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No BS: Why there’s no aliens in your inbox

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No B.S Friday: I’m not surprised aliens aren’t reaching out to me.

You know me. I like to ponder the big questions.

Like will football ever be the same now that Messi has left Barcelona, and who could possibly stop Paris Saint-Germain now?

(Nobody).

The other question I've been thinking about lately is where are all the aliens?

This is the Ferme paradox. It's the idea that our Sun and our planet are relatively old in the scheme of the universe.

There have been millions and millions of suns for millions and millions of years and it's likely that at least a few of them would have created life and that some of those lifeforms would have figured out interstellar travel.

And they should've done that along long time ago. Long enough them to drop by earth and say hello.

The Ferme paradox is the idea that the universe should be full of aliens but it seems to be empty.

So I've got an idea about this.

And it's kind of just a numbers game. So of all the sun's out there, only some of them have planets of those planets only some of them are capable of sustaining life.

Of those planets, maybe only a small percentage would actually find that magic catalyst – that Starseed – that sets the whole caravan is evolutionary life in motion.

It keeps going. Of the life forms that emerge, only a small percentage would be cooperative.

I read somewhere the other day that only 3% of the species on earth could be called cooperative. It's primates, ants and bees and not much else. And even then I don't know if you say that most herd species were really cooperative.

I mean cows aren't getting together and pooling their resources to solve shared problems.

There's no chance in my mind that there’s an evolutionary line that runs through cows and somehow ends up with a species that conquers the universe.

Anyway, I think it's fair to say that that achieving the capability to transcend planetary limits probably requires cooperation – and complex cooperation at that. No lone wolf is going to do it.

But as I said, only a small percentage of species are cooperative.

But if any species that rises to the top of the food chain – that becomes the planet’s dominant species – it has probably done that in a way that has neutralised the threat coming from any other species.

Like, I'm imagining a species of super-bees. I'd imagine that once the super species of bees have taken over a planet, they just lock it in and keep doing their thing. The evolution of life sort of ends at that point.

They’d be dominant, harmonious, and happy.

So what I think you need, is a species that can become the dominant species on the planet while still having a capacity for war and competition within itself.

It's this competition that drives technological advancement. It's this competition that would create the curiosity and the hunger to explore space.

So not only do we have to find a cooperative species, we have to find a cooperative species that is capable of holding a dynamic competitive tension within itself.

Not only that, this species has to be able to play the war games of dynamic internal competition, without consuming all of the planets available resources, Or making the planet uninhabitable for itself.

This is the gate at which humanity currently stands. We have to find a way to put our internal competition on hold for long enough to give our precious little planet room to breathe.

And so I think when you look at all the ducks you have to get themselves in a row, I have to think it's not surprising that there are very few (if any) species with curiosity and the capacity for interstellar travel.

And I don't really know what to do with that, other than to reflect that life in general and humanity in particular might be even more miraculous than we think.

Wonder of wonders.

JG.

No BS: Why we self-sabotage

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No B.S Friday: There’s a good reason why we’re afraid of success.

Why do we sabotage ourselves?

It’s funny isn’t it? Why do we do it? Why do we trip ourselves up just as we’re about to cross the finish line? Why do we become an enemy of our own success?

Why would we do that? It doesn’t make sense.

But we do. We do it all the time.

I’ve got a theory. And look this is a blog not a psychology text book, so don’t mark me down for incompleteness, but I reckon it’s definitely part of the puzzle.

And the best way I can describe it is to think of a builder building a house. That builder refuses to move on to doing the plumbing, because plumbing doesn’t involve hammers and he really loves hammers.

In fact, he thinks he’s a hammer.

Ok, maybe that’s not as crystal clear as it seemed in my head, but let me break it down.

Often, we fixate on certain challenges in life – finding the right place to live, finding the right career, finding the right romantic partners, whatever.

We tell ourselves that once we ‘tick these boxes’ we’ll be happy. We convince ourselves that happiness lies on the other side of ‘achieving something’.

