I hate to break it to you, but you will never be free. Freedom and free will are two bullshit concepts fed to you by a system of modern day slavery.

If you don’t believe me then ask yourself, what is freedom, exactly? What does it mean to be free?

You’re free, so you can do what you want? What if you want to shoot the guy next door? Are you free to do that? How about to fly a helicopter- are you free to fly a helicopter? Or get the kind of healthcare and education that you would like to get? Is everybody free to go to the university that they would like to attend?

You’re free to a limited extent. Your environment defines that extent. Your freedom is limited by laws, infrastructure, available resources, money and more. In the world we live in today, you have as much freedom as your dollar can buy.

What you might not realize, however, is that the biggest restriction to your freedom may just be your own mentality! Which is also not in your control if you really think about it.

Where do you get your mentality from? It doesn’t just spring out of nowhere. You had no control over where you were born or who raised you, yet the people that raised you brought you up to have a particular mentality, value system and way of living. If you are born in Korea, you would adapt the value system of a Korean person. If you are born in a poor African village, you would behave like someone who was born in a poor African village. You wouldn’t have the choice to behave like a rich Swedish kid because your environment didn’t expose you to the factors that would cause you to behave like a rich Swedish kid. This fact continues into adulthood. A poor African adult cannot behave like a rich Swedish adult without exposure to an environment that causes him to behave that way.

You get it? You cannot exceed your environment.

Think about events, behavior and free will from a mechanistic point of view. A house does not fall down during an earth quake. The movement of the ground causes instability in the material that make up the walls of the building, causing it to loosen up. Gravity causes the loosened material to fall to the ground.

A baby does not just cry. Something bothers the baby and causes it to have a reaction in the brain which causes the baby to cry.

A KKK member does not just kill a black man. The environment that he was raised in causes him to become racist, join the KKK, and go after black people.

People often tell me that they wish they could travel like me, but then come up with a million excuses about why they can’t. If they talk to me for long enough they usually understand that what’s really stopping them is not money or whatever other excuse they came up with, but their own mentality. This is not anybody’s fault, because as I explained earlier, you are a product of your own environment and you do not have free will. Most “normal people” are brought up in an environment that teaches them that they have to finish school, go to university, get a job, get married, buy a house, have kids, then retire. They think that they need a consistent full-time job because that’s what they’ve been conditioned to believe they need to survive. Traveling the way that I do is scary to many people because it is difficult for “normal people” to change their mentality and let go of these beliefs.

If freedom existed then having no job would not be scary to anybody. If free will existed then people would not be afraid to break away from societal pressures and expectations.

I know that I don’t have free will. Every choice that I make in life is a direct result of my influences, my environment and everything else in my surroundings.  The plus side to all of this is that that you can use this understanding to benefit yourself by exposing yourself to an environment that will influence you in a positive way.

I like to travel so that I can expose myself to a variety of very different environments. This allows me to expand my horizons to be influenced by many different factors. Although my “freedom” is still highly restricted by what my few dollars can buy, the “freedom” of my mentality is continuously expanding as I study new material and expose myself to new environments; and that’s worth a million bucks ;)