When I was in a corporate job, after a few years, I discovered this thing called FIRE – Financial Independence, Retire Early. It fascinated me and I felt like now I knew what I wanted. This was when I was around thirty or so – that’s more than a couple of decades back, and a couple of years after I had folded up my dotcom entrepreneurial venture.
What drove me for the next eighteen odd years in my corporate career was to achieve that freedom. All investing education, investing strategies, career growth plans, job changes, planning expenses were driven with that single goal.
But it was always a case of freedom from something. Freedom from being forced to do a job. Freedom from money problems. Freedom from being a corporate slave. Freedom from being under a boss and the associated politics.
But as I got closer to that goal, another question started haunting me. All this freedom-from talk was fine.
But what was this freedom for? What was I going to do with it? While I was focused on the Financial Independence part of FIRE, the Retire Early part didn’t seem that appealing now. The freedom from was a great goal, but freedom to do what was an unanswered question.
I took a good year or two to think it over. That’s when I realized that freedom from something is not enough, beyond a point. There has to be a freedom to something. And it also came with the realization that the freedom itself was a responsibility that was not to be taken lightly. The privilege of that freedom was not to be wasted.
The freedom from had to change to a freedom to.
Freedom to make conscious choices in life. Freedom to contribute. Freedom to create. Freedom to make a difference.
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