Adii Pienaar

Money can buy many things.

Often on the road to making more money, we buy more and/or more expensive things.

And we agree that the smarter is often to save or reinvest that money into something that can make even more money.

Capitalism is beautiful in that way; it can keep on compounding forever. And it can do so exponentially if you keep adding more fuel to the flames.

The even smarter play is when one starts to use money to buy back time or meaningful experiences with those people who matter most in life.

Eventually though even the richest of the rich gets to a point where their financial means at least partly makes them lonely.

As a millionaire, it is easy to throw a party and get people to attend. It’s harder to make them your friend. But money can go a long way to plaster over those cracks.

Money loses it efficacy when I can’t use it to change the society I live in.

Looking at this with my South African tinted glasses: I can use money to insulate myself against many of the challenges in our country. But, what I ultimately desire is to live in a country that is free of crime. That is only achievable (and realistic) when we eradicate poverty and inequalities.

My money is definitely not enough for that, and no well-known, super rich individual can buy that outcome. Changing the status quo requires a collective effort that involves money, but it is not the primary thing:

The original title for yesterday's post was simply "Freedom".

I changed it, because there is a difference to freedom and being free.

In our daily, human lives, we're afforded certain freedoms depending on the specific context. Our freedoms also layer up in different ways, where we have a Constitution as foundation, but can then add agreed freedoms in our workplace or local community or at home.

Beyond that, I also believe that we have an inherit, humanistic freedom that we rarely tap into. In a world, where we're all merely a similar sack of atoms, we're already free from many of the things that we perceive impedes our freedom.

Irrespective of how you define freedom, there is a difference to having access to it and actually being free.

To actually be free, I think we need to travel in two directions:

The first part is a solo player game, where I get to decide how I relate to and experience my own values, standards, goals, dreams, ambitions, fears, desires, and needs.

When I hold these too tightly, take them too seriously or attach myself to them too much, they have the ability to trip me up and make me less free. This is self-inflicted and whenever I get there, I have the opportunity of acknowledging the role my ego plays in that.

The second part is entirely multiplayer. It's all about community, connection and those universal bits that makes all of us the same.

There is a certain safety in the commons. I don't have to stand up or stand out or be different. I struggle with those same very human things that my neighbour suffers with. And when we suffer together, maybe we dissolve this illusion that being human needs to be any different to what it is now.

As I clicked publish on yesterday's post, I also clicked through to my blog to just check that it had not broken anything on my site (considering the other changes I made recently to remove things like newsletter signups).

It looked fine, so I closed the browser tab.

I immediately felt this odd sense of being free.

Usually, when publishing a post, I'd check - and keep refreshing - all the metrics I was tracking: views, newsletter opens, etc.

I would have to draft punchy versions of the post to share on X and LinkedIn because I would've been chasing engagement in the past.

But now I have none of that, and I instinctively sensed that as I hit publish yesterday.

I didn't have to spend any mental cycles thinking about what I had just done. There was no goal. Nothing had to come from it.

All of the value of doing the thing (writing, in this case) had already accrued to me.

I've ignorantly and without any planning stumbled into some things that have had a material impact in shaping my life.

One of those things was writing. It was something I had always enjoyed, and then I stumbled onto WordPress/blogging and became a prolific writer for a few years. I would write and publish whatever I wanted.

I regret that in one of the many changes to my blog over the years, I got lazy in one of those changes, and I lost years' worth of writing. Fortunately (with some work), The Internet Archive has retained some nostalgic gems I wrote 17 years ago.

Doing some post-rationalisation with all of the benefit of hindsight, I can't tell you why I published that. Except that, I felt the urge to do so, and I'd imagine I derived some joy from doing it.

In the last 17 years, I have had fits and spurts of writing more and less. More interestingly, I've published less and less as every year passes.

Part of this is because writing - and publishing - became content marketing. I had experienced the power of having an audience, and I was patently aware that there were a lot of tips, tricks and best practices for making your writing work for you.

But writing became work for me.

It became another thing I needed to be good at to pursue my broader goal of progressing in life and business. I had utterly lost the ignorance of just being able to write and publish for the sake of it.

Almost a year ago to the day, I was contemplating something similar, and I concluded that post by saying:

"...in this season of my life, I will write what I like."

But I never did.

Instead, for a few weeks, I embarked on toying with a new workflow that would take some ideas I had, and then, with the help of voice note transcription and genius LLMs, I'd efficiently turn them into punchy blog posts that I could publish here. I had a plan, too: this content was designed to build attention and eyeballs that I could divert to my new (paid) written project (R.I.P.). A little extra, fun wine money has never hurt anyone.

I never published any of those because I didn't feel like me. Part of the fun of writing is to figure out how I best communicate this idea or thought in my head. It does not have to be optimised for another purpose if the only real goal is to get that thought out of my head.

So, I recently decided to go almost dark on this blog in favour of writing just what I like.

There's no more newsletter here. Unless someone else shares it, this blog post won't make it onto X (where I've not been active for months and have locked my account). Nobody might read this. Unless, of course, they intentionally type adii.me into their web browser to come here.*

And that feels just about right at the moment.

(*I am curious and excited about Ghost's work with ActivityPub and will likely participate in and push my content into the fediverse as soon as I can.)

I've been told that (when writing) one should lead with the hook and not bury the lede. So, I'll start by telling you that I got terrible news on Friday that ~35% of my financial portfolio vanished.

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