Your own journey towards freedom and how to stay sane in the era of social networks
For those who don’t know me, I grew up in the early 90’s, way before the internet became popular. My country at that time was experiencing economic hardship and everyone was equal. Equally poor that is.
The only source of entertainment at that time was the TV, where from time to time, I used to catch a glimpse of the lives of wealthy individuals such as football players or artists.
Their wealth was out of this world, something unheard of at that time.
30 years later, wealthy individuals are just a click away.
Just open Instagram, Twitter (X) or LinkedIn and you’ll see people that seem wildly successful.
On top of this, now you don’t see just a minute or two of their lives, but you are overwhelmed with their amazing houses, cars, yachts, jets and so on.
And then you start to compare yourself with them. You feel bad that your life is not as perfect as what you see on social media. And that’s the worst mistake you can do, because your value as a human being does not come from how you rank comparing to another person.
But that’s what the majority of the people do. And no wonder more and more people get depressed.
Comparing is an observation. No one got ahead in life by comparing or observing. You get ahead in life by action.
So what should you do?
Define where you would love to be in 3 years.
Use the same social media (eg: LinkedIn) to find people who are living the life you want to live.
See where they lived. Where they worked. How they progressed in their career.
Follow them, understand their background, context, mindset
Reach out and talk to them.
Also, if you’re now working 9 hours / day + 2 commute, it’s pointless to dream about private jets and end up taking no action.
Because life is not binary.
There is a whole spectrum of wealth between your current situation and the life of your dreams (even if it’s private jets).
It’s less likely you can make a huge step and get there.
So, just focus on the next step.
Ditch the commute.
By finding a job closer to home.
Or by finding a better paid job which will allow you to move closer to work
Or by going fully remote
You see, just 3 possible options to make a small step on the quality of life spectrum.
And keep doing the steps.
To get a better quality of your life, all you need to do is improve these 3 factors that impact your freedoms:
Time freedom (from not having time for anything, to having all the time to do whatever you wish)
Location freedom (from not being able to travel anywhere, to be able to travel everywhere you want)
Financial freedom (from barely making ends meet to being able to live indefinitely from your investments and only work if you chose to)
Once again, nothing is binary.
If you want to take action towards living a better life, just figure out how you can increase these factors by 1 periodically.
And remember that you don’t need to score the highest everywhere. Just be realistic, define what’s important for you and work your way there.
Sometimes, all it takes for massively improving your quality of life is a few years of hard work. But if this was obvious, everyone would do it. You can go at it alone, or you can have me by your side. My unique perspective over the past 15+ years working and living with multiple cultures in multiple countries allows me to understand how opportunities look like, and how to get them without wasting your time. You can ignore this, or you can book 1 hour of mentoring which will change your perspective over what’s possible as a software engineer here:
https://mihaivalentin.com/#mentoring
Until next time!
If you read through the end, I hope you liked it and find it motivating. If you have any feedback or questions on this, or you need mentoring, feel free to DM me on LinkedIn (I have open profile so anyone can message me even if not connected).
See you in the next one,
Mihai