"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
Sterling Hayden (actor and adventurer) had this to say about freedom in his novel “Voyage”. (written in 1976) “In the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine...we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry and playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade. The years thunder by. The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked on the shelves of patience. Before we know it the tomb is sealed...When you consider the beauty there is in the world, the rapture that can be known, the honest relationships, the excitement and exaltation there is for the taking...the real things to look at and feel and read...Where, then, lies the answer? In choice.
Baby Boomer's - What do we do with our lives? We get an education (or not), get a career (or not), have a family…you know the drill. All the while, looking ahead, living for later, planning, scheming, hoping and praying that we can come up with a solid strategy to not have to work in a job that we hate, live an “average” life; looking forward to collecting a small pension or even worse, social security. According to recent Social Security Administration data there are some 48,000,000 people currently collecting benefits! 32 million of those are current retirees. 2007 was the first year that the oldest Baby Boomer's (born 1946) were eligible to sign up for social security benefits. There are only 80 million more to go!
I hope to provide a forum for exploring creative ways to live and prosper under the system that we currently have. Not everyone is a corporate executive, with millions of dollars saved for a luxurious retirement. Most of us are average working people, saving what we can, while working within the current tax and retirement system hoping that time and compounding will work for us -
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