Are you a slave and you don't even know it?

Long time ago, slavery means your master owns you. You do all your work for no compensation other than enough food and shelter to keep you alive. Perhaps enough nutrition to keep you strong if you need to do manual labor.

Those times of slavery are mostly gone in the US (or is it?) but has been replaced by a new kind of order. It doesn't quite resemble slavery because it has an illusion of freedom. For those that watch Game of Thrones, in Season 6 Episode 4, Tyrion Lannister offered to end slavery within 7 years to the slave masters at Slaver's Bay. He alluded to riches does not necessarily require slavery but can be transformed into a 'new order' that works even better because he is even richer than the slave masters while requiring no slaves at all.

So are you a slave? How many hours a week of true freedom do you really have? A large portion of the population is locked into a life of perpetual work. Many low wage workers have to take up 2 or 3 part time jobs in order to make enough to sustain a meager life. Many simply do not even have free time.

I must assume life as a slave largely means working every waking hour with no days off. So that may mean 16 hours days 7 days a week or 112 hours a week of work. I assume taking 2-3 jobs is no different.

Life these days for the average middle class person is no where as brutal but could be thought of as a type of fractional slavery. You work at a job in exchange for pay that you use to sustain your life. You have the 'freedom' to vacation time of about 2 or more weeks a year. But do you really have freedom? To some extent yes but you are not allowed to leave your job for long or else you'll get fired. You are not allowed to quit a job for long or your prospects of a new job will dwindle. If you leave long enough, you will likely exhaust your money supply and bring forth your own demise and likely end up homeless and hungry.

Now I as ask you dear readers: What would you do if you have enough money to sustain your life and do not need to go in to work? Would you still go to work because you enjoy it so much or will you do something else? I fully believe people who say they will stay at their job to be completely lying to themselves. How many of us stays at their job after winning the lottery? Truth is, we say we are happy at our jobs as a way to reconcile ourselves so that we wont hate our very existence.

Now I ask you again. What would you do if do not need to go to work? The answer is probably the path to true contentment and happiness. It might not be just one single thing but the freedom to pursue various endeavors what ever it might be. Maybe it would to travel the world endlessly. That might be only temporary because people usually get a bit of home sick after wandering for an extended period of time.

So what is keeping the masses in an endless perpetual semi slave state? It's largely your spending habits and the marketing machine that altered your mind to think you need one of the many necessities of life that may not actually be all the necessary at all. If you are not financially independent, you are a semi-slave period. Your boss basically dictates what you do. Even the boss has their boss so we're all locked into doing someone's bidding. Even the CEO, is required to do the bidding of the shareholders.

I challenge you to look at something that you think is absolutely necessary and really think if you really do need it. Do you NEED that commonly talked about $5 latte? Do you need internet? Do you need to eat $100 per person French Dinner? What you need actually comes down to food, clean water, clothing, and shelter.

If you live in the US, you live in one of the most wasteful country in the world and if you are able to break the cycle, you can easily break yourself free. One interesting to notice is that you are getting paid as if you are wasteful. But if you get paid typically but spend atypically, you can easily amass enough wealth to get your to be financially independent pretty quickly.

Is your freedom not the most important thing to strive for? If we all continue to spend typically we will likely continue to be a slave for the rest of our lives, perhaps until 70. But perhaps if you do not buy that new car and instead buy a used one, you could finally do what you want to do one year earlier at age 69. What if you never buy cable? Maybe you can pull it back another year. How about bringing your lunch everyday? That's probably another years worth.

You can take any amount you are about to spend today and extrapolate how much earlier you can retire. This has a directly consequence of putting a life value in days to the item you are buying. Every item you do not buy, you save yourself a number of days maybe 100 of NOT having to go to work. If that isn't enough to convince you to not buy that luxury leather good, it just means marketing won.

The Spending Divide

Although I myself have almost fully converted to an extremely frugal state of spending, I am puzzled why there is such a difference in spending habit with those around me.

As I mentioned before, I bought expensive jeans once upon a time and have finally realized that buying the expensive pair meant nothing to me. Now I opt for about $15-18 (usd) jeans instead. Sure I would like to have the expensive ones but I am not willing to spend the money to trade for it. You see, the money costs me a finite amount of my time which equates to a finite amount of my LIFE.

A lot of people vicariously spend without care. There is a very ingrained physiology involved that I've been trying to get to the root of. For example, I know buying a new car depreciates greatly off the lot. The value evaporates like puddles of water off a cast iron skillet. So, rather than buying new, you buy used and you skip all the depreciation. Even if you use the car in both cases til end of life, it serves you better to use the used car to end of life as that gives a much better value.

Although I would like a new car one day, I equate that  to essentially burning cash. If I had so much money that I would not blink an eye to really burn cash, then perhaps I would consider getting a new car. And yet, said person was told all these point of views and reasoning but still adamantly chooses to buy a new car. The quoted rebuttal being "I like it". My mind was boggled.

Now, I understand the allure of a new car fully. You can see it from the new state and you would know everything that happens to it. But the price is hefty enough that giving up that new car smell is certainly worth the $10k reduction in price by buying one that is 1-4 years old.

So can we chalk this up to difference of opinion? Do people just inherently prefer new goods? New anything is great of course but I think the point is to realize the amount of money spent is really not just using what you saved up but rather using units of your life that you traded for these money 'credits'. If it takes you 1000 hours at $10 an hour to make that $10k in price difference, will you readily spend it?

Does it take the realization that the $10k costs 1000 hours of work. In order to generate that 1000 hour of work, you actually had to commute, eat, sleep to produce those 1000 hours of work. If you add up the days you spent creating those 1000 hours of work, you'll realize it actually takes 6 months of your life to make this $10k. In other words, assuming a 80 year lifespan, you spent
0.6% of your LIFE that you will NEVER get back. (Not everyone makes $10/hour, if you make $60/hour then it costs you 0.1% of your life)

With that, you can only spend 0.6% of your life 133 times in your lifetime before you lay on your death bed. At which point you spent your life spending your life away by trading your most valuable commodity for mere things.

I hope at this point you will agree with me that the next time you spend $10k on anything that is completely discretionary and if looked carefully could be superfluous, you would say "Hell no, I'm not spending my life to buy that".