One of my biggest regrets is not being financially independent at 18 years old.  My history with my family with regards to finances was unhealthy to say the least.  They held my savings accounts, college, and possessions over my head and unfortunately I bought into their financial carrots until I was 23.  They had convinced me that I couldn’t make it by myself and so I subjected myself to 5 more years than I was legally required to be living with them.  …but we can get more into that at another time.

It is my desire to help young adults become financially independent sooner.  I would like to solicit my readers feedback to create a project around this subject.  This project could be a series of posts on my blog, a good thread at FDR or even an entire website dedicated to this subject.  This project is all up to the feedback I receive from you, so I encourage your feedback so I can make an awesome resource to help 18 year olds gain independence faster so they can start to make their own decisions without fear of being “cut off” financially.

Since I did not escape my parents house until I was 23, I would like to get the following feedback from those of you that are on your own financially:

• Starting early
  • How did you prepare yourself for the job world before you were 18?
  • How did you prepare yourself for college?
• Jobs
  • What are good resources to look for jobs?
  • How did you build your resume?
  • What made interviews successful/unsuccessful?
  • How do you get your foot in the door if you haven’t had a job before and/or have few references?
  • Are references always necessary if you are just starting out?  If so, how do you get them?
• Shelter
  • What are the best housing options for someone starting off?
  • What do you look for in roommates?
  • How do you find a place to rent?
• Food
  • How do you live on a budget without destroying your health?
  • Any good, inexpensive recipes that don’t involve ramen noodles?
• Clothes
  • Where do you shop for clothes?
• Transportation
  • Finance a car?  Buy a motorbike?  Bike?  Bus?  Train?  What transportation has worked for you?
• School
  • How do you finance college without your parents help?
  • How do you decide and research what you want to do before going to college?
  • How do you find the right college for you?
• Other expenses
  • How do you get health insurance?  What kind?
  • How do you afford therapy?
  • What other expenses did you encounter starting off?

Any feedback would be helpful!  Please reply to this post with your thoughts and you can be involved in helping others become financially independent more quickly. Even if you didn’t get out of the house at 18, I am sure any life experience would be helpful to others.  Thanks!

Until this project moves forward, I would like to offer a link to a budget calculator I created for myself and others to manage their monthly expenses.  You can view and save this budget calculator here.  Also, if you use a credit card or debit card for most of your transactions, mint.com is an excellent resource for managing your budget.

Tags: finances, financial, independence

The Guardian published an article about Freedomain Radio with a pretty huge slant towards it being an Internet cult.  A link to the article can be found on the FDR forums here.

I have a mixed reaction to that news.  

I am angry and sad that Tom’s name was mentioned in the article and that his heinous mother would try to hurt him so publicly.  She is a truly cruel and abusive person and is further exposing herself as such.  

The more prevalent feeling I have is happiness and excitement.  This may be confusing at first glance, since the article paints FDR in such a cruel light, but we knew this day would come and we knew that the media would not paint a pretty picture.  The reason I am excited is that it’s a positive thing to let people know that their familial relationships (and other relationships) are completely voluntary.  Just this idea alone will give many people the conscious option to leave people who do not truly love them.  Also, this will improve parenting because parents now have the explicit knowledge that their children have the choice to leave them.  I think this will cause many parents to think twice before mentally or physically abusing their children. Ultimately Tom’s mom has shot herself in the foot, because this will give people more freedom in their lives and I am sure it will bring some truly bright people into the conversation and keep away people who are not interested in philosophy.  I look forward to meeting new, bright people!

I also totally sympathize with how scary this would be for someone new approaching the Freedomain conversation now that this article is out there, so if you are skeptical but still curious I challenge you to read and watch the following:

• Important threads on Freedomain Radio pertaining to the “cult” accusations:
  • Stefan Molyneux’s public statement about the article
  • DeFOO statistics
  • Discussion about the Guardian Article
• Other Freedomain materials pertaining to the cult accusations
  • First podcast addressing cult fears
  • Podcast about FDR Cultwatch
  • Conversation Stef had with a critic of FDR
  • How to beat FDR
  • Sunday Call In Show about the article
  • How (not) to Achieve Freedom goes into the psychology behind the accusations
• Other bloggers
  • The Guardian Publishes an Article about Freedomain Radio
  • Anarchist Mind Control Threatens Foundations of Culture
  • (if you write a response to this article, let me know and I will link it here)

Also, feel free to ask me questions or contact Stef himself if you have any further questions.

