FYL

Free Your Life

Freedom :
The promise of liberation that’s pulling us towards the next vision of the future worth living into. Yet, when you talk to anyone, anywhere, struggling to make ends meet, you can clearly see that the popular story of freedom has never come true for most of us.

What about those of you that made it?

Does having all the money and influence in the world make you feel free? Or is it just as meaningless in a world where your children’s chances of breathing clean air or eating fresh food look questionable, your screen addictions leave your soul on empty, and your portfolio of profits can go poof in the next crypto bubble? How free could you possibly feel if you have to keep live-streaming your lunch to feel like anyone out there gives a damn? What’s the end game of this approval seeking and numbers chasing madness? Escaping to space? When can that happen if the glaciers are melting now?

Hmm. Maybe it’s time to consider that we’ve hit a wall!

Our old story of freedom had reached its limits some time ago, and now we’re all searching for another. Maybe this next one considers more than one point of view as a new way forward.

So here’s one humble attempt at writing a single line into that next story of freedom.

Last year, after a decade or more of looking for ways to make sense of the world that looks like it’s on a fast track to our mass extinction, a new idea finally got me feeling hopeful about the future.

From my early childhood experiences with economic outcasts in rural India, to an immigrant kid growing up in ethnically diverse urban neighborhoods in the U.S., to working around the world as a designer, strategist, activist and entrepreneur, I’ve experienced life from both sides of the economic and political divide. Through both poverty and prosperity, my life and work has always been about asking what’s really going on here, and are we really seeing past our beliefs and biases to see it?

What follows that quest is the story of FYL — Free Your Life — our co-creative contribution to writing the next chapter in a new, inclusive story of human freedom. We’re just getting started now, though very soon, we’re inviting everyone to engage with our practical solutions and tools. Decentralized applications, dynamic decision making processes and more, now sprouting from our extended global family of co-creators ready to make a lasting impact on our economic evolution.

Please check out the FYL website and the community links within it at the end of this article, and let us know how we can serve a better story of a free future together. Many thanks in advance for your attention.

FYL — Free Your Life is a first of a kind, scalable 360˚ Shared Prosperity co-design service to transform your member communities into our regenerative wealth, post monetary evolution of culture, capital and commerce.

Converting your subscribing members into tokenized equity stakeholders, to access the pool of resources co-created by your community, as well as enable them to benefit from other resource pools in FYL’s growing ecosystem. Using our unique smart membership access card and decentralized digital crypto wallet experience, we empower every member of your community to reap recurring rewards with new forms of wealth and well being.

Post monetary? How can anyone be rich without money?

Money is just an agreement to trade value right now and into the future.

Our “now” trades are made up of all kinds of currencies, or visible flows of resources that we can currently see. Some are social, some cultural, some fuzzy and conceptual and some just in cold hard cash. For example, education and experience is a kind of currency we exchange when we trust our health with a doctor. Saving cash means nothing when it comes to saving our life!

The other type of money is about believing that we can keep doing those trades in the future, so we bet the future on collecting more of those units. Right now, most of our money has become about gambling on those possible futures, because we made our world too complicated for most people to know or understand what’s really going on. We made the speculative part of the economy so complex with stocks, bonds, futures, derivatives and now cryptocurrencies, that it overshadows our daily trading of real goods and services by over 90%. Yup, our everyday trades only make up about 5% of the economy as we know it.

Yet we still keep chasing one confidence story of numbers to the next one seeking a secure future. Meanwhile, our networked capacities are already showing us that we know that future right now. Isn’t that what token sales, crowdsourced campaigns, and predictive analytics really are? When we can see supply and demand signals well before we produce anything, when we are made accountable to each other with real time read receipts, do we still need a ticket-based system of money to predict outcomes? Is a speculative coin really necessary within this instant messaging reality? Why would you need a picture of food when you’re already at the buffet?

Claim check tickets with everyone’s consensus are no longer as necessary to be the money system as we knew it. In fact, we are already living that reality technically, yet we don’t all have the common frames of reference to see it.

Think of your ride sharing app like Uber or Lyft. The payment part is the least of its value proposition for exchanging real time supply and demand data like location and ride availability. Wouldn’t that service then pay for itself, if we all owned a stake for contributing our data capital within that service ecosystem?

A future where the inefficient old instruments of money are no longer needed is not only possible, it’s inevitable.

360˚ Shared prosperity? Isn’t this socialism or communism?

Our societies produce surplus. We always do more with less over time.

The device you are reading this on was just a pile of glass and dirt less than a hundred years ago. Seeing it differently changes everything. Communism, capitalism, socialism, or any other “ism” are just a set of ideas to decide who gets what and why.

Today, we have the digital, geospatial, deep learning and distributed computing eyes and ears to see and understand a very different world.

A world where we can finally see how everything connects to everything else, needs a very different operating system to decide who gets what and why. The Internet of Everything, including the interdependencies of the air, water, soil, crops, and the biodiversity of life that interconnects to it all, is now quite knowable in real time. We can no longer operate by accounting for just one slice of it, without accounting for the whole system of relationships that we already know exists. It’s time for an upgrade!

Closed loop, circular shared prosperity systems are much better ways for us to be free of old constraints. Think of how we experience Netflix in terms of its media reserves, relative to our capacity to consume it. Hundreds of thousands of hours of content, yet we are each limited in our binge-ability by 24 hours. What if our access to everyday resources like housing, transportation, food and more, felt something like the Netflix model for media consumption? A community context by context whole systems design of a deeper pool of shared resources, than the demand or capacity to consume them?

This is exactly what FYL can co-design for member communities, converting subscribers into stakeholders, sharing our colective resource pools on the terms of interchange we set for ourselves.

That’s 360˚shared prosperity.

