Personal Freedom through Lifestyle Design

I think there are a lot of wonderful, brilliant people who have just fallen onto, and accepted, the path that’s been put out in front of them.

What I’d like to do with New Hampshire Man is help people discover that they DO have control over their destiny, and they CAN spend their life however they want. You DON’T just have to do what you’ve been told.

This realization hit me pretty hard in 2015 and 2016.

I was already coming around to the idea, and looking back, maybe I was well on my way.

My career in the Navy, circa 2011, would have put me at sea for many more years leading up to a retirement, if I stayed in.  When I got married we knew we wanted to have kids, and I knew I wanted to be there for them. For no other reason, I left the active duty Navy.

But I didn’t want to miss out on that pension! So I as I left the active component I joined the reserve component.

Even as I write this I can see my own decision making and how it aligns with my new vision of Personal Freedom. Making a huge career move to be available to dedicate myself to a family that I didn’t even have at the time, yet also making a huge decision (bigger than I imagined at that time) in fear of missing out on that pension.

Fortunately, my stars aligned, and I found a great position to study a graduate degree at UNH. Still on the traditional track, for my views of pursuing degrees has changed over the years, but that was truly a blessing and it brought me back to New Hampshire, a state that I love for many reasons.

There are two paths that my life took simultaneously over the next few years. On the one side, I graduated with a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering, had a baby, bought a house, and got hired as a Research Project Engineer at UNH in the same department where I studied for my degree.

A glorious path.

The other path was my continued career in the Navy Reserves. Drilling one weekend a month at a site 3 hours away, and travelling to Asia for 2 weeks in the summer. To the lay person that trip to Asia sounds pretty cool. I dreaded it. Total travel time was almost 24 hours and the work was abysmal.

But dreams of that pension kept myself, and my wife, fully engaged.

A couple more years down the line my wife and I agreed it was time to bring a little sibling into the world for our daughter.

This is where the story gets pretty real.

I’m one of those guys that doesn’t buy into any organized religion, but I KNOW there is something more to this world than what we are capable of comprehending.

For an irrelevant Navy obligation, I was stuck in Fort Worth TX for a few days because of a major snow storm in the Northeast. I was there with two other dudes and we actually had a pretty good time tearing through TX waiting for Boston to open up. It took a couple days.

Well, when I got back I needed to take another day off of work because I had to clear all that snow from my own driveway, and do an assortment of other chores to take care of my family.

I’ll never forget this day.

I was bringing wood up to the porch and my phone rang with the 401 area code.

Newport RI.

The NOSC.

My drill site.

Fairly certain it was with regard to the storm, and my unplanned orders for an extended stay in TX, I answered.

YN1 something or other was on the other line.

“Sir, I’m just calling to let you know that you’ve been selected for a mobilization.”

What? Who are you?

That was about all the information he had, but his answers assured me that he wasn’t some trickster scamming me.

What unfolded really opened my eyes to how I was living my life.

Until this point it hadn’t really occurred to me how little control I had. But now, some dude can call me up out of the blue and tell me I’m going away for a year.

As my Gunny said at OCS – “This is what you asked for.”

And that’s true. I’m not pointing fingers at anyone other than myself. Somehow, I asked for this. I signed up and asked someone else to take full control over my life.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, as the information became more available it turned out that the deploy date aligned within a week of our due date.

So I asked the boss; Hey boss, can we push the deploy date back a couple weeks so I can be here for the birth of my child?

Turns out that’s a pretty tall request. The same people who I had trusted to make my life decisions took very little interest in my family situation, which, if you asked me at the time, was my highest priority.

Again, under the influence of forces greater than I can understand, that child never came to be. I think the words of those in my chain of command were sincere in apologizing for our loss. But in my soul I saw them relieved because it solved their problem of this tenacious Junior Officer, me, trying to work the system to get a mobilization deferment.

As if that weren’t bad enough, fast forward a few months, and by the time I get to my mobilization site, Djibouti, I slowly discovered that the mission is a total joke. If my position had gone unfilled for a few weeks it would not have made a damn difference. But the system is so established that any deviation from the norm threatens the continuity of the system.

