Why LibMyLife.com?

For years now, I’ve known that something was dreadfully wrong in my life.  I’m married to a wonderful woman, I work with nice people, and I have all of my fingers and toes and other bits.  Why then the depression, the fibromyalgia, the fear, the anger…?

If you’re reading this post, I’m guessing that on some level you have a similar sense that something is off in your life.  You might not know what it is, or maybe you do.

I have some inklings as to what the problems in my life might be, but I don’t claim to be an expert on personal growth or mental health or any of that.  I’m a dude who should be a lot more happy, if indeed the things that are supposed to make us happy actually did.

That’s the point of Liberating My Life.  I want to free myself from the unhappy things (as much as any human being can) and the fake “happy” things so that I can concentrate on the real happy stuff.  I want to share that process because I think my own struggles might help other people with similar issues.

I’ve been dabbling at this for awhile, trying everything from intense political activity and medicine to fortune telling and religion.  Mind you, I’m still politically active, I still take Citalopram, I still think that the diviner was giving me advice I needed to hear, and I still believe that atheism is just as stupid as unquestioning dogmatism.  Those things are all a part of who I am right now.  Hopefully, I’ll wean off of the Citalopram, but my faith, my spirituality, and my ideology are not the anchors that are holding me down.  At one point, I thought that might be the case, but I was wrong.

A few weeks back, I was worrying (again) about money, and I typed the words “creating value” in Google. I searched for that because I knew that I wasn’t creating nearly the level of value that I’m capable of, and on some level, I understood that wealth was somehow tied to value, either through creating it, connecting people to it, or stealing it.  I’m not too keen on stealing, so I wanted to think about ways that I could upgrade my value output.

Enter Steve Pavlina.  The first link on Google was to Steve’s article How to Create Real Value, which was a very refreshing read.  The previous article, on building wealth during a recession was also very enlightening.  It wasn’t what he said, exactly- I knew most of what he was saying, having read a lot of Robert Heinlein and being interested in monetary policy and such.  It was more about the way it was said.

I’m sure that Steve and I disagree on a lot of things- veganism for instance, but I very much respect his work.  I feel that on some level Mr. Pavlina is continuing the social transformation that Heinlein wrote about throughout his entire career.  Take a look at For Us, The Living, which was Heinlein’s first (and until recently, unpublished) novel from 1939.  While it’s a bit pedantic in places, the society described is remarkably modern for a book that predates Second-Wave Feminism and the Internet.

Okay, enough about Mssrs. Heinlein and Pavlina…

My point, and the point of this site, is to let you ride along on a rather personal and probably bumpy ride to be the kind of person I really want to be.  Right now, I’m fat and out of shape.  I’m in debt up to my eyeballs.  I work full-time at a job that is a pale shadow of what I’m capable of and which pays about half of what other people in my industry make for doing the same job.  Yes, I will talk about it in more detail some other time; but, suffice it to say that I really do like the people I work with and it is good (as in helpful and meaningful) work.  It’s just not my life’s work.

To someone who hasn’t read this article, the day-to-day shift in my focus- recipes one day, artistic musings about firewood the next, and a treatise on meat-eating the next- might seem scattered or confusing.  That is not my intent.  Everything I write here is a part of the mental, physical, and spiritual experiment that I am conducting.  If I’m writing about hamburgers, it’s because I’m really trying to think about hamburgers and how they fit into my life.  In the grand scheme of things, how we eat and why is just as important as how we earn our money and why or to whom we pray and why.

I guess that’s today’s lesson, assuming that I have one- little stuff.  By nature, I’m a grand ideas, view-from-above, big picture sort of person.  It’s very hard for me to break things down into small parts.  Some people have trouble “seeing the forest for the trees”.  I instead struggle to see the individual trees because it’s so easy for me to see the forest.

LibMyLife is the little stuff.  It’s my magnifying glass, my microscope, and I’m putting myself underneath it.