Culture, Capital and Commerce? Don’t we already have that?

Yes, and we also know that our social, economic and political problems today are the difference between what we humans think and how nature actually works. At each iteration of civilization, we get a little closer to how things really are, versus how we want them to be. This is as true in our own lives as it is in our societies.

Culture represents why we do what we do, capital represents the things we do them with, and commerce represents how we decide the best way to do those things for our benefit. When we can see a different reality than the one before, the rules of all three must change to fit the world as we are. This is how we shifted from a flat to a round earth view of the world, from a local to a global civilization, and from top down decision making systems to bottom up, distributed decision making systems with the help of the Internet.

Cultures are our nuanced and complex social agreements, satisfying a sense of predictability and purpose for most people. They hold psychological safe spaces for us to show how we can serve each other’s well being. When stakes are clearly understood within our closed cultural loops, each of us can be more valuable to each other within them.

Arguably, some of our greatest breakthroughs come from structures where the exceptional people within such supportive culture feel safe enough to share their best ideas with their peers. Supportive environments for humans to re-search or look again to arrive at in-sights, or see what we’d not seen before. This is how many of our greatest innovations, from satellites to the Internet get invented.

Today, that foundation for a trustable, coherent culture is wobbly. We can’t trust fake news, fake food and fake people any more than we can trust fake money and fake promises about the future. Forget basic agreements as to whether or not ecological collapse awaits us, we can’t even agree on what is science and what is opinion. Now, no one has the time for another’s point of view, or even each other. Narcissism and loneliness are the norm, not the exception. The foundations of how human beings make meaning through cultural norms are now in flux, especially when anyone can make unverified claims and then broadcast it all over social media. Keeping this up will make us all insane beyond recovery.

There has to be something better.

FYL co-creates coherent environments of trust, relative to the shared values of communities. Engaging influencers, innovators, individuals within them, and their trusted circles, to co-invest in the upsides for all. When stakes are made clear for each contributor, everyone benefits from the other’s gifts. Freeing us to form our value flows the way we want, laying the foundations for our next cultures of confidence.

Capital we’ve covered earlier. We are evolving better ways of seeing that the resources for our future will be there when we need them. That means we need new tools to see new possibilities in the physical world, as in the smart device example earlier, and (two way editable) smart contracts to ensure fair claims to resources when the time comes to access them. This is far more secure and reliable than the current money system, because this gives each of us the direct access, instead of inefficient, centralized intermediaries operating with their own short sighted, self serving agendas.

Commerce can be a trickier transition, because buying low and selling high has been the way of life as long as we can remember. Yet today, technologies like blockchain and geotagging let community members see all the resources we’re working with, while also having the ability to fairly account for each individual’s contribution to consumption while accessing these resources.

In such a real time supply and demand resource environment, commerce is less about capturing market share, and more about sharing the whole market. The market is no longer some isolated exchange, disconnected from knowing where the land and labor are sourced. The market can now become a network of regenerative resources, with real goods and service economies made up of equity stakes for everyone. Tokenized, crowdfunded, closed circles of fair flows for all, including a better future for existing capital to bet on.

The market is now free to be the world itself.

Recurring wealth for everyone? How can everyone be wealthy and free?

This is the most interesting paradox of prosperity. If everyone wants to rule the world, how can anyone ever be free?

The zero sum game to exploit each other for profits, seems to be the the most popular one playing now. We all want to be billionaires first, before thinking of serving the billions that we share our home planet with.

Until now, the most popularized story of freedom has been about escape. Escape from tyranny and oppression to a better place. Where is that place when the refugees from that old story land in our backyard, and there’re no more places left for us to run to? Are we looking at this all wrong?

Or was another option always here, just waiting for us to see it?

Well, now we can.

Today, it’s easier than ever to see a digitally assisted, radically transparent and personally accountable reality between peers, where we can naturally manage the diversity of local communities with decentralized tools at global scale.

Nature thrives with the diversity of life.

Everything moves and grows, though not at the same pace or scale. We now have the tools to contextually decide what is a fair trade amongst each other, without it being hard coded into the fabric of society. We can see how each of our individual actions impact the whole of our resources, which we can now map and understand.

Look around, we are already living through the best time in human history… awaiting the awareness to shift the way we see, to manifest a better world hidden within this one. In fact, that’s how we’ve always moved forward as a civilization, and right now is no different.

The paradigm shift of our times is upon us.

It makes zero sense to keep investing in the diminishing returns of extractive economies, when we can have more and more circular, regenerative options available. Exactly the types of options FYL co-designs with communities to give everyone equal access to common resources. Investing in each other and all life that connects to it, is no longer just wishful thinking, it’s our wisest insurance plan for a prosperous planet.

When we finally realize that we drink the same water, breathe the same air and walk the same earth as all life that make us who we are, and all life that’s ever existed before us, our next story of freedom looks a whole lot different.

It’s time to GROW up my fellow humans.

We’re in relationship to each other and we’ve got little choice other than to be responsible, if we really want to live free. Responsibilities to our mother earth, to our brothers and sisters across the planet, who may not look or think like us, and if not to anyone else, to our families and tribes. The people who see, hear and feel us, and yet somehow still manage to love us. We now have the tools to share our garden of riches with each other, feasting on its fruits without ever killing the tree of life that sustains us. This is our new dawn.

The last time, we felt the seismic shift of our times, we walked upright.

This time we get to fly.

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Our shared prosperity co-design services are expressed here: www.fyl.life

We are grateful to visionary early adopters engaging with us to co-create their shared prosperity networks. We are pouring our hearts, minds and hands into helping make our world work better for us, one circular prosperity community at a time. Learning forward as we ride this next regenerative reality with you.

Welcome to the new world. Welcome to our new story within it.

Welcome to #FreeYourLife.