To achieve that something we develop a whole bunch of tools and strategies. We can call this the ego – the ego is the part of the mind devoted to identifying and solving problems, and taking charge of the tools and strategies at our disposal.

And so the ego is out there doing it’s thing, and then one day, we come very close to ‘ticking one of our boxes’.

We find a job that seems too good to be true. We find a partner who puts a big tick in our box. We find the perfect house.

At this moment, it seems to me, the ego gets very alarmed.

Because once you land that perfect whatever, one of two things will happen.

Either that thing will be the perfect thing to make you perfectly happy, and you will be sorted – you just don’t need the ego any more. You’ve got no more work for it to do.

Or, you will land that perfect thing, and then realise that it doesn’t actually make you as happy as you thought it was going to. Endless happiness remains elusive. Life goes on. New reasons to be sad and dissatisfied quickly emerge.

And at that point, you realise that your ego has wasted your life chasing after a mirage. You realise that your ego has no power to make you happy – that happiness comes from within, from having a right and loving relationship with yourself.

Either way, at this moment, the ego knows that it’s facing an existential threat. There’s a very good chance that once you achieve this ‘thing’, you will realise that your ego is actually just getting in the way.

So what can it do?

I mean, it can’t let you achieve the thing, right. That potentially means death.

The only option?

Sabotage.

The only option here is to sabotage your success, so you keep on believing that the key to happiness is achieving the thing, and that the ego is the right man for the job for navigating you towards the thing.

Maybe it’s like the army general who is afraid of peace. They devote their whole lives to winning peace, while knowing that if peace actually came, they’d be out of a job.

I think it’s like this.

So watch this – watch for those times where you seem to be on the brink of everything you thought you ever wanted, and all you want to do is run.

That’s not you. That’s your ego clinging on for dear life.

Don’t lose sight of the job, just to hang on to your tools.

Just breathe through it, and allow it to unfold.

JG.

No BS: Why forwards feels like backwards

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No B.S Friday: If it feels like you’re going backwards, you might be making progress

“Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.”

This is something that I only got recently.

I always heard this and thought “yeah, yeah, that’s probably true… for other people. I’m just going to cruise from one level of awesome to the next.”

But the other day I got it.

And I got it because I went the physio.

I went to the physio to get my shoulder looked at. As you know, I hit the gym pretty regularly. I like the energy it gives me, and I like to keep myself looking like a Greek god (the god of eating and drinking.)

But my shoulder was starting to tweak out a bit, and I think all the time I was spending at the computer probably wasn’t helping.

Anyway, I won’t go into the details of the bio-mechanics (because there’s no way I remember), but my physio spent some time on my shoulder and loosened a bunch of stuff up.

And what I noticed was that my shoulder was feeling better. So that was great. But then my neck was feeling really sore. And under my arm pit. And across my chest.

I’d seemed to have replaced a single chronic pain with a whole bunch of minor ones.

So I went back to the physio and was like, “hey, what’s going on here?”

And they said, “Sometimes it has to get worse before it gets better.”

And I’m like, “Oh don’t give me that. What do you mean?”

It turns out that what was happening is that I was using my shoulder in a particular way to protect other parts of my body.

So because my neck was tight, my shoulder was moving in a way that didn’t make my neck worse. And because my chest was tight, my shoulder was moving in a way that protected that.

Eventually, that funny way of moving started to create pain in my shoulder.

But what that meant was that when we got the shoulder moving freely again, it was no longer protecting my neck and my chest.

And without the protection of my shoulder, I now became very conscious of the pain in my neck and chest.

It felt like a new pain, but it was actually just an older, legacy pain being unsurfaced.

And so now I have more work to do.

And at this point I got it. This is why sometimes it feels like you’re going backwards when you’re going forward.

We build many different rigidities into our life to ‘protect’ pain points.

So maybe feeling poor is painful, so we cover that up with a resentment of rich people and an unfair capitalist system.

Maybe we felt shame about our creative urges, and so we cover that up with a hyper-macho commitment to being ‘business-like’.

