I used to work in a senior position as a programmer making quite a lot, and of course, everyone around me including friends and family considered my successful.

But, a few years into that job, I considered it to be the most unhappy time of my life. I quit and became independent. I started building a series of passive income streams. I'm not really working very hard at it, and I certainly make hardly any money compared to before. But I'm a lot happier.

Now I "work" maybe 10 hours a week, and I spend the rest of my time chillin', working on projects that migth be profitable or might not be, reading, writing about whatever I want, etc. But I've got enough and it's the best time of my life.

Yes, I don't have kids and that's partly what enables my alternative lifestyle. But it just goes to show that private land ownership coupled with the family lifestyle necessarily leads to increasing wage-slavery, especially once areas become saturated and land becomes scarce.

What we need to do is move towards a system where private land ownership on a mass scale (not talking about your house) goes away and owning land for yourself to live and eat on is no longer an investment strategy but a way to establish a relationship with the biosphere. The current system is broken....