Suffice to say, then, that if I wasn’t bitter enough going into my deployment, being there made me sick. Both literally and figuratively. The concept made me sick figuratively, and that manifested itself into literal depression. I was real sad. A sadness I’ve never known, and hope to never find again. It just kept coming back to me; This is what you asked for.

I owe a real hat tip to a couple guys who took the time to notice my situation, ask the right questions, and genuinely listen to the answers. I walked a lap around Camp before dawn once a week with my boy CM (I didn’t ask to use their names so I’m not going to) and found a mutual interest in Ultimate Frisbee with PVK. Around the 6-month mark of my deployment I was walking daily, meditating daily, and committed to myself to never let this happen again, and to somehow turn this low point in my life into the impetus for unprecedented achievement.

I dedicated all my free time to studying Permaculture and brainstorming how to implement what I learn into my own 2 acre landscape at home. I kept a satellite view printout of my property in my work notebook so that when I was stuck in any of those classic meetings-about-having-a-meeting I could pretend to be taking notes while I was actually drawing ideas on my property.

By the end I had a 25 page ebook and a legit name: The Applied Permaculture Project.

As I write this, much of that project has come to fruition. I have a small knife sharpening business called The American Edge to raise money for the project. The chicken run is a model for chicken husbandry where my chickens do a tremendous amount of tilling and compost generation for me. In 2017 I planted seven fruit trees, and the chickens are preparing an annual bed for a three-sisters plot.

A little over a year after my return, my son was born (at home) and I completed my transition with the Navy to a volunteer training officer. I drill locally for free to retain the prospect of a pension, but have few obligations.

That’s all groovy, but as it has come together I’ve realized that I need to share what I’ve learned. Sometimes I feel like the only one who is not on cruise control. Do people even know that they are asking other people, and organizations, to manage their life? Do they know they have a choice?

That choice is Lifestyle Design. It involves genuine awareness of where your life is and then purposeful design to get your life where you want it to be. I think it’s captured pretty well under these main categories: Money, Health, Resilience, Relationships.

The issue I take with a lot of the great content and direction from others willing to post online is that they generally pick one of those and infrequently, if ever, offer guidance on the bigger picture. But the bigger picture is what is actually important – everything is connected. That’s my message.

Your money, your health, your relationships with those around you, your ability to take care of yourself – all of that is connected. You can’t drill down on one of them while neglecting the impact on the rest, at least not if you’re trying reach a state of genuine happiness, which is what I think we are all actually working toward.

And since happiness is something that requires continued attention even after attainment, I’m in a niche that can last forever.

My goal with New Hampshire Man is to first, help people understand that they CAN have control of their life, and second, provide instruction on how to design their life for true freedom.

True freedom is having the ability to spend your time however you genuinely and deliberately choose. That often manifests itself into things like; sleeping until and whenever you want, wearing whatever clothes make you most comfortable, associating with people you choose and who bring you joy, being wherever you want geographically, and ultimately, just doing whatever the hell you want.

I’m not suggesting that I have reached what I call true freedom. But at least I know that I’m working on it, and that it’s an option, and that’s what I want to share.

Life is short. It’s so sad to me that we are deliberately taught to not enjoy it.

That’s what I’m after. Most people aren’t ready for it. Some have already made it, some are just coming around to it. I hope to someday be a beacon of liberty, just as New Hampshire is in this fine union of states.

If this resonates with you, I invite you to document your 1 / 5 / 10 year goals, and Life Goal on this free worksheet I built, and set a calendar reminder to review it at least every year.

DOWNLOAD FREE GOAL SETTING WORKSHEET

If you already know your goals, please scrutinize my Lifestyle Design Guide and consider implementing it into your life to get you where you’re trying to go.

Just curious? Sign up for my newsletter to learn more about Personal Freedom and Lifestyle Design.

Together we can grow our tribe. Thanks for reading, see you out there,

-Matt

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