B) Family and Life Planning
Family and life planning
In our world, life is pretty standardized. You are born, start kindergarten, move on to a mandatory amount of schooling, start work until the given retirement age, and, once retired, you wait until you’re dead.
Even though this is quite a cynical way of thinking about live, it’s true for most modern, wealthy societies. The state regulates more and more areas of our lives, and most of the time, we don’t even think about questioning the way in which we currently live.
Not so on OboxPlanet. Society here has no laws about schooling, no standard retirement age, and no such things as standardized work license requirements or mandatory marriage contracts. People are free to choose what works best for them. Want to work until your 80ies (I’m looking at you, Joe Biden)? More than welcome to do so. Want to go to school until you’re in your 40ies? Sure thing. Go ahead.
It’s all about personal freedom. Some people “retire” in their 30ies, while others choose to leave school early to start working or pursue a passion of theirs. In short, while you also have to take more responsibility for your choices, OboxPlanet gives you the opportunity to do whatever you want with your life without any state obligations. The following chapters describe some of the areas of our life in more detail.
Steps for our world:
Nothing about our current life-regulations are given by nature. Aim to deregulate wherever possible.
In a few words, people on the OboxPlanet have more freedom for living their own lives and dreams.
On Earth, along with growing wealth, the states have been regulating more and more areas of our life to the point that we do not even think about what we would do without all these laws and regulations. This makes thinking about it so much more exciting.
In a stateless society, there are no mandatory schooling, no work licenses, no marriage and inheritance laws and taxes, no Medicaid, and no standard retirement age. In such a world without state guardrails, one of the challenges for each person is to choose his personal life plan. How long do I want to go to school, where and what for? What marriage contract do I choose, if any? How long do I expect to live and what part of life do I want to spend working? Each of these questions opens a world of additional choices and options which we can only begin to discover in the following chapters. Finally, we include some contentious subjects in this chapter. We hope, thinking about stateless solutions will produce some ideas that we can use on our planet earth today.
What experiences on Earth, past and present, help us understand life on the OboxPlanet?
We have mentioned that on Earth, we have become so accustomed to the “standard” life plan that most of us don’t even think about it.
There are three problems with this attitude:
Firstly, we might miss out on opportunities. How would we have planned our lives without all the state restrictions? This is the least tragic because what we don’t miss doesn’t bother us.
Secondly, what if the state changes the rules? What if my retirement pension is no longer guaranteed? This may leave some of us feeling helpless and anxious.
Thirdly, and this is perhaps the area of state rules that affects you the most: What if you don’t want to conform? What if you are unable to have children and want to adopt, or when you need to undergo in vitro fertilization or practice alternative medicine and the state doesn’t allow it? What if you want to homeschool, take your kid out of certain school courses and the state threatens to take away your child?
On the OboxPlanet, there may be rules in some communities or societies, but there is no institution that has a monopoly on making rules from which you cannot escape.
State means some people make rules and enforce them with coercion, if needed. It attracts people who like to do that. While there are many well-meaning and honest do-gooders, It is no coincidence that many power abuses occur in state social institutions and with social services.
Dealing with a social service lawyer is the only time that I have personally experienced what I can only call sadism.
Now it’s your turn:
How would you plan your life with no obligations, taxes and regulations “nudging” you into the trodden path of a politically determined “normal life”?
Things we could learn and implement from the OboxPlanet:
Regarding life planning, the most important step is to make people realize that our laws push us into a standardized life-plan. Kindergarten, mandatory schooling, 9-5 jobs until the legally determined retirement age and then “hang in there” until you die is what happens if you don’t rebel and pay for it. Nothing of this is nature-given, lots of it driven by special interests. And nothing is necessary. Life planning should be free, not handicapped by laws and regulations.
