(warning: honest language)

If you're living for the weekend, your life sucks.

If you dread Mondays, your life sucks.

If you're waiting for retirement, you're living a lie.

Weekdays and weekends are human constructs. Recognise that your life is one long flowing piece instead of artificial segments that exist only in our heads. Stop reading now to mentally zoom out and think about your life as a whole. Feel yourself going through your teens, 20s, 30s, 40s. Did you focus on individual weeks or months? No? Then why do you live your life that way?

TGIF? TGyourlifeisf**ked.

Do you fear death?

I recently downloaded an app called WeCroak that sends me a notification, 5 times a day, that I'm going to die. The notifications come at random and have appeared at extremely salient times that have really jolted me and given me cause for meditation - it's the app equivalent of a slap across the face. Nothing resets your perspective quite like that.  I have never had a full time job and there have been many occasions where I don't know what day of the week it is - but it didn't matter, and I couldn't have been happier.

Don't forget, you're going to die.

Don't forget, you're going to die.

Don't forget, you're going to die.

Don't forget, you're going to die.

Don't forget, you're going to die.

10/10 app would recommend

 Have you contemplated, grasped and appreciated your own mortality?

The only people who fear death are those who have not lived.

The Retirement Myth

Trading time: seconds and minutes and hours of your precious, finite life for money is a bum deal, and retirement is the ultimate myth that does far more harm than good. Life is meant to be lived in balance: work, passion, social and personal needs are all equal and meant to be grown together in harmony. "Retirement" is one of the biggest cons of our age.

Take 15 minutes out of your busy, busy day to meet Slomo:

A neurologist and psychologist who's spent his life studying the mind, and realised when he started to go blind that happiness, slightly ironically, comes from not thinking. Point is, he realised he had two choices: retire and wait meekly for death, or to burst out of the rat race, find out what truly made him happy, and do it for as long as he could.

HEY.

Take another second now to stop reading, close your eyes and breathe slowly. Think about yourself. Who are you, really? You are, in underrated essence, a brilliant mind in a healthy, unbelievably adaptable, capable body, AND NOTHING MORE. All labels and identities on you are nothing but stickers that are pasted on and can be easily peeled off at your will.

You are your own person. You have 100%, FULL CONTROL over your own life. If you wanted to grab your passport now and head to the airport and book a flight to the Maldives you could. Why don't you? What's holding you back? Limiting beliefs, outdated claims and in some cases outright lies. Be self-aware and conscious of yourself and the power you hold. Analyse your beliefs and opinions that you never thought to question  Do they actually make sense?

It turns out that the path we're shown and instructed to follow, the higher education/40 year career/retirement then you can finally start living, is absolute bollocks. It's an archaic relic from the Second Industrial Revolution from when factories actually needed people to put in long hours in factories and production lines, otherwise things didn't get made.

Life Design

Most people live their lives reactively. React to their parents telling them to go to school by going to school; react to their teachers telling them to go to university by going to university; react to graduation by getting a job then wondering why they're miserable.

We're living in the absolute best time to be alive, and it only gets better from here. Technology has made it so bloody easy to monetise doing what you love for a living, especially outside of "getting a job"; from travel blogs to e-sports stars making upwards of a million a year. If you're still miserable in this day and age, it's your own fault. Find out what you love doing, find a way to make money from doing it, then get up the courage and do it. The price of cowardice, of playing it safe, is mediocrity and misery.

Be active instead of reactive: Actively seek to know thyself; to know your fiery passions and spirit city/country, then take the time to use all your intelligence and wit and cunning to design your best possible life and become your best self. Have the audacity and courage and sheer balls to say, in the eloquence of Rage Against The Machine: "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me." In your passing you shall know the peace of having had a life well lived.

A successful human being

How do you define success? For me, it's being able to do anything you like. Since doing NO RAGRETS full-time, I'm usually an 8 on the happiness scale, every day. I haven't woken up to an alarm for work for over 10 years. I hardly ever spend any time at all doing anything I don't want to. I'm not saying this to show off in the least: I'm desperately trying to tell you about the life we could have - SHOULD have - but haven't been told about, and instead been lied to our whole lives.

This is how I feel on a daily basis:

The only way to live is to do what you love and do it now. Life is about having everything in balance.

Let's live.