When I graduated from university, I didn’t enter the work force straight away. I did volunteer work. I met friends, and with each meeting, I saw the light in their eyes fade as they complained about work. I wrote a book and got it published. Then I figured out people would pay me to write for them, and I started my first career working with words.
Later I got sick and lost my ability to write for a few years. I got married, took on responsibilities, bought a flat, and joined the rat race. To earn a living and provide for my family, I left words behind and went to work with numbers. I figured out people would pay me to help them make sense of their numbers and how to make it work for them.
Back then, I wanted to make a difference to the lives of people I worked with, or at least I thought I did.
I later learned that if you’re not sure of who you really are, and if you don’t set boundaries around yourself, other people will turn you into something they can use, and you will lose sight of who you really are. All it takes are a few dollars in your bank account every month, especially when you are most desperate, and you will change who you are to survive.
We sell our selves, our bodies and minds, our talents and abilities, and sometimes our souls, for money. The more desperate you are, the more willing you are to sell yourself, and not question it because you’re too busy working, trying to survive.
Many of us reach a breaking point at some time in our lives. For me, when both my marriage and my business partnership failed, I was at a crossroads — do I try again, or do I do something completely different? I came to realise that the way I was living my life wasn’t working, and that I didn’t like the person that I had become. But I couldn’t see a way out.
That was when I was introduced to the freegan life. Learning about it, how it worked, completely blew my mind. It helped me to see that instead of a life of scarcity, I could actually be living a life of abundance, given my present situation; I just had been too blind to see it.
It was something completely different from the way I lived before, but at the same time, it felt like I was coming home to something familiar.
Over the years of being freegan, this life has given me many benefits. Most of all, it gave me the time and space I needed to find myself again.
In the past, I was always busy working for money, trying to survive, trying to promote my business. Even when I was on holiday 1-2 times a year, I never really felt rested. I never really had time to listen to my inner voice, and what it was telling me.
When I stopped work for 2 years to explore the freegan life, and to figure out how to make it last forever, I started to find myself again.
After 2 years, I found this life sustainable and could reasonably continue it for the rest of my life. I decided not to go back to work full-time. If I needed extra money for, say, travel, I could always work part-time, earn what I needed, then go travelling, or do whatever I wanted.
When I no longer needed to worry about money, I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted with my life, and my time. I went back to words, which was my first love. And then this year, I found that working with pictures was something I could also do.
I continue to learn more about myself with each passing day. Where once I used to travel 1-2x a year, now I travel 1-2x a month, and the reason I can do this is because I am freegan.
Over these years, I have summarised the 3 main reasons why people become freegan.
First, they want to save money.
Being freegan means getting almost everything you need and want in life for free, in ways that I have shared with you in previous weeks. See below for a list of links to the past articles.
If you get almost everything you need and want for free, you don’t need to spend money getting them, and you end up saving a lot more money than you would if you tried to earn more.
It is far, far easier for most people to save money by spending less, than it is to save money by earning more.
Second, they want to save other people.
In these past years, I have met many generous people who adopt the freegan life because they want to help other people.
Buying things to give to other people who cannot afford it is limited by how much money we have. But if we can get things for free to give to other people, we can do so much more to help them.
We become limited by how much we can physically carry.
Third, they want to save the earth.
The freegan life is one of the best ways to reduce our environmental impact on the planet.
By not buying things, and by reusing and repurposing things that already exist, we not only reduce the demand for the manufacture of things, we also reduce the number of things that go to the bin, get incinerated and poured into a landfill.
It’s not just a zero waste lifestyle; it’s a negative waste lifestyle, because we not only do not generate waste, but we help other people reduce theirs. We don’t need the whole world to become freegan; just enough to start going into net negative waste.
But the thing is, regardless of your reason, anyone who lives a freegan life eventually ends up doing all 3 — save money, save other people, and save the earth.
To what end?
However, only the first one is not an end to itself. Most people do not save money because they love money. We are not Scrooge McDuck, swimming in a vault of our savings.
Most of us save money because there is something else we want to do with our time, besides selling it for money.
👉 Some people do it because they want to be around their children when they grow up. So, they become freegan and work part-time, or become a single-income household.
👉 Some people do it because they want to help others or a cause they believe in, so they end up doing volunteer work.
👉 Some people do it because they are tired of working. They figured out that by being freegan, they can retire now instead of working for another 20 more years. There are other things that they want to do with their life, or maybe just rest for a very long time.
👉 Some people do it because they have a passion or dream for something that people won’t pay for. Most people have had to give up their hobbies because they spend most of their time working for money, and are too tired to have hobbies and a career. As a freegan, you can revisit these passions even if they do not earn you a living. You do it simply because you enjoy it.
👉 Some people do it because they want to find themselves again. They are not happy with the person they are today. It is hard to find ourselves when we are so wrapped up in what others want us to be for them.
When we are so busy working for others, we don’t have time to find ourselves. Instead, we fill our free time by pleasuring our senses. That’s why Singaporeans are always eating and shopping, and chasing the latest fad, and then going back to work to earn enough to sustain that lifestyle.
We need to make time and space to rediscover who we are meant to be, and who we want to be for ourselves.
I once thought that I wanted to make a difference to the lives of others, to make an impact on the world around me. But as time goes by, I am learning that maybe what I really want to do is to make as small an impact to the world around me.
Maybe I just want to enjoy life while I have it, and leave as little a footprint behind as I can.
Daniel Tay 