Tags: cult, fdr, guardian

Sorry to my readers for the slow start on this blog.  Like I said in the first post of this blog, I don’t want this to be a dumping ground for my unexplored thoughts or emotions.  I want this blog to be my processed history.  I want it that way so it can be helpful to others.  When I started the blog I was just getting back into therapy and realized that I had reached a point in my public blog that I hadn’t processed yet.  So I trusted my emotions and stopped blogging.  I am still not confident about going further with the story of my history yet, but I will as soon as I get the right feeling about it.

One of the ways I am processing my past is by going to therapy.  I started off with a primal therapist, which I might touch on more later, and now I am with a therapist that is CBT, or a cognitive behavioral therapist.  The essence of cognitive behavioral therapy is that thoughts proceed feelings.  CBT holds the theory that thoughts are controllable and feelings are not, so if you want to reduce feelings such as anxiety, you look into the thought as the source, correct the thought and then the feeling will follow.

The reason I chose to go to a CBT was because I experience a high amount of anxiety that is triggered by many different situations.  For example, I used to spend a large part of my day worrying about money.  I kept having disastrous scenarios where I would go bankrupt, lose my relationship with my girlfriend and wander the streets alone.  Of course this is not a rational thought but it was one that occurred many times a day and I felt like I had no control over it.  My therapist suggested that I take control of these thoughts by setting aside 20 minutes a day to focus on my finances.  During the rest of the day, when I had thoughts about money I would gently tell myself, “It’s not time to think about money, we can do that tonight.”  Within a few days I almost completely broke the habit of thinking about money and my anxiety levels were reduced immensely.  With my anxiety under control I was then able to explore more root causes of why I was creating disaster scenarios, if I was truly headed for the streets and what I was really avoiding by thinking about money all of the time.

With the cognitive part of CBT, the focus is on the thoughts.  Since that is a major part of my therapy right now I’d like to go into a little more detail on how that works.  We all have automatic thoughts that have been conditioned into us for many years for a variety of reasons.  Most often these thoughts are fortune telling thoughts.  An example of a fortune telling thought with my situation is that I was convinced that I was headed towards a life of being a lonely bum.  Analyzing my situation in reality, I know that I am managing my debt well and even if the worst case scenario came true and I went bankrupt, I would probably just end up in a smaller apartment.  However I had an automatic thought that told me that I was going to be a lonely bum and I allowed that thought to repeat in my head every day.  Like any habit, it’s very difficult to turn around and that is why it felt nearly impossible to me to challenge it.  Using a tool such as allocating time to think about money helped me manage the thoughts, lessen the anxiety, and give myself room to look at the situation realistically.

I have found it important to keep a journal and put my anxiety, worry and fear to paper.  My thoughts fly around my head faster than I can analyze them, so getting them down on paper helps me to slow down, listen to myself and logically challenge my thoughts.  I more often than not find that my thoughts are far out of proportion to reality and then I am able to think of realistic possibilities for worrisome situations.  After that my worry reduces to more appropriate levels which allows me to come up with solutions to any problem I am having.

Another big lesson I have learned from CBT is that emotions are not going to hurt you.  In fact, they are here to help.  Anxiety, worry and fear are to help you avoid dangerous situations.  Exess anxiety, worry and fear may make you feel like you are in a dangerous situation but when you straighten out your thoughts about the situation, you can have a more realistic feel of any situation which will help you face what you need to and avoid what is really dangerous.

