There is a version of freedom I used to imagine. It looked like an arrival. Like a moment somewhere in the future when life would finally feel spacious enough, light enough, mine enough. When I would have done enough of the hard work to earn the right to actually live the way I wanted to. I waited for that moment for a long time.
Midlife stopped me waiting and asked a different question:
What if you designed the life you wanted and started living inside it now, not all of it, not perfectly, but the essence of it?
That question changed everything.
Freedom in my life doesn’t look the way I once thought it would. It definitely doesn’t look dramatic. There is no single moment I can point to and say: “There, that’s when it happened.” It has been slower than that, more deliberate. Built from a series of quiet, sometimes uncomfortable choices to stop organising my life around other people’s rhythms and start building one that actually fits me.
What it looks like, in the ordinary and unglamorous day-to-day, is this. It looks like slow mornings every day. Not the kind where I’m checking notifications before I’ve fully arrived in the day, moving at a pace that belongs to someone else’s urgency. Mornings that ease in, that give me time to think before I am asked to produce. That let me be a person before I am a founder, a writer, a business owner. This alone, this one thing, has changed the quality of my days more than almost anything else I’ve tried.
It looks like a four-day work week. I’ll be honest, though: I’m still working on that one. The pull toward more, toward filling every available hour, toward treating productivity as a measure of worth, runs deep. But I know it’s right for me, and I know what I’m building toward, even on the weeks I don’t yet fully live it.
And it looks like this: from Friday to Sunday, I am not working. I am weekending, properly, in the Scandinavian sense of the word. Three days that belong to living rather than producing. To being rather than achieving. To rest, presence, and the small pleasures of a life actually lived. I didn’t just find this rhythm by accident; I was brought up with it, as I lived the first 30 years of my life in Norway. Midlife just reminded me of it.
I have also designed my work to move with me. This is the thing I am most quietly proud of: not a particular achievement, number, or metric, but the simple fact that my work doesn’t require me to be fixed in one place, performing availability on someone else’s terms. I can write from my apartment in the UK one month, a cabin in the Norwegian Highlands the next, my dad’s farmhouse in Punjab the one after that. The light changes, so does the pace. Something in me that goes flat when I stay still for too long comes back to life.
That took years to build. It is still being built. But it is real now; a work life rooted in creativity rather than exhaustion, that moves with me rather than asking me to disappear in order to sustain it.
The other thing I had to learn, and this one took longer, is that no one else’s system was ever going to work for me. I spent years studying other people’s routines. Their frameworks, their schedules, their methods for organising their lives and businesses. I genuinely believed that if I found the right one, the one that had worked so visibly and reliably for someone I admired, I could simply adopt it and feel the same results.
It never worked. Because my mind doesn’t move like that. I think in circles. I need spaciousness to produce anything worth keeping. I come alive at unexpected hours and go flat the moment I try to force myself into a rigid structure designed for someone built entirely differently from me.
For years, I treated that as a character flaw. Something to fix, to discipline, to overcome.
Midlife asked me to treat it as information instead. So I stopped trying to reshape myself into someone else’s template. And I started, slowly and deliberately, building something that actually fits the shape I am.
That is what a freedom-based life means to me. Not an escape, a fantasy, or a highlight reel of beautiful locations and untethered days.
Enough spaciousness to think, feel, reflect, and actually participate in my own life while I am living it. Work that moves with me. Mornings that belong to me. Weekends that are genuinely weekends. Income rooted in creativity. A rhythm I designed rather than one I inherited and never questioned.
I am not fully there yet, but I know what I’m building. And knowing that, clearly, honestly, without apology, is further than I have ever been. Most days, that building looks quieter than you might imagine. It looks like an open laptop and a phone camera within reach, both of them mine, both of them carrying the work I chose. Not glamorous or grand, just the quiet, unromantic tools of a freedom I designed myself.
The Practice
This week, ask yourself one honest question and write the answer down:
Where in my life am I still living inside someone else’s rhythm — and what would it feel like to begin designing my own?
Not a complete overhaul. Just one area. One small, real shift in the direction of a life that actually fits.
That is where it starts.
The member section below goes deeper: a values-based freedom audit, journaling prompts to help you identify where you’re working against your own nature, and a practice to begin redesigning your work and daily life around who you actually are rather than who you thought you were supposed to be.