Maybe we were rejected in love, and so we cover that up with an over-the-top righteous commitment to dead-end marriages, with an expectation that marriage should be dull and boring.

Whatever it is, at some point those protective measures don’t serve our broader life goals. They are protecting particular pain points, but they are holding us back from living a rich and happy life.

And so we need to ‘unwind’ them.

But when we unwind them, the old pains resurface, and now we’ve got to deal with them.

And so there comes a stage where all we’ve got to show for our work is a new set of pain – a new cluster of blockages – and a cluster of blockages that feels deeper and harder to shift than the original set, because they are.

And this is why sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.

So stick with it.

Keep going, and eventually everything will be moving in harmony again. That point exists.

Just got to push through it.

JG.

No B.S. FRIDAY: The One Key to UNLEASH YOUR POWER

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Now THIS is the key to real power in the world.

You are a powerful being.

But all that power is useless if you don’t know how to use it.

Most people seem to think the success journey is about becoming more powerful. It’s about learning new skills, become more efficient, more effective. Learning how to bend the world to your will.

And it is. But that’s not all it is.

Think about it this way. Imagine you have an old Datsun car. Now you strap a booster jet from a military cargo plane to it.

That car just got a tonne more powerful.

But will that power do it any good? Power is just dangerous if you don’t know how to handle it.

Or imagine you want to go to an awesome Vietnamese restaurant across town. You’re trying to figure out how to get there and you’re friend says, lets put some extractors and a supercharger on this thing. Make it fully sik.

Again, that will give you more power, but power wasn’t your problem.

If you don’t know where you’re going, more power just means you get lost more quickly.

This is true in all things.

It’s not enough to focus on your skills, your techniques, your strength. It’s not enough to focus on the things that give you power.

We also have to be constantly cultivating wisdom. We have to be cultivating the awareness and maturity that will help us navigate through life. We have to know where we are going.

And the only way to do this is to live. To live broadly and courageously. Seek out new experiences, meet new people, take on new challenges.

Be playful, brave and be constantly curious.

This is the discipline of power. Wisdom is nothing but experience made conscious.

And it is wisdom – wisdom is the key to realising the promise of the power you already possess.

No BS Friday: I Give Up (Seriously)

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Give up trying to ‘make it’.

You are never going to make it.

But this is the secret that no one tells you.

There is no “make it”.

There is no point where you’re done, where you’re putting your feet up with a whiskey in your hand and thinking, yep, I’m a success.

Because if you’re defining success on your achievements – on your business successes, on your fancy cars, on you funds under management – you’re chaining yourself to the wheel.

There is nothing you can do that will ever be good enough. Think about Alexander the Great.

He’d conquered half of Asia Minor and it still wasn’t good enough.

Even the most mighty king is never free.

But freedom can be yours.

Don’t look to what you do in the world, but look to what you do in yourself.

Do you give everything every thing that you’ve got?

Do you rise to meet your fears and hit things with relentless courage?

Do you strive to see yourself clearly and honestly in the mirror, striving to be the best version of yourself that you can be?

This is the only definition of success that matters.

And so this is the secret I will share with you. When you set your soul on this course, then you can “make it.” You can be a success.

You can sit back, take a long look at yourself in the mirror and think,

“Yes, I am the person I want to be.”

Then you will have made it.

And peace and freedom will be yours.

Take the pressure off now… give up!

Surrender to the person that you truely want to be…

The real YOU!

No B.S. FRIDAY: Don’t leave a beautiful corpse…

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Are you tip-toeing at the moment ?

If so, I have some advice for you.

You are not here to leave beautiful corpses.

I broke my arm once when I was a boy.

My uncle said that the only people who’ve never broken a bone, are cowards (He was tough old Greek).

If you’re too scared to climb trees, jump off sheds, pull tricks with your bike or get into a bit of biffo, you might be lucky. You might get through childhood without breaking anything.

But do you want to spend the best years of your life wrapped up in cotton wool?

I don’t know if I’d recommend everyone taking life advice from that particular uncle, but on this occasion, his words stuck with me.

Life is risky. That’s kind of what makes it exciting.

