Lately, in more than a few contexts, I’ve seen people really struggle with the balance between what freedom is when you have it and what freedom feels like when you don’t.

I’m pro-freedom. I want unconstrained choices, by default. Counterintuitively, sometimes the greatest freedom we can possess is the ability to restrict our own freedoms to our own benefit.

There are things that, while I could do them, would cause me great harm. I choose not to do them, despite the fact that overall I like having the option. Sometimes, however, the “great harm” is only possible because of an earlier choice I made!

Here’s a simple example: I own a house. If I don’t pay my mortgage, great harm will befall me – legal trouble, the foreclosure of my house, shaky living conditions, ruining of my credit history, bankruptcy, etc. When I simply rented, the consequences would be far less dire – I’d eventually get evicted and probably a ding on my credit history, but that’s it. Much lighter consequences, comparatively speaking. And way back when I just had an informal “under the table” rental agreement with some guys I knew, failure to pay would have had even fewer consequences.

So why then, did I willingly restrict my own freedom? No one made me go from “paying a dude for his spare room” to “signing a lease on an apartment,” and no one made me go from that to “buying a house.” All of the potential harms I’m subject to, the limits on my own freedom, were made by choice. That’s an important thing.

I made those choices, voluntarily limiting my own freedom because it allowed for boons in other areas. Despite the overall loss in freedom, I want to own this house. I like it. It gives me a lot of benefits – benefits that I have decided outweigh the drawbacks of not being able to just disappear if I want to (or at least, significantly raising the cost).

All that being said, here’s the difficult thing: there are times when I am frustrated. When I’ve been “cooped up” for too long, when I haven’t gotten into the woods for a while, when something breaks in my house, when I see someone else who lives in a less geographically permanent manner – I can get frustrated. And when I get frustrated in that way, it’s very very easy to say “Ugh, I should never have bought this house, I wish I could just live out of the back of my car on the road again.”

That is a very dangerous position to be in. Because ultimately, I do have the freedom to make that choice. I can just stop paying my mortgage, pile my kids into the car, and figure it out from there. Any level of good sense will tell me that’s a terrible idea with terrible consequences. But when you’re in that moment…

You can see this scenario play out a thousand times a day if you pay attention to it. Long-term relationships hit a rough patch and one (or more) of the people involved starts remembering how easy it was to be single. People in a job for a long time get stressed out and start remembering how easy it was to not have some boss telling them what to do all the time. Tales as old as time.

This is the most apples-to-oranges comparison you can make, but we make it so easily. Yeah, it was sweet when I didn’t have a boss telling me what to do, why did I ever give that up? Oh, that’s right – I was broke, I had no prospects, and that in turn also kept me from building the life that I truly want, so I willingly restricted my own freedom a little in order to get all these other benefits. Oh man, remember how when I was single I could run around and do whatever I wanted? Yeah, and come home lonely to an empty home and watch my life slip away without building it with someone or raising a family.

So yeah, sometimes I look at the cost or effort of maintaining my home and long for the life of a wandering vagrant. But then I see my children, joyful in the safe and warm space that they use as a foundation for their growth. I see them thrive, and I remember why I gave that freedom up.

Now, here’s the final key to this puzzle. Sure, we can – and should – sometimes voluntarily restrict our own freedoms for our own benefit (important point: our own; this is a world away from someone else making these choices for you). But that doesn’t mean we always land perfectly on the right balance, nor does it mean that even if we do strike that balance, we can avoid the itch, the yearning for the greener grass.

So, here is how to avoid that.

You have to still give yourself the freedom you miss, in small doses. You need to. If you feel cooped up in suburbia, as I sometimes do, it is crucial that you do things like take road trips, go camping, or even crash with friends sometimes when you don’t have to. If you are in a long-term relationship, you need to – on occasion – go out and party with your friends, maintain other connections, and have a little “you” space. If you have a stable, long-term job, you need to do a little freelance/consulting work, take vacations, and say “no” to stuff; maintain healthy boundaries.

You need to do these things for two reasons:

One, because doing so will keep the itch down. It will remind you that you’re not actually trapped – you’re just making choices and trade-offs, as any human must do. Many people are like me and will fight against even a very good situation if they feel like it’s one that’s being forced on them. That’s a form of self-sabotage that it’s good to control. “Microdosing” freedom helps maintain that because you also get to “microdose” the consequences and remember that they exist.

Two, because doing so will help you make accurate and true observations about your current circumstances. Sometimes – not always, but sometimes – you really should sell that house, quit that job, or leave that relationship. But the only way to know is if you have a realistic comparison to make. You can’t compare your actual current living situation with the rose-colored nostalgia of how you remember your life twenty years ago. You can’t compare the job you have now with an imaginary, idealized job you invent in your head. You can’t compare your real, human relationship with what you think is out there.