It’s difficult to challenge these thoughts without a therapist.  A therapist can help give you an outside perspective of your thoughts and behaviors.  It was a frightening step for me to actually get into therapy because I was raised to think that therapy was only for insane, broken people.  I realize now that it is just like college with a more personal touch.  It’s a place to go to learn about yourself, improve yourself and take the steps necessary to change destructive patterns from your past.  Cost seems to be one of the biggest barriers for people considering therapy.  With insurance, plus four sessions per month, I pay $340 per month.  This may sound outside of most peoples budgets, but I think it is a much more worthwhile investment than even college.  People take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans each year to go to school without a huge amount of hesitation, yet for a few thousand dollars a year you could really come to understand your life better.  I don’t think there is a better investment than yourself, so if you are hesitant about therapy for any reason just think of it as any other investment.  It’s all for your long term benefit.

If you are interested in therapy, but are unsure where to start, please feel free to send me an e-mail.  I have a lot of experience with the whole financial aspect of it and also searching for a therapist.  I’d also be happy to post some tips in a new post if anyone is interested.

If you are not quite ready for therapy yet, but find the CBT method interesting I suggest you pick up a copy of David Burns books: Feeling Good and When Panic Attacks.  Most of the therapists I have spoken to have suggested those and they go into great detail about CBT.  Also, Christina Molyneux hosted a great talk on CBT at the Freedomain Radio Miami Symposium .  Well worth the price!

If you have any experience with therapy that you would like to share, be sure to leave a comment.

Tags: cbt, freedomain, Therapy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igbBItLemsM

Tags: freedomain, Politics

One year ago today marks the day that my life was changed in the most significant way ever. What happened on that day? I joined the Freedomain Radio (FDR) forums. It’s been nothing short of an exhilarating ride since then. I can best describe it as my soul tearing me along down the rabbit hole of philosophy.

Before I came to FDR I was into philosophy, but certainly not as personal as I have made it now. I was an Objectivist and had very strong political opinions as a result of that. Colleen had been reading articles on anarcho-capitalism. It was a taboo subject in Objectivist circles and I was nervous about exploring a subject that had been condemned by Ayn Rand as “Gang Rule.” Upon being presented the argument that any form of government violates the non-aggression principle I realized that Ayn Rand had made a horrible error. It took a couple days of discussing this with Colleen, and I quickly changed my position on the need for a government and watched as the rabbit hole ripped open in front of me.

I had watched a few of Stef’s videos on Youtube about 6 months before I accepted ancap ideas. I thought he was an Objectivist and found the videos to be enjoyable (but a little too long to hold my attention span at the time). Colleen reintroduced me to the videos and we started to watch video after video. I think the first one that really struck me were about how “Muslims are not your enemy.” Colleen had posted it to her Facebook and was still friends with a number of Objectivists. This video caused quite a few of them to leave caustic comments. I started to see what others had seen in Objectivism. I started to see the ugly side, the blind government and war-supporting side.

I started burning through Stef’s podcasts, but mostly the economic and philosophical ones. I pretty consciously avoided the psychological ones. I knew vaguely about how others on the forum were actively integrating philosophy into their lives, but I was not ready to accept that idea. I was just getting used to the idea of a stateless society. Colleen started to have a wrenching time after reading “On Truth” and I became very frightened by the effects it was having on her. She was questioning her friendships and most frighteningly of all, her relationship with her family. I read “On Truth” to try to figure out what was going on for her. At first, I had thoughts like, “Oh, I see how this applies to her but I don’t think it applies to me and my family and friends.” Colleen challenged my idealization of my family and I started to wonder if I could be wrong. I became increasingly nervous as the holidays grew closer. I still hadn’t heard any of the psychological podcasts and still was skeptical of how “On Truth” applied to my own life. I decided that I would bring up my new found ideas during my trip to see my parents for Christmas. I also decided to talk to them about my atheism and how I wanted to be able to be open with them about it. Before I left for the trip I decided to take a crack at the psychology podcasts and loaded up my MP3 player for the flight out. It was a fairly unconscious move on my part, I don’t remember what in particular moved me to finally listen to those. Now I know why. They prepared me for the most honest conversation I was ever going to have with my parents. In short, I tested my theory that “On Truth” had nothing to do with my personal relationships. My theory was shattered. The full account of this will be available on this blog in the weeks to come.