And you can maybe get away without taking any knocks – maybe you can leave a lovely corpse in your coffin that doesn’t have any scars – but the only way to do that is to live a small life.

It’s to live your life wrapped up in cotton wool, not taking any gambles, any chances. Not risking anything.

But that is smaller than your life would naturally be, and it’s smaller than the life you should be living.

We’re not here to create beautiful corpses.

We’re here to live bold and beautiful lives – to create epic stories and take ourselves on wonderful adventures. Start businesses, fall in love, grow empires, eat risky foods from street-side vendors in Asia.

And we’re here to break bones, break hearts, go bankrupt three times and then leave an ugly corpse with the life completely squeezed out of it.

Agreed ?

This is what you are here to do.

So go out and break something.

You’ll thank me for it.

Go for it.

NO BS Friday: Fear your way to freedom

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The great American President, Franklin D Roosevelt said “The only thing to fear is fear itself.”

The great American President, Franklin D Roosevelt said “The only thing to fear is fear itself.”

Obviously he’d never been to Australia otherwise he wouldn't have said that…

“The only thing to fear is fear itself and bloody great red-back spiders hiding under the toilet seat”… but the point still holds.

Fear guides us way more than it should.

It holds us in patterns, in dull and comfortable careers, in uninspiring relationships, in bland and boring pursuits, way more than it should.

At least the fear of a redback spider will get you off your arse and running for the nearest tree.

This other, nameless fear – a fear that has no specific name or target – just locks us up. It stops us from moving.

And so we stay stuck in boring lives, long after we’ve outgrown them.

The antivenom is confidence.

You need to learn how to back yourself.

I’m lucky. I’ve always been too stupid to doubt myself.

And so whenever I was challenged to try something new – to turn my back on the comfortable life I’d made for myself – take a gamble on a totally new career direction, I did it.

In my mind, even if things went wrong, even if it was a disaster, I would manage. I’d fall back on my wit or charm and somehow, I’d get by. I’d be alright.

And it was this confidence that allowed me to conquer that nameless fear, and keep myself moving.

But I don’t know anything you don’t.

I’m sure you have the same resources that I do.

I’m sure you have the same charisma, wit, cunning good-looks – whatever it is you need to get you through.

Maybe you’ve just never been tested..

But back yourself. You are capable of more than you can dream of.

And the only thing holding you back

Is fear.

Use it to move you forward…rather than hold you back.

Fear is good, if you know how to manipulate it.

Fear you way to success and wealth is what I want for you.

– JG

No B.S. Friday: Three things you need to be grateful for right now

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Some little birds let me know that I was being ungrateful. This is what they taught me.

Would you like to be a bird?

It’d be alright, wouldn’t it? Being a bird, doing bird things. Hanging out with your birdy mates.

That’s what I was thinking the other day. I was sitting in my courtyard watching some little birds flit about in the garden.

“Look at them. They don’t have a care in the world,” I thought. “So jealous.”

And that point I had to acknowledge I was in a particular frame of mind. I’d been mulling over a couple of headaches and chores I needed to get sorted. Nothing too hectic, but nothing too fun either.

And in that space, the idea of being a little brown bird pissing about in my hedge was pretty appealing.

But the more I sat and the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I would totally not want to be a little brown bird, and that even for all the hardships associated with being human, being human is pretty awesome.

I really should be more grateful.

And if there’s one thing you’ve learnt from these blogs… (Actually if there’s only one thing you’ve learned, what are you doing? Stop reading. Go outside and hit the hedge bro.) But if there’s one thing you’ve learnt I hope that it’s that gratitude is not something that comes. It’s something we create.

Gratitude is like good health. It organically occurs when we put everything in place (like exercise and right diet etc.), but if we don’t put these things in place then it won’t happen.

That’s how gratitude works. If we’re not training ourselves to be awake to the awesome, and if we’re not training ourselves to celebrate the awesome when it comes, then we won’t be grateful.

Gratitude is a conscious practice.

