Are you creating fake problems to deal with the boringness of life?

Freedom is a catch word now.

Everyone wants freedom.

Financial freedom - Freedom from our job or money problems.

Location freedom - Freedom from living in one place.

Freedom from meetings, emails and all our responsibilities.

But no one ever gets free, we just trade our current set of problems for new ones in search of freedom.

There are three kinds of freedom:

1. Freedom from (Negative freedom)

2. Freedom to (Positive freedom)

3. Absolute freedom

Freedom from comes from dissatisfaction or unhappiness. If you are unhappy in your job, you are looking for freedom from your job. This dissatisfaction might drive you to seek out new opportunities, whether that's a different career, venturing into entrepreneurship, exploring content creation, or something entirely different.

Often, what you end up picking isn't really your passion. It might feel like it at first, but in truth, you're just choosing it to get freedom from your current miserable life.

When you start something new with the idea of freedom from, eventually you would want freedom from that as well. You will be trapped in this freedom cycle.

Positive freedom is the freedom to control and direct one’s own life.

Freedom to comes from awareness of yourself, when you are clear about your direction and your journey. You shape your own life; you act instead of being acted upon.

How to reframe freedom from → freedom to?

I want freedom from my job. —> I want freedom to work for myself.

I am a slave to no one. —> I am my own master.

I have been on this journey. Five years ago I wanted to travel the world. So I started to travel on my time off. Then COVID came, everything got shut down. Paradoxically, this setback only intensified my craving for freedom of location.

Thankfully, my job transitioned to fully remote, allowing me to embrace the lifestyle of a digital nomad. I got location freedom. I traveled a lot, but did it end my desires? No.

It wasn't until I paused to reflect that I realized my wanderlust wasn't solely about the places I longed to visit—it stemmed from a dissatisfaction with my job. Traveling provided an escape from that reality.

You don’t want freedom, you want a better life.

True liberation comes not from fleeing one's circumstances but from clarity about one's aspirations and direction in life.

The end of our problems is freedom from the mind. This is called Absolute freedom.

All your problems are created from your mind.

Ask yourself, are you creating fake problems to deal with the boringness of life?

See our mind roams aimlessly when idle. Hence the perpetual cycle of problems; we trade one for another. But lets also not bury ourself in so many things to do that you have no time to understand life and seek deeper truths.

So you are saying to stop doing everything and become a monk. Yes but not the way you are thinking about this. You can become a monk or attain samadhi (highest form of meditation) but that is even harder than fighting your own problems.

Life is about balance. Find balance between solving practical problems and cultivating inner awareness.

Awareness is the first step in any kind of freedom. If you are not aware that you are held back by something, you will never try to be free. So become aware of the root of your problems.

Our minds is complex.

In the game of the mind, you don’t win by solving every problem.

The real winners are who completely step out of the game. Very few people do this, less than 0.001%.

So what do we do, the normal average human?

Solve your problems but be aware where are they coming from. Are they coming from the boringness of life or somewhere deep within. Get to the root of them and then act to pursue what you really want.