Recently my buddy Ryan went to Hawaii and got a tattoo. I’m not sure whether it was the fact that I felt it was completely out of character for him to get one or whether it was the profoundness of the statement plastered massively across his arm that made my jaw drop and time temporarily stop. SLAVES of FREEDOM. Right there, tattooed on his arm. Huge letters. It’s an epic line to choose to carry on your body for your entire life.

I guess the beauty of it is the truth in it. Aside from the fact that the Tattoo looks fucking stellar, it’s truly something that resonates with humanity on a broad scale and on an individual level as well. Looking into freedom and what defines it, and how we as humans perceive it, you can quickly deduce the fact that yes, we are in fact not only addicted to it, we have become slaves to it. We all carry this “slavery” with us whether we realize it or not.

We as human beings strive to have more of it with all of our actions. We work because we need money to survive and have “freedoms” to do what we want. In this society Freedom and Money have truly become synonymous. The more money we have the more freedom we have. That is a very western thing I think, but even if you look at other societies and other places in the world you can see that the idea of working for freedom is also there.

I guess you have to take this to the next level of thought if you were to transcend the “slaves of freedom” idiom. You have to look at freedom simply as the idea that it is. Freedom is an idea, a concept, and if you dig far enough you can see that this concept too is an illusion. We rarely sit down and think about it because it is so ingrained in us. We are all free, we have always been and always will be. It’s the rules, regulations, boundaries, systems, processes that we have created as human beings that “take it away”.

Props to you Ryan for doing something so epic and contemplative that you have chosen to share with the world. Maybe when people ask you about your tattoo they too will stop and think about it, find a deeper meaning and take something away from it.

Now let’s go get drunk and smash things.

😉

Shane Lamotte
shane@livingillusion.com
http://www.livingillusion.com/

P.S. Everything in moderation, even mental masturbation.