Like us, more and more people are choosing to live outside the matrix. Quit your job/company and just go. Because as long as your house still has a mortgage, you are stuck in the matrix. Renting a house also keeps you pretty much stuck. But I wrote about that earlier in The Mortgage as Prison. In that group of brave people, who are choosing themselves, I see that some are stepping into a new matrix, a new form of slavery. And apparently they don’t see, that they are move from one cage, into another. Let me explain this.

Many people who change course, sell everything and often leave with the rest of their belongings in a motorhome and hope to find their new permanent home elsewhere, in the middle of nature. Often they are looking for a community. A place with like-minded people, where they can park their motorhome, or rent a cheap place and join the community. Using principles from permaculture to create (food) forests and vegetable gardens and doing a number of activities together. For example, cooking, eating, meditating, yoga, etc.

As you probably know, we left at the end of August 2020, initially to stay in Portugal. We ended up staying there for 19 months, in different locations. Within two months, we found that we only felt comfortable in the South West.
A lot of people were and are going/moving to Portugal. ‘Port – o – gal’ . It means ‘Haven that calls’, as we learned in the summer of 2021. And energetically, we understand it. For foreigners, it was a good place to be during the period when many people were facing lockdowns etc. And there was mostly