Freedom, at its core, is good. To truly exercise it, you must have a steady hand and an even heart. You must learn and observe, especially yourself. You must know when to maximize on what you can do, and when to invest in what you should do. Freedom isn’t about never choosing the smaller possibility space over the larger one; it’s just about always making that choice for yourself.

No one is more capable of harming you than you. If your internal machinery is functioning well, you’re practically invincible. But minor cracks can become major flaws in short order. With the same level of attention you give to potential external threats, watch for the following:

1. Threats to your mental stability. That means practicing good mental habits, strengthening your emotional resilience, refining your reasoning process, and keeping good notes (or maybe blogging).
2. Damage to your health. You’re in no condition to do battle with the forces of evil if you’re in the grip of addiction, being eaten away by poisons, or letting your heart wither.
3. Harms to your virtues and principles. When you’re truly up against the wall and in dire circumstances, the last line of defense will be the man in the mirror. Make sure that’s someone you want on your side.

You are not simply a frail body you inhabit, piloted by a flawed brain. You are a life, and you are the sum total of the actions taken in that life. That means “you” cannot be destroyed, except from within.

Imagine you are in a carriage, but there are no horses attached. You’re in complete control, but you’re not going anywhere anytime soon. So you get yourself a horse, and you hitch the carriage to it. Now you’re moving, but you also have to contend with the will of the horse. Add a few more horses and you have much more power, but now you must contend with multiple wills that not only don’t match your own, but also might not match each other’s. That forward momentum will collapse quickly if some of those horses want to go left, some want to run faster, and some want to pull off to the right and stop.

In this analogy, “horses” are the resource inputs in your life. You need them to move forward, but each one is also trying to do its own thing.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch – or a horse without a mind of its own. So while we often think that more resources are what we need in life, we also have to contend that resources are not mindless. You will never just have a big pile of money dropped in your lap without an agenda attached to it.

A big part of this game is finding horses that are either easier to tame (even if they’re less powerful) or that already tend to do what you want a horse to do. That’s definitely more beneficial to you than just finding the most powerful horse (or horses!) that you can, attaching them to your carriage, and hoping for the best.

Going in the wrong direction is bad, even if you go there quickly. And fighting with your own horses never made anyone happy.

A lot of being successful in life comes down to figuring out the right time horizon for each repeating task in your life.

Think about things like laundry or email. It’s certainly not the most efficient approach to answer each email the second it comes in regardless of what else you’re doing, just as it’s silly to wash each article of clothing as soon as it comes off your body. We batch these things for a reason. On the other hand, it’s very easy for a slight disruption in schedule to turn “an appropriate-sized batch” into “an insurmountable heap of bullshit.”

Everything batches differently. Words like “weekly” are nice, convenient ideas – but they aren’t always the correct cadence for whatever you have to do. It would be wonderful if every task reached “peak heap” in seven days, but that’s not how it works.

So, what cadence do you choose? How do you keep it straight? If you’re not doing it on a regular schedule, then you’re using at least some of your mental effort to monitor levels waiting for the right threshold to be hit, and I don’t really want to do that, either.

My personal solution: a “middle heap.”

For any task that should get completely done at regular intervals, I create miniature versions in between. For instance, I like to completely clear my inbox every week. Doing it every day would be absurd, but only doing it once a week creates the aforementioned “insurmountable heap of bullshit” every Friday. So instead, I have a daily routine that does not involve committing to “inbox zero,” but involves responding to a set number of emails. This, in turn, builds in a “monitoring event” so I can gauge the state of things without compulsively checking.

Sometimes you look at a huge task and you don’t start it because you feel like “starting” automatically equates to “committing to finishing right now, all in one go.” But that doesn’t have to be the case! A lot of laundry has piled up? Okay, just wash one load of it. That doesn’t have to be a solemn resolution to “handle the laundry once and for all.” And it’s better than nothing.

Everything is a game. Everything. You can play games for fun and you can play games for prizes, and often you’ll do both. But everything is a game.

Running for political office is a game. Attending a fancy dinner party is a game. Navigating modern life, having a job, driving. These are all games.

You need to understand that everything is a game in order to understand how rules work. You need to understand how rules work in order to live a life of intention, instead of wandering around with no clue what’s going on until you die.

Here is the simplest definition of “rules” I can think of:

Rules are an agreement you make so that other people will play with you.

That’s it. They aren’t iron-clad universal diktats. They’re choices you make, based on outcomes you want. Some rules have more serious and deadly consequences (like, say, the rules of driving) and others seem to have very light ones – but someone cares about every rule. What you need to figure out is who.

And then ask yourself: is playing with that person worth the rule?

Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t, but it’s the people you need to care about, not the rules. A game is only worth playing if you’re playing with exactly who you want.

There are a few ways we can accidentally open ourselves up to being taken advantage of. Ways we can give too much of ourselves to the world. Those are traps and pitfalls to avoid, and here are two:

One – Do not give the majority stake in any important sphere in your life to a single person that isn’t you.

