My Promo-Mentors writing challenge - My financially free life and dream space.

carpet.duck (47)in #promomentors-challenge • 6 years ago (edited)

If money wasn’t a problem for you on a daily basis (no mortgage payments, student loans and other financial obligations), how would you live?

The intention of this post is simple, to submit an answer to @promo-mentor's first challenge.

My answer gets a bit long, but I was excited to explore it and I'm interested to see what happens when I present more raw versions of myself.

I'm really thankful for this challenge to come along. It provides opportunity to connect with a young Steemit community and also craft and attract my dream life - thank you @promo-mentors, join their discord here

How would you lead your life without any financial worries?

Before I get into my answer, which comes in two parts, I'll explore my first thoughts on the question - it's interesting to think about and consider.

What would you do, day to day, if you did not have to worry about money? And after that, what is in the way of this actually happening?

The fact is, money is a thing for pretty much everyone. Unless you're hyper-privleged in a financial sense, we all have some wall of bills, expenses, debts & lifestyle spending in front of us.

'Money,' as we know it, is distributed in a controlled fashion, crafted by policies, laws, rules and other structures; with the majority of it existing to further the profits of already wealthy corporates - Fractional reserve banking anyone?

Despite this, I do not believe a lack of 'money' is an excuse to not pursue our dream life - especially as more decentralised avenues of work/value-creation appear.

Through proper use of the technology infront of us and the environment around us, the world is available in whatever form we want it to be. Although I'm very much still practicing this, opportunity is there, waiting to be tuned into and taken advantage of and if you're curious with how to access it, I believe it starts with gratitude.

So although it's fun to play with what our lives would be like without financial burden, I choose to believe that some, or all, of this ideal reality is possible and can be constructed.

This opinion/view has been crafted by what I've learned about the law of attraction, quantum physics and banking systems.

Now that's out of the way, let's do it.

Photo by Joshua Earle

What would your day-to-day life look like?

For me, this would mean complete mobility. If an event popped up in Portugal, I would make my way there, and an income or cash-base would fund my travel and expenses; and I wouldn't be tied to any responsibilities I didn't 100% agree with.

While being mobile, I would also be equipped to assist people in creating their intended realities - I would use what I know and what I can do to advance their platform, business, idea, or just help them out. Due to my non-need for financial pay off, I would throw myself into these ventures fully.

Financial freedom would also give me a ton of free time and energy, further enabling me to invest in new skills. I could explore my curiosities and the world around me without worry of the venture being worth it or not.

This hits an important point. Being enclosed by the wall of living week-to-week or month-to-month and being restricted by the constant overhanging of our expenses/bills/debts forces us to consider if what we do is worth it or not - since we feel we have to be more considerate of our spends and energy; and this exact consideration is largely what gets in the way of gaining value from what we do - instead of being absorbed in what we're doing, we're half there, half worrying about how it will all work out.

Not worrying about what things mean or don't mean for my future security would free me up to experience, all the time - and this would increase the 'fullness' of my life.

Photo by Alex Holyoake

Honestly though, this is something already accessible all the time. Having trust in things working out will always be important; in the financially free case, money might not be the thing, but something else will. We are lazy, greedy, and we leave too much to our future selves to sort out when it matters, instead of taking smaller steps now.

I'm getting off-topic here, but I think you get the gist of how I would live my day-to-day - I'd be free to explore and experience where-ever my curiosity wishes to take me. Though I do believe this is available to me, there are just some barriers I need to get over and lifestyle changes I'd have to accept.

Aside from the day-to-day aspect of a financially free life, there is another, more interesting part to my answer that I am super excited to explore

What space would you create if you had no financial worries?

TLDR: A collaborative & adaptive space which facilitates unique human interaction.

During the drive to a festival I volunteered at, one of my hitch-hiking passengers asked everyone this exact question - What kind of space would you create if you didn't have to worry about money? This question inspired a lot of creative thought and energy in all of us; and I really appreciate her efforts in inspiring change in those around her.