So in that spirit, for my own practice, I decided to sit down and write out three reasons why being human is awesome and being a bird sucks.

Reason One: Leisure is sweet

Now it might look like being a bird is a pretty cruisy affair. It’s hard to see that they’re under much pressure to achieve much with their days.

Me, there’s an unusual noise coming from my rear tires, so I need to go and get that checked out. And then my wife’s birthday is coming up so I’ve got to think of a gift that is perfectly thoughtful without being overly contrived. And I’ve got this sense that our procurement systems at work could be better optimised, so I need to look into that at some point…

Uggh. So many headaches. Who wouldn’t be a bird?

But I think if you actually look at it, birds are pretty busy. There’s not a lot of idle time in a bird’s life.

And the same was true of humanity until pretty recently. The amount of free time and leisure we currently enjoy actually took a lot of engineering. It’s the result of a lot of factors working together to provide us with surround sound cinema’s and alfresco dining and entertainment quarters.

We lounge about and drink coffee on the shoulders of giants.

So humans are different. For the great majority of organisms on earth, they are slaves to their biological needs. If they have energy to spend then they spend it on eating, mating or nurturing the conditions that are conducive to eating and mating.

Like the birds and their singing. That might sound like a leisure activity, because we’ve made it into one, but for birds it actually serves particular purposes.

I actually transliterated some of the bird song in my garden and punched into Google Translate. This is what they were singing:

Oi you other birds.
Fek off,fek off, this is my shrub. These are my berries.
Fek offfek off, if you come around here I’ll go ya in the face.
Fek off.

Oi you lady-birds,
Come here, come here.
I’ve made a sweet-arse nest,
and my genes are conducive to successful reproduction.
Come here, come here. You know you want some.
You know you wantsooooome .

Bird poetics is actually quite under-developed.

But me, my poetic sensibilities are quite well developed actually, even though it’s not something I given much time to. And I’ve got so much surplus energy that I’ve actually got to come up with contrived ways to burn energy – like beating up a bag full of sand – otherwise I’d get fat and die.

The human capacity for leisure – and to be fair we are probably still talking about the west here. I guess I am talking about luxuries that many people in the developing world still aren’t able to enjoy – but that said, the human capacity for leisure is unprecedented in that natural kingdom.

There are activities you can engage in – activities that have absolutely no point other than the pleasure they provide. In the context of the million-year history of life on earth, this is unique.

And it’s something to be very grateful for.

Reason Two: Wonder is fun

I didn’t set out with the intention to just trash-talk little birds here, but how much is really going on in those little heads of theirs?

Are they pondering the mysteries of the cosmos? Are they getting tangled in the nuances of moral philosophy? Have any of them renounced a life of seeds and berries in pursuit of truth and meaning and liberating all of birdkind from the wheel of karma?

No, I don’t think so.

And that’s no moral failing on their part. I just don’t think they have the cognitive hardware to start approaching these kinds of questions.

But before we get all high and mighty and opposable- thumbsy , I think it’s important to remember that there’s some pretty hard limits on our cognitive hardware as well.

Just as maths is beyond the ken of birds, there have got to be things beyond the ken of human understanding. Most things probably.

And so we’ve been wanking on about philosophy and the good life for centuries, but where has it got us? Nowhere really. We don’t even have a coherent picture of the things we can see, let alone the great mysteries that are beyond the limits of our perception.

But… it’s been fun.

There’s a unique delight in being deliciously baffled. In feeling your mind get in the ring and dance around with things that it will never understand.

(What’s ‘outside’ the universe?)

It’s fun. It’s a leisure activity. And the name of that leisure activity is ‘wonder’.

Wonder is what happens when you get a sense of a mystery that you will never perceive.

It’s a beautiful thing.

And I think it might be a uniquely human experience.

Reason Three: Authorship is sexy

Imagine you were born as a bird. What life paths are available to you?

Within the limits of your biology, it doesn’t look like you have a lot of room to move.

You might choose to be an aggressive bird. Or you might choose to be a cooperative bird. You might decide that you’re going to stop chasing insects and focus on seeds.

