How to be Free and Independent in Life
What method or methods do you use to gather the resources needed to live on a daily basis? Do you work for it yourself, or do you need money from someone else to keep you going?
How can you be free and independent?
Dependent people need others to get what they want. Independent people can get what they want through their own effort. Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.
7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Whether you are dependent, independent, or interdependent directly impacts the capacity of freedom and happiness that can infiltrate your life.
In this article I’ll explain what it means to be dependent, independent, and interdependent, help you identify where you stand, and teach you how you can get where you want to be.
Dependence
The first stage of life is dependency. To be dependent means to need others to get what you want to survive.
As newborns, you’re completely exposed to the outside world. To fulfill their needs, babies cry and wriggle their arms and legs. They’re completely reliant upon their parents/guardians for food, clothing, shelter, safety, and emotional support.
After a few years, you’re able to put food in your own mouth, talk/convey emotions, and explore your immediate the world. However, you’re still dependent. As your 16th birthday arrives, you start becoming less and less dependent.
While in the dependent stage, a person’s attitude is typically self-centered. “What are you doing for me?” is a common thought process.
If you’re emotionally dependent, your sense of self-worth comes from others’ opinion of you.
If you’re intellectually dependent, you count on others to do your thinking for you.
It’s considered “normal” to be in this stage for about the first two decades of one’s life. But beyond this point, you need to become an independent citizen of the world.
In the first quarter of your life, while you may not be able to actively exercise true independence, the mindset of “I can do it myself” is what takes one from dependence to independence.
Independence
Independence begins to show itself at an early age, although full independence is still years away.
Parents are scolded by their kids who want to tie their shoes and dress themselves. Teenagers crave the freedom to go to the movies with their friends and to stay out late goofing off. Later, young adults get a taste of real freedom when they finally get their driver’s license and a car. Spending the hard-earned money from their job gives them personal satisfaction and a taste of independence.
As an independent person, you show your ability to wander the earth with (some level of) confidence. You make your own decisions and think your own thoughts without the need for social validation. As a result, your sense of self-worth comes from within, not from the outside world.
Although it may take some time after formal schooling, a truly independent person makes their own money and lives by their own means. Independence allows you to act on the world instead of being acted upon. It means having the ability to free yourself from people and circumstances beyond your reach.
If you’re still dependent on your parents or guardians, your first goal should be to become independent.
This is the definition of what it means to be free at its core! When you’re free and independent, your capacity for happiness is greatly expanded. Only by becoming independent can you begin to take steps to live as a free human being.
But it doesn’t end there. The world is full of people you interact with on a daily basis. The final stage of emotional and physical maturity, and freedom, is interdependence.
Interdependence
Interdependent people know they’re capable of sustaining all of their physical and emotional needs. But they also realize if they work cohesively with others, they can accomplish better and greater things than they ever could by themselves.
Interdependence is what makes people able to communicate and manage their day-to-day responsibilities in coordination with others to maximize their effectiveness of essential tasks.
Society in all forms is, and always will be, highly interdependent.
Interdependence, simply put, is the ability to be a part of a team and contribute to the desired goal of the team.
Independent people alone could never have built the Great Wall of China, the Egyptian pyramids, or staged political revolutions, not to mention designing and mass producing the palm-sized computers now involved in every aspect of our lives.
This isn’t a revelation; businesses by definition are interdependent. Businesses are one or more people working together to provide us the opportunity to buy food, power, communication devices, and overall live in the best conditions available.
Entrepreneurs demonstrate their interdependence when they’re able to work on what they do best, such as creating content, while delegating their weaknesses, such as marketing, to others with that strength. They understand they need balance in their lives. They’re willing to expose themselves to others in order to achieve great feats as a cohesive group working towards a common objective.
But only by being an independent person can you then choose to become interdependent. Those that’re dependent on someone else are fundamentally unable to become interdependent. They physically cannot rely upon themselves to accomplish their own needs, and therefore cannot be relied upon to successfully contribute to a team.
Only by becoming truly independent do you then have the foundation needed to become successfully interdependent. When you finally become interdependent, the sky is the limit to what you can accomplish.
Recap
To wrap everything up:
Dependency is the first stage of maturity. In this stage you need others to take care of you in order for you to survive.
Independence begins to show in early childhood, but isn’t fully achieved until you can sustain yourself in all aspects of life.
Interdependence is the final stage of maturity, and can only be reached after you become independent. When you become interdependent, you learn how to team up with others around you. Through interdependence, you can achieve greater things than you could accomplish all by yourself.
