Wageslave Speaks

We are the new rich. Or will be soon. We still want to change the world, but also want to not have to work. The key thing is we are at a point in our life where we have the choice of becoming wage slaves and working for companies all of our life or figure the system out and have companies work for us the rest of our lives.

Philip Dick once wrote a short story which became a movie entitled the same: Paycheck-where in a future world, ruled by corporations and governments, where individual rights scarcely exist. Many people today live in that world. They are bound to their jobs and don’t have the freedom to figure out what they want or even begin to think about how to get there.

This blog is about combining individual stories to create a base of knowledge in order to figure out how to not be one of those people. I felt myself falling into that world. I worked for a small company. We were a bunch of bright kids and we felt like we could take over the world. The only thing we had to do was help our boss accomplish his goal first. And so many of us worked a lot; often between 60 and 80 hours a week. Our boss promised us a lush future compensation in stock options. The funny thing was for every year we were there, the date those options were to be worth something was always one more year away. (When I started we were one year away, the next year we were two years away and so on.).

Something was wrong.

I was a wage slave. I needed to work, because they didn’t pay me enough to save enough to take much time off. I wasn’t working on my own dreams but someone else’s. In fact, the job was so consuming that I didn’t even get a chance to think about my own dreams. But I decided to make a change. I quit, did a little job hopping, started a little side-business or two and suddenly in the course of a year make almost twice what I used to make and work about half as much.

A lot of people say: I don’t care about the money. Honestly, I agree. It wasn’t so much the money but the freedom. While I started to make more money I kept my lifestyle largely the same, paid off my car, and suddenly my overall expenses are significantly lower than when I started. So I don’t need the money. But the freedom is wonderful. The freedom comes from two places. One, I save a bit of money now. So if I don’t want to work – I can stop. Two, I have time to think! I’m not sure what I’ll do with my life when I grow up but at least I can think about it and then have the opportunity to pursue it as well.

Wageslave is a cofounder of RocketStocksBlog.com

-Wageslave