The Moment I Knew I Was Free
an age 29 realization
It’s late September and I’m driving fast, blazing east from San Francisco toward California’s rocky crest on a crisp, sunny, windows-down Wednesday. The mountain roads are empty, the mosquitos and vacationers have gone home, yet here we are, my friend Vince and I, fit and free and funemployed, about to hike for days among the pine forests and glacial lakes and hanging valleys of the Sierra Nevada.
A shiver runs down my spine. “This is it,” I tell myself. “This is what I’m meant to be doing.” Not toiling under fluorescent lights, not battling weekend traffic, not obeying some arbitrary schedule, not furnishing some unnecessary apartment, not clawing my way up some ridiculous hierarchy. I am doing what I want, when I want, with whom I want.
It’s been four years since my South American escape. I’m still poor by traditional standards, but I’ve become rich in a different kind of way. I’ve started my little travel company, one that lets me take teenagers on multi-week international adventures of my own design. I’ve published my first book about education, with another on the way. I’ve fallen in love with tango, trail running, and a delightful young ceramicist.
It’s been a full year since I’ve needed to work for anyone else to pay my bills, and the independence is starting to sink in. Life drips with purpose, connection, and opportunity.
I am 29, and I am free.
I am free because I have finally accepted something: I am not made for this world.
I am free because I have stopped believing that I must have a normal job in order to feel secure. All the running away, all the quitting, all the fleeing of responsibility, was actually a message: “You don’t belong here.”
I am free because I have stopped thinking that I must forever increase my standard of living, do better than my parents, or keep up with my peers. Give me a room, some decent outdoor gear, and a reliable used vehicle, and that’s enough. Material needs, achieved.
I am free because I have stopped assuming that I must live close to my birthplace, my family, or some trendy city. I don’t need to “live” anywhere—only where I feel most alive.
There’s another way to tell this story.
I am 29, and I am refusing to put down roots, invest in community, or consider my future.
I am 29, and I am blind to my privilege, squandering my higher education, and failing to serve humanity with my gifts.
I am 29, and this thing I call “freedom” is an elaborate rationalization for escaping duty, obligation, discomfort, conflict, and commitment.
I am 29, and I am a self-centered, hedonistic, unemployable drifter, incapable of sitting still, technically homeless, following an impossible vision of eternal summer.
I am 29, and I am mess of contradictions.
I am 29, and I am very much a product of my time and place: a healthy European-origin male beholden to a myth of rugged individualism, emboldened by a post-Cold War economy, reared in the resplendent nature of the West, and heir to a countercultural canon of wildcast entrepreneurialism, radical environmentalism, and American Transcendentalism.
I am 29, and I am free.
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Love this! At what age did you realise the second part? How do you reconcile this? Do you need to? Do you just live with both truths side by side?
I’ve been aware of and skirting around the unschooling world for just 8 years now and what you’ve written succinctly sums up some of my views of it.
It sounds refreshingly free but often ends up looking like rampant, selfish individualism which ignores the many privileges which allow such a drop out/cherry picked lifestyle to be a choice.
I don’t see anything wrong with what you are personally doing by the way - you are doing awesome work to be open and share your life in exactly this way and don’t owe anything to anyone (presuming from what you’ve shared you’ve not knowingly left a trail of abandoned children all over the world!)
On a personal level, do you worry about illness, old age? Your resourcefulness must be in your favour. Anyone working pay check to pay check without wealth build up is in a similar position with old age, but your life looks way more fun!
I used to get meaning from life by nursing - helping people through what was often very difficult situations with their/family health. Now I’m ‘just’ a parent and help with voluntary things for their music and sporting interests (which benefits far more than just them). But it all feels incredibly meaningless and like a trap if I’m honest.
If my family was wiped out, I would probably try to radically downsize and simplify my life (I would be very wealthy from cashing up everything we own) and just dedicate my life to finding ways to help raise awareness and do practical things to help the environment and vulnerable people in general. It feels like that is all that matters right now. But it also feels like this is incompatible with the family life I have constructed so far which is awfully mainstream aside from homeschooling. My kids would hate to give up their current lifestyle. Our lifestyle is funded by an engineering job that is mainly road construction - something I don’t even want as we need less roads and more mass transport systems!
Thanks as always for the thought provoking writing. Meri kirihimete/Happy holidays. (It’s Christmas Eve in Aotearoa as I write).
Do you still feel that sense of freedom? Has it changed at all since this realization at 29?