Nine years ago, I pulled my then three, eight, and 13-year-old daughters out of school and left Europe on a one-way ticket to Costa Rica.
An empty bank account, no solid plan, no sense of security. But a sense of freedom, an inner voice that was calling. A voice, barely above a whisper. But it was there, and I had no choice but to listen. Because what does it really mean to be free? Are we free when our table is plentiful? When we have a car parked in front of a house we own? Are we free when war is absent? When our money is in the bank? I needed to know.
Although we didn’t own a house, our table was plentiful. We had food on the table, and clothes on our backs, we were safe. But I didn’t feel free. My choices weren’t mine. I couldn’t educate my children the way I saw fit. I couldn’t live my life on my terms. That is why our quest for freedom started here, freeing ourselves from the shackles of the educational system.
For nine years, I have unschooled my children. No more sitting inside the four walls of a classroom. The world is our classroom now. I became a facilitator, led by the children’s curiosity and intrinsic motivation to learn. A hundred lives lived and a plethora of wild adventures in between, from the Costa Rican jungle to the Peruvian desert, to the Indonesian islands, the children became trilingual. Turned into possibly the biggest bookworms on earth, and found their quirky passions in life. From a traveling social media influencer to an enthusiastic performer in circus arts, to a compassionate animal rescuer, they naturally found their path.
Finding educational freedom within our nomadic, out-of-the-box, lifestyle subsequently led to questions about money, control, and privacy.
We don’t strive to live completely outside the system. The reality is, to be and feel free, we have to live in this world, but not belong to this world. Not be enslaved by it.
During our travels to Guatemala, I met a friend who introduced me to crypto, and more specifically Zcash, a digital currency like Bitcoin. I wasn’t immediately drawn to it. For a single parent, raising three kids on a small budget, and without much knowledge in this field, buying and trading crypto felt intimidating. I dropped the subject. Years later in Mexico, when I met this friend again, my life had come to a low. I felt not only financially stuck but also stuck in a system that was increasingly becoming more controlling. I decided to dive into the subject again. I now understood the value of Zcash in general and to our specific lifestyle - Zcash (unlike Bitcoin) keeps all our financial information private and in our control. It serves our quest for a deeper freedom. Zcash is a borderless, permissionless system. It is, in my eyes, a tool for dissolving borders.
What if we all used Zcash’s digital ZEC coin to send and receive private, peer-to-peer payments? To buy groceries and pay rent. We’d cut out the middleman and have power over our money, control over our privacy. We could find true freedom. We could live in this world, without being enslaved to it.