I was looking at my bank statement last month and I realized I pay rent to someone I have never met for a place I will never own and I pay for internet to a company that can turn it off whenever they want and I pay for cloud storage to a company that can delete my files and I pay for electricity to a grid I do not control and I pay for water to a municipal corporation that does not clean the drains and I pay for streaming services that remove shows I was halfway through and I pay for all of this every single month and if I stop paying for any of it my life gets noticeably worse. That is the trap of recurrent expense which is the mechanism by which the world keeps you dependent because nobody needs to own you when they can make sure you never have enough saved to stop working and never have enough time to build something of your own and never have enough breathing room to say no to any of it because recurrent expense is what makes individual sovereignty impossible when you need to earn money every month just to keep existing in the same place you already are.

The thing about real independence is that it is a technology problem and not a political one because politics just rearranges who benefits from the recurring outflow and technology is what actually reduces the cost of living to zero. The goal is to make it so that the things you need to survive have no recurrent expense attached to them so that your water comes from a system you maintain and your power comes from panels you installed and your food comes from a setup that regenerates itself and your computing runs on hardware you own and your shelter costs nothing to keep and once you hit that point you have sovereignty because nobody can take anything away from you by turning off a subscription. Most people will read this and think it sounds like a prepper fantasy or a return to the stone age and they miss the point because the stone age did not have solar panels and 3D printers and open source software and the goal is not to go backward but to go forward to a place where the technology does the work of keeping you alive instead of the work of keeping you paying.

I do not know if I will ever get there because the recurrent expenses pile up faster than I can eliminate them and every solution I find seems to require capital I do not have yet and the system is designed to keep it that way. But knowing that individual sovereignty is a technology problem rather than a political one changes how I think about what to build next because I stop looking for someone to fix the system and start looking for ways to make the system irrelevant one expense at a time.

Tell me what you would cut first if you could. I am @troysk704.