Shortly after that, Colleen and I cut our families out of our life, moved in with one another, and began the (chemotheraputic) process of confronting my past so I could begin to heal from it. I got into therapy and had some very intense sessions where I confronted much of the anger and sadness that had built up over the years of being subject to the tyranny of my family. I am still in therapy and will be until my gut tells me that I am done. I am in therapy for myself, but I am mostly in therapy because I want to create the opportunity for myself to be a great parent in the future and give my children all of the opportunities for freedom that I was never given by my family.

It’s the best decision I have ever made. Since then I have been able to achieve more than I was ever able to in my life. My relationship with Colleen has become deeper and more fulfilling, I am in a job that I enjoy and am making more money in than my previous venture and I have a much greater perspective on my life which brings me a sense of peace that I didn’t have before. Not only that but I have quit binge drinking, smoking pot and generally avoiding the pain in my life. I cannot claim perfect mental health or absolute understanding of my life and what I want, but I can say that I am infinitely more free than I was a year ago. I can not give enough thanks to the FDR community and Stef for helping me get this far. I have cultivated the best friendships of my life on this forum. I particularly want to thank Colleen for being so patient with me through this process. I don’t think I would have made it this far without her and I look forward to many more years of helping each other improve and be free.

Tags: family, freedom, freedomain, philosophy

I think I paused before my post about my nihilist phase because I ran across some unprocessed feelings about the moral relativism that was along side that nihilism.  Once I have figured that out (and I think I am fairly close), I will get back to posting.  Something I want to be careful with on this blog is not to post anything that I haven’t processed yet.  What do I mean by processing?  I mean really sitting down and understanding my feelings and thoughts so I don’t inflict them upon anyone or misguide my readers.  I ask you to challenge me if you ever see me doing this and be honest with me if you have any unexpected feelings while reading my posts.

In the meantime, if you have been listening to Freedomain for awhile and have enjoyed my blog, I think it is high time you listen to these podcasts.  Listen in order if you can and do not skip podcast 183.  It is a very important podcast.  And always remember, you have a choice between the red pill and the blue pill.

Tags: family, freedomain, moral relativism

I wanted to take a small break from recounting my journey and see how my readers lives are going.  I haven’t spoken to a lot of you in a long time and would like to know what’s been going on.  Just to put it out there, I’m always up for a Skype call if anyone wants to catch up.  I know, Skype works both ways, and I apologize for not taking the initiative to contact you all in awhile.  I think I needed some “me” time to get myself back on the rails.

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Now that I’ve gone into my history a bit, I think it is a good time to talk about where my desire to be free began.

Sometime in high school I became enraged with my mom about the lack of freedom that she allowed me.  I started to rebel in hidden sorts of ways.  I started listening to music that my parents would disapprove of.  Most of it was punk rock but there was also some heavy metal.  I went from oldies to hard rock in just a couple of months.  I went to loving the music my parents loved to despising it.  I remember I liked the way the music made me feel.  I felt powerful for some reason.  I felt free.  Listening to the lyrics of those songs today, I begin to realize that music was my introduction to philosophy.  It was a crude form of philosophy to be sure, but it showed me that there was a world beyond my parents narrow view.  Many of the songs were filled with lyrics about freedom.  Freedom in this sense was “doing what you want”.  This struck so deep with me, because I really wasn’t able to do what I wanted.  I wanted to experience life.  I wanted to go out and socialize and find out who I was.  Unfortunately most of my experiences were second hand.  I listened jealously to my friends stories about staying out late.  Many of them were superficial stories about parties or getting into trouble, but they sounded so much more desirable than spending another tense evening with my family.

Eventually my music was taken away from me.  My mom walked into my room one day and pulled my headphones out of the jack on my stereo and started listening to the music I was listening to.  I turned off the power of the boom box and nervously asked her what she was doing.  She then began interrogating me about what I had been listening to and went to turn the stereo back on.  Ironically, the song that was playing was “Abuse me (more I like it)” by Silverchair.  Before she was able to turn it back on I confessed wildly about the “bad” lyrics of the songs and that I didn’t think she would understand.  She became enraged hearing my confession and tore the tape out of my boom box.  She grounded me for two weeks and had my dad listen to the tape to see what I had been listening to.  A week later he basically smirked and said, “that’s some angry, bad word filled music you listen to, but it’s not as bad as I thought”.  I can’t remember, but I think he actually gave me back the tape.  I felt absolutely horrible.  I felt betrayed by both my mom and dad.  Worst of all, I had lost my music and was again left with nothing.  I became depressed without my music.  Hopeless.