That doesn’t mean you have to control everything yourself. It just means no single entity should control it for you. Don’t get all your news from one source. Don’t be completely dependent on one organization for all your income. Don’t let only one thing make you happy.

Two – Do not allow “treating you well” to become something you view as a perk.

Too often I see people giving others a lot of extra influence, slack, consideration, etc., simply because they don’t treat them like utter garbage. If someone treats you poorly, remove them from your life. That’s good advice, but it doesn’t mean that treating you with respect is a bonus. It’s the standard.

Diversify your sources of the things that are important to you, and then only keep those sources that respect you. Do these things, and you will be much harder to take advantage of.

When I was a teenager, I was a terrible slouch. I had horrible posture. I hunched.

I need to take a moment here to say something that may seem obvious to some of you. To others, it will seem like balderdash. Your thoughts on it will largely be based on your current circumstances, but I need to assure you that what I am about to say is perhaps one of the truest things I will ever write here.

Your posture matters.

It matters immensely. Standing up straight, putting your shoulders further back than your ears and your chin up, using your core muscles to shift your body mass upward, pointing your toes outward and widening your stance a bit – all of these things add about 25%, instantly, to your presence.

You will be more attractive. You will be taken more seriously. You will avoid fights. You will be more observant. You will be more prepared to use your body as it was intended, when needed. You will notice more things. You will be more alert and more aware. Your breathing will improve.

When I was a teenager, and I didn’t know this, my father used to sneak up behind me (which was easy, because I was not alert nor aware and he was crafty), get right behind me, and shove his knuckles between my shoulder blades while yelling out “Stand up straight, boy! Head up, shoulders back!” He did that with such consistency that soon he didn’t need to; if I even felt my shoulders start to sag or my chin to approach my chest that voice would just ring out in my head and I’d snap into position.

My father once left a bar late at night in a bad area, and saw a few guys right outside that didn’t look especially wholesome. My father looked them in the eye and walked past them; nothing else. The next day he was informed by a friend that left that same bar only a few moments later that he had been robbed by those same guys. Obviously, the thieves didn’t stick around for an interview, but it’s worth noting that they chose not to try to rob my father.

You can’t always draw iron-clad conclusions from incidents like that. But they were a part of a lifelong pattern. My father filled a room, and he was not to be trifled with. But if he wanted to seem like a frail old man, it was easy to do.

All he had to do was hunch.

Your posture is one of the greatest returns on effort you can make, as a habit. It requires nothing more than your attention. Almost no physical work is required, and zero money, and mere seconds. But for such a small investment, you can change your life.

It’s good to not get what you want right away. It’s good to have to search, and work, and hustle.

I know it doesn’t seem like it when you want something and don’t have it. But if you achieve everything instantly, you miss out on a tremendous amount of positive externalities. The act of having to search and work for what you want is exactly how you gain sufficient exposure to the world to have goals in the first place.

Imagine someone raised in a featureless room their entire life. Every whim is provided instantly – but without outside stimuli, what kinds of whims could such a person even have? Without awareness of a wider world to shape you, how can you even figure out what to strive for?

So it’s good to have to take a longer road towards what you want. Those roads feel inconvenient at the time, but they make up your whole life.

One of the unique challenges in life is keeping the growth of everything in your life at the pace you want relative to everything else.

Your life has many aspects, and they will change in size over the course of your time on this planet. You’ll make more or less money. Your family will grow or shrink. Your hobbies will take up more or less of your time.

With those things, other things must change. If your family grows in size, you may need a larger home. You’ll certainly need more food. When your children move out, you may want to downsize that home, too.

And with any positive growth can come similarly larger problems. Let’s say I accidentally back into my neighbor’s car when I leave my driveway. I don’t know for certain, but I have an approximate idea of how much such a mistake would cost me, based on the average value of the cars (and homes, etc.) around here.

But what if I suddenly were 10x as wealthy as I am now, and moved to a wealthier neighborhood as a result? It’s still possible that I could back into my neighbor’s car, but now that’s a much more expensive problem because the car I might be backing into is probably much pricier.

(Obviously not a perfect analogy given things like insurance, but you get the idea.)

You can’t always be chasing linear growth in every aspect of your life. The goal isn’t “grow forever” – always more money, more friends, more whatever. The goal is to fill the right amount of space, and then be content. Part of that journey is knowing what “the right amount of space” even is for any given thing.

If you like and want kids, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to just keep having kids forever. But why not? If you love kids, why isn’t “one more” always the right number? You can probably intuitively sense that it isn’t, but can you define why?

The costs, drawbacks, and problems that come with any good thing don’t always grow at the same rate as the good thing itself. Finding the balance – and it’s different for everyone – is key. Look for the space you want to fill, and don’t just chase “up” forever.

One year ago today, the coolest mother fucker on the planet rode off into the sunset for the last time. He cast one hell of a shadow and I was happy to stand in it. I miss him so much.

Nothing else today. Today is a bad day. But he would tell me tomorrow will be better, and I trust him.