The other passengers designed their own personally themed cafes - full of their favourite materials, food, board games and coffee. What I imagine in mine is similar, but unique in the way it operates.

Photo by Tyler Nix

My space would be an open venue that adapts to its visitors. It would allow visitors to simply enjoy the venue, and also contribute to the enjoyment of others in the venue, with currency facilitating all kinds of exchanges of value.

What do you mean by this?

In case you want a cleaner lay out before I ramble:

There would be open space.
There will be tools/instruments/facilities for guests to use within this space.
Guests can also bring their own tools/facilities, and earn money from the value they bring.
Guests can order something from the tools/instruments/facilities and other guests can act as the workers which fulfill the orders, and get paid for it.
The space allows for multiple kinds of people to do multiple kinds of things, and for complex exchanges of value to occur.
Custom materials brought in by anyone can be added to the space and used by anyone who visits, and the value that everyone exchanges is represented by the exchange of a currency.

For example, imagine there is a coffee machine in the space but no paid barista/coffee-maker available, so a guest would fill in and do the work, he might even bring his own coffee beans - he would also get paid for it.

What the space and the technology would allow, is for 2 people to walk in off the street, order a coffee, and for another patron, who might be reading a book in the corner, to be able to make these coffees for the customers. Payment would come from the customers, as usual, but payment would be delegated to the impromptu-worker, the venue itself and whoever else contributed (maybe someone else owns the coffee machine and gets a small payment whenever it's used)

Value would be exchanged, and so would currency. Going further with this, the customer would have the facility to tip extra to the worker if they added value in some way, perhaps through coffee art, a funny joke, or good conversation - it's up to what the customer finds valuable.

In this scenario, since the impromptu-worker did the work and provided value, why shouldn't they be paid? And since this venue created the space for the exchange to happen, why shouldn't it be paid? For me, this complex & adaptive style of work and exchange is what is missing from our current society, which makes sense; with traditional infrastructure, there would be a ton of legal loopholes in creating these spaces and exchanging currency.

How do you handle quality-assurance for customers? Who's responsibility is it if something goes wrong? Who pays for what and who gets paid for what? How do you prove all of this?

These are difficult questions to answer and designing solutions into a system is a difficult task - but I do believe it's possible, especially through the application of Cryptocurrency. Although I'm not a Blockchain developer, I understand that these kinds of questions are what Cryptocurrencies exist to answer (and more).

Photo by Iulia Mihailov

I imagine a world where roamers can roam, slipping into and out of work-places and spaces where they provide value. And those that want to stay in one spot, can build spaces for these exchanges to happen. There's nothing stopping a person from being able to do exactly what they can/want to do.

The space can get much more complex. Communities could band together to create their own custom events, inviting passers-by to come in and contribute to the space, be it with their attendance, or their own unique skills - and for all of this value to be rewarded with cryptocurrency.

An animation would really help me out here and I could talk more about it in a video but really, the platform to support this space would take an incredible amount of work. Although I don't think a completely public blockchain and completely decentralised network would be the solution here, a cryptocurrency would almost be necessary in enabling these complex exchanges of value.

To summarise my dream space.

I would create a cryptocurrency & tech enabled space that allows the incentivisation of value-exchange in individual-specific ways - where anyone has the opportunity to do anything. Customers be workers, workers be customers, entertainers be customers, customers be entertainers. The technology which would support these environments would handle the sticky bits, like legalities, responsiblities and the exchanges but really what we'd be doing here, is facilitating interactions between the niche communities and groups.

Jacek Dylag

Someone who understands and connects with the different groups (like me) could pull them all together, creating collaborative environments where knowledge and experiences are shared between enthusiast communities which normally wouldn't interact.

The future I envision is that of many micro-economies which are pulled together by larger economies. In this, would be an ever-adapting comprehension of 'work' and 'value', allowing for all kinds of spontaneous exchanges to occur between real people, regardless where they come from or any other socially constructed history.

It's bold, but it's true and it's what I see is possible.

We are ever-changing and ever-expanding, and our current systems restrict us to certain versions of ourselves - why can't our technology and our environments encourage the complexities? Why not?