I quickly figured out ways to listen to my music without them knowing.  My friend listened to even harder music than I did so I would go to his house and listen there.  Rammstein, Metallica, Type O Negative and other metal bands started to become my favorites.  The songs I remember most were laced with the word freedom.  Most of them were about how freedom was restricted and how cruel the world was.  They reflected my life too well, and reflected the anger I felt even more.

I would also listen to the radio late at night which led to my discovery of a show called “Love Line”.  This was a show where a doctor (Dr. Drew Pinskey) and a comedian (Adam Corolla) would take calls from kids and teens and discuss their problems.  Mostly the questions were about sex but there were also a lot of questions about how to escape abusive parents.  I would stay up until 1 or 2 in the morning almost every night listening intently to these stories and the advice given out.  Although the show wasn’t extremely intellectual, I do think I learned a lot about the world and how abuse was at the core of most of the problems in it.  This was a secret I was able to keep without my parents ever discovering.  I can not imagine what they would have done if they had have found out I was listening to that “smut”.

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When I got into college my politics and beliefs began to pull a 180.  I went from being my parents conservative little pet to a war hating liberal.  I even have my picture in some school newspaper somewhere carrying a casket at some sort of liberal protest.  I can’t even remember what the protest was about.  I went from believing and praying to god to hating religion.  I didn’t become fully atheistic until much later.  I was agnostic for most of my college career.

When my mom told me that she “didn’t want me bringing my liberal opinions into the house anymore” that is when my desire to flee became intense.  I began reading everything I could.  From Karl Marx to the Bible, I was searching wildly for the truth.  I would debate with anyone I could.  I had a friend who was a theology/philosophy major who taught me how to debate, or at least what I thought was debating.  What I found out later is he taught me how to be really good at manipulating others arguments.  He taught me how to frustrate people.

…but I will write another post about that.  That is when I became a moral relativist.  Or more accurately, a nihilist.

Tags: family, music, nihilism, philosophy, religion

My favorite novel is available for free at Freedomain Radio!  You can find the MP3s and PDFs here or simply subscribe to this feed using your iTunes or RSS reader.

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I am going to start with a little early history. I have come to realize what a huge impact my history has had on my life and think it is an important starting point in any honest self exploration. My history will probably be the trend for awhile in these posts, as I think I have processed a lot of my history and have a more accurate view of it now.

To be honest, this is a painful history for me to recount. Writing this was not easy and I had to stop a few times to just process the feelings.

I am the first born child in my family. I have two sisters, one is a couple years younger and the other is about 6 years younger than me. My mom and dad remain married to this day. As far as my experience goes, my family was fairly typical as far as American families go. I know that most people I encounter would even call my childhood “good” from a surface view of it. Little did I realize at the time that typical did not equal good.

My mother was overbearing. My earliest memories of her are of her neurotic behavior. She wouldn’t let us go outside to play without full supervision. She snapped at us for being too loud. Instead of telling us why it was bad to talk to strangers, she filled us with fear by telling us to never talk to strangers but never telling us why. My sisters and I asked many, “Whys” but were often replied to with, “Because I said so.” I remember very often that my mother would blame us for the way she felt. We were always “scaring her” and “making her nervous”. I am sure this sounds fairly typical to most people, but as I said before, typical does not equal good.