But really, you’re probably not ‘choosing’ anything at all. You’re probably just following the behavioural coding in your DNA.

Now imagine a child born today. What life paths are available to them?

Well, at this point in history, there is a dizzying array of life paths on offer. They could do anything.

They could be a lawyer. Or they could be a marine biologist. Or they could be a ballerina. Or they could be a civil rights activist.

And they could live in Australia, or Austria or Antarctica. They could live in the city or the bush or on renovated bus touring through Siberia.

Heck, these days, we’re not even bound by our physiology. If I decided I wanted to spend a decade as a woman to see what it was like, that’s is medically available to me now.

There is an immense amount of choice on offer to people these days.

And that sets up a new game – a game where you get to follow your own truth, and become the author of your own life.

A game where you get to experiment. Where you get to taste life’s fruits and decide for yourself which ones you really like.

And it’s a game where you get to learn about yourself. You get to learn what you like and what you don’t like, and what life-calling really excites your spirit.

And it’s a game where you get to set the course. You get to choose your path and follow your own journey. You get to decide what it is you want and how you are going to achieve it.

What a fabulous game that is.

Of course some people are more free than others. But if you’re in Australia, with enough resources to read this on your phone, them I’m talking to you.

Being human is the opportunity to be the author of something completely wonderful.

How good is that?

Oh! I forgot one!

There’s three reasons that I’m very grateful to be human. Today, I am extremely grateful to be Jon Giaan, a human, alive at the most amazing and expansive time in history.

I give thanks.

And I don’t want to rub it in the bird’s faces or anything, but how good is it to also be at the top of the food chain? Can you imagine navigating the commute to work, always worried that something might be about to eat you?

How stressful would that be?

So yeah, nah , I don’t want to be a bird.

I’ll stick to being human thanks.

… until I master it.


– Jon Giaan

NO B.S. Friday: Power Challenge #2: Know Your Pain

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Your opportunity to win an iPad and make a full-power start to the year. Challenge #2 – Knowing Your Pain 

Wow, 326 responses to Challenge #1 and counting… If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check your email inbox or click this link. 

Let’s move on to Challenge #2 (Participate – Movement creates momentum). 

There’s a story where I come from of a master craftsman who kept his old apprentice’s apron in the attic.  

Every night he would go up to the attic and connect with the apron, as a way of remembering how far he’d come, and the road that he was still on.  

In a way, I think we are all escaping from something 

I mean, you don’t set out to overhaul your life if everything is perfect, right? You’re not here for the entertaining way I confuse ancient wisdom and footy coaching clichés. You are here because you want something more.  

But our mistake is to hide our pain from others and from ourselves.  

We pretend like everything is more or less sorted. We’re here just for a bit of spit and polish. Just to put the finishing touches on a life that is pretty much complete.  

And we can’t admit that our life is on fire – that it’s coming apart at the seams and taking on water.  

Maybe it’s pride. Maybe we think it’s polite to keep our suffering to ourselves.  

But whatever the case, there is an opportunity missed here.  

The human, in its pain response, is incredibly energised. Of course it is. You might struggle to get up off the couch, but if the house was on fire, you’d break land-speed records getting out the door.  

So if we muffle our pain, we muffle our pain response – and that deadens us, makes us less energised.  

So this is your simple challenge for today: Connect with your pain. Connect with your discomfort.  

Give yourself two minutes (that’s all it’ going to take), and just free-form it. Don’t think about your answer. Just write.  

Leave a short comment below:  

  • What in your life right now just isn’t working.  
  • What just doesn’t fit?  
  • What pisses you off?  
  • What would you leave behind in 2019 if you could? 

Go! 

Ok, be aware that you are sharing this with random people on the internets, so maybe don’t go into the specifics. Don’t name names.  

But spend time with the part of you that is uncomfortable. The part that wants to move – that wants to move forward.  

Despite what the happy-clappy success gurus say, it is a pain that should be central to our daily drive.  

So this is your challenge for today. Comment below.

