The freedom of wanting nothing

04-25-2026

This blog was inspired by Diogenes of Sinope, an ancient Greek philosopher who rejected wealth, status, and social norms completely. He lived with almost nothing inside a barrel and believed that true freedom came from needing as little as possible. To him, the less you depend on external things like money, reputation, or approval, the harder it is for the world to control you. He proved through his life that if you remove desire, you remove the system’s power over you.

The Next Level of Freedom in the Simulation

I had a conversation with my friend Rebecca last night. We ended up talking about deadbeat fathers, guys who have kids and just choose not to be there. No effort. No responsibility. Just gone.

What stuck with me was not even judging those guys. It was thinking about the kids. They did not choose any of it. They did not pick their parents or their situation. They just showed up and now they have to live with whatever they got.

That made me think about my own life in a way I had not really fully put into words before. I realized I am very different from most people. I do not want the usual things. I do not want kids. I do not want a girlfriend. I do not care about owning a house or building a career. I do not want any tattoos. I do not care about anything materialistic. I do not want to fall in love or ever get married. I do not want any pets. I do not want any heavy self inflicted responsibilities. It is hard enough to take care of daily hygiene, my body, prepare food, make money, and focus on health. I never want things, objects, people, or items to enslave me. I do not want to leave a legacy. I do not want to be tied to anything long term. I do not want anything permanent in a life that is already filled with impermanence.

I started to realize that maybe the highest form of freedom is not wanting anything the world says should be wanted or desired.

Just think about it for a second. A lot of what we have been told is the right way to live feels more like a script than a choice. Go to school for twenty two years, get a career, find a wife, have kids, leave a legacy, buy a house, retire. That path gets repeated so many times that it starts to feel like the only version of a successful life.

The American Dream is pushed so hard, but when you really look at it, it starts to feel questionable. Not because it is wrong for everyone, but because it is presented like it is meant for everyone.

Even on a biological level, we are already dealing with built in drives that control a lot of our behavior. We need to eat multiple times a day just to function, which already ties us to constant maintenance. Then there is the sex drive, which can influence decisions in ways people do not even realize. People spend money, change how they look, and act a certain way just to attract attention, validation, and TO HAVE SEX.

When you step back and look at all of it together, it makes you question how much of life is actually chosen and how much of it is just conditioning and instinct playing out.

All these attachments, relationships, desires, dreams, and goals might bring short moments of happiness, but in the end, many of them lead to some form of unhappiness at the final stage. If you really think about it, very few people reach 80 or 90 years old feeling truly fulfilled with the life they lived. Most die with regret, broken dreams, and unfulfilled lives.

In the end, I realized that my definition of freedom is not wanting anything that can be used against me. Not wanting the house, not wanting the status, not wanting the validation, not needing someone to stay, and not needing anything external to feel complete. Because the moment something becomes a need, it also becomes a way to control you.

My life has never been normal, so maybe that is why I see it like this. I spent 12.7 years running from the government. Living like that changes how you see everything. You do not think about comfort. You do not think about building a stable life. You think about movement, survival, staying ahead, and never being in a position where you can get trapped. When you live like that long enough, freedom stops being an idea and becomes something very real and very personal.

So when I say I want freedom, it is not coming from a place of theory. I had to define what freedom meant to me while not having it. Now that I am finally free, I get to redefine it again, but this time on my own terms, not based on fear or survival, but based on choice.

Most people do not really think about the life they are building. They just follow what is expected. School, job, relationship, house, maybe kids. It happens step by step, and before they know it, they are locked into a life that requires constant maintenance.

A lot of people are not unhappy because they chose wrong. They are unhappy because they never really chose at all.

They followed a script. A script that tells them what to want, what to chase, and what a successful life is supposed to look like. And once that script is accepted, everything that comes with it is accepted too. The pressure, the obligations, the expectations, and the loss of control.

The kind of freedom I am talking about sits outside of all of that. It is not about building more. It is about needing less. Not being tied down to things that were never consciously chosen. Not chasing outcomes that were never truly yours. Not building a life that ends up owning you instead of the other way around.

But there is a side of this that most people will never understand. When you remove desire, you also remove direction. When chasing stops, there is nothing automatically pulling you forward. There is no default meaning anymore.

You have to create it yourself.

That part is not easy. There is no guide for it. It becomes a process of building your own version of a life that actually feels right.

For me, it is simple. I just want to live freely. I want to experience different places, meet different people, and create memories that actually feel real. Everything does not have to make sense. It just has to feel like I am actually living.

At the end of my life, I am not worried about legacy or being remembered. I just want to know that I lived a life that was true to myself.