She did not loosen her control without a huge fight. I spent many evenings “debating” with my mother about my freedoms. I put debating in quotes because I realize now that it was not a debate. It was an emotional battle. Whoever gave up first lost. My mother rarely lost. The “debates” started fairly benign. I would ask my mom if I could stay at a friends house. She would say no. I would ask why. She would say because she didn’t trust their parents. I would give her the option of meeting my friends parents. She would say she was too busy. And on, and on. She was an expert at twisting and dodging. There was never a chance for me to get a straight answer from her. I began to believe that she didn’t know the answer, but the truth was much worse than that. She knew that if she gave me honest answers, then she would have no choice but to let me do what I wanted. If she let me do what I wanted then she would have been subject to the judgment of her peers and society in general.  She was too afraid of that to ever allow logic to lead her decision making.  She was always more concerned about what her family, friends, peers and society would think to care about what I was experiencing.

School was hell and didn’t help the situation. I could (and may) write pages about my horrible experience in the public school system. I was anti-social, scared every day, and unchallenged intellectually. I spent my evenings in my room alone, tinkering with electronics, writing and drawing. My mother had no sympathy or curiosity for why I was having so much trouble with school. She acted much of the time like it was my fault. My strongest memory of this interaction was when I was being threatened by a couple of inner city kids at my junior high summer school and I wanted her to help me get these boys suspended, her frustrated response to me was, “Do you want people calling you a mamma’s boy?!” The implication was that I relied on her too much to solve my problems. She was yelling at me to “grow up” when she had been responsible for my lack of growth all along. I felt so horrible and alone on those days that I started to develop a hard emotional shell to cope with the strong feelings of sadness.

As I got into my teenage years, and the debates turned into battles. I would request a new freedom, usually something having to do with socializing, and my mother would much more quickly resort to “because I said so” rather than trying to evade. There was no longer much of a cloak of evasions. It was now a clear dictatorship and I was the uprising to be squashed. Our “debates” turned into two or three hours of me trying my best to prove why I deserved my freedom while she berated me. She would get so angry that her eyes would bulge and her voice would begin to give out. I would rarely yell back because that only escalated the situation. Sometimes my dad would come in and say something vaguely threatening along the lines of, “boy, you better watch it”. That was the only time I really feared my dad. Most of the time he was just reserved. Unemotional. A template to the man I would be in my early 20’s.

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Unfortunately I believed my parents when they said I couldn’t afford college on my own. So, I agreed to obey their rules for another few years if they would pay for college. 4 years turned into 6. During that time I met my first girlfriend and struggled hard between the ages of 18 to 23 to loosen some of the chains. I regret not leaving my home when I was 18. I lost 6 years of my life by making the decision to make a deal with the devil.

From 18 to 23 was the era of the 3 hour smack downs. Of course they didn’t ever beat me (but there was always the implicit threat), but rather I had yelling matches with my mom until I was exhausted. It would start the same way it did when I was young, but it would devolve into her bringing up every reason why I was irresponsible and did not deserve freedom. I had a 10 o’clock curfew until I was 19. After that it was midnight.  The curfew was never officially dropped. That was the most “freedom” I was ever able to “obtain” from her.

Finally my mother started to blame her failing health on me. She was overweight, had a brain aneurysm that could burst at any time and always had some sort of ache or pain. She trapped me in the car one day and told me that I was no longer allowed to express my “liberal opinions” in her house. She implied that I was corrupting my sisters and that if I wanted to have free expression that I needed to get out of the house. My dad also pulled me aside during this time and told me to not engage in anymore debates with my mom, because I was hurting her and the family. I felt so rejected, hurt and alone. I wanted to run but I still had college, barely had a job and was feeling pretty hopeless.

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I became a very angry and bitter person because of these experiences. I finally found an outlet for my anger. The Internet. I became a bully. I became a troll. I became my mother. I would have twisted “debates” with people until they were too frustrated to continue. It sometimes felt cathartic but other times I truly felt like I was losing my soul, piece by piece.

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This of course is all a summary and I tried to keep it as short as possible. I may go into more details about my childhood in other posts, but I wanted to give my readers an overall look at where I have come from. I think it will help you understand the decisions I have made since then.

If you relate to this post at all, I think this is a very relevant podcast and will give you a better understanding of why most men have a angry/violent streak to them.
The Roots of Male Violence

I think my next post will focus on how I started to piece together the abuse and wake up from my dream world where typical equaled good.

Tags: early, History, mother