Ruling Class

I think the people who impose the most rules on themselves are the most free.

It takes extreme discipline to live a free life. If you don’t impose rules on yourself, someone else will impose them on you. The world is like a maze, and unless you make your life too big to fit in it, you’ll get trapped in it.

Sometimes I hear this lament from certain people about how they’d like to just chuck it all and go live in the mountains somewhere. Personally, I think that’s awesome – I want to do that. But these people seem to think it’s easy. As if “living in the mountains somewhere” would somehow take less discipline than living their current life.

You can take a day off from work. You can’t take a day off from your own survival. When you’re every piece of your own life, you can’t falter. You need rules to live by.

Not doing that is turning over some of the framework for your life’s decisions to others. Some level of that may be necessary, but do it deliberately if you must do it at all.