And if you missed your challenge #1, here it is again. 326 people took the time to share, so the buzz is real. Check out what they’re responses were, plus add yours! 

Remember, everyone who completes the Power Challenge goes into the prize draw to win at the end of the month. 

Power on. 

JG 

P.S. – As a bonus, share this with someone who you think resonates with the pain you are pointing to. Say, “Hey, this wanker Jon asked me to do this. But I thought you might resonate with this. Is this how you would say it?” Copy and paste. 

P.P.S. Still reading? Good. Now time to take two minutes and do the work. Here are the questions again. Don’t think, just write. There are no right or wrong answers. 

  • What in your life right now just isn’t working.  
  • What just doesn’t fit?  
  • What pisses you off?  
  • What would you leave behind in 2019 if you could? 

Post your answers here.

NO B.S.FRIDAY: Such is Life…

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Why do we love bushrangers so much? Are we all just bushrangers too busy with our day jobs?

November 11th was Remembrance Day, but I also noticed it’s the 138th anniversary of Ned Kelly’s death. They hanged our most famous bushranger on November 11, 1880.

I feel like we must be due for another round of bushranger romanticism. Seems to come around every 30 years or so. I mean, it’s been 15 years since the last Ned Kelly movie.

(Update: they’re in the process of making one right now. There you go.)

But why do we love bushrangers so much?

Kelly has more brand recognition than any Australian has ever had, including Don Bradman, well over a century after his death.

And Kelly’s life was hard. He was born into a poor family, took a lot of knocks along the way, before finally going to the gallows at the tender age of 25. Not a lot to envy there.

But we collectively get starry-eyed, and imagine ourselves in an iron suit, both guns blazing.

(Or is that just me?)

Bushrangers were a product of that time, and our romanticism has as much to do with that period in Australian history as it does with them.

I mean, if Ned Kelly were alive today, he’d probably end up on Today Tonight, with a camera man chasing him through the streets of Melbourne. Clank, clank, clank. “Mr Kelly. We just want to ask you a few questions.”

No one is getting misty eyed about car thieves in tracky-daks and sneakers these days.

But still there is something in the archetype of the bushranger that calls to our spirit.

To me, I think the key selling point of brand bush-ranger is ‘rebelliousness’. That’s what elevates them from the muck of humanity’s dregs, into the rarefied air of cultural hero.

But what does that say about us?

Why do we love and celebrate the rebellious? The rule breakers? The trouble makers?

Do we secretly long to cast ourselves in that light – break the rules, trash the law, kick down the doors and leave our name in bullets in the wall?

Are we all just bushrangers, too busy with our day jobs to cause anybody any trouble?

Yes. Yes we are.

The world is repressive. It crushes our freedom, our unique spirits, our playful, child-like natures. It’s just how it is. As we get older, we find the adult world with all its rules and regulations has us all bound up in a straight-jacket.

The question becomes how do we respond?

Do we suffer in silence, taking a photo-copy of our bottoms when the boss isn’t looking in an impotent act of defiance?

(Brian, I know it’s you. Just stop it, ok. It’s unhygienic.)

Or do we go totally off the hook, become a renegade, dying in a rain of bullets and glory?

That’s sexier, but still pretty sad in the end.

Or do we find another way? A third way? Do we find a way to push back the prison walls of the world, and find a way to live on our own terms, with our own money, with our own drive and our own autonomy?

Do we find a way to keep expanding the sphere of our own freedom?

This has been one of the central missions in my life in recent years. Finding that freedom.

Sure, that’s partly about money. Money can buy you many freedoms in life – the freedom to travel, the freedom to follow your own interest, freedom from the stresses of a hand-to-mouth existence.

But it’s also about making it part of my life goals – finding a career that let’s me set my own hours and schedule. Living somewhere that gives me easy access to the things I love doing. Putting energy into my relationships so they are supporting me, rather than holding me back.

But ultimately, it starts with recognising that we are all living in Ned Kelly realities – realities where the system is not set up to maximise our freedom and fulfilment.

This is the first step.

The fight then and must come second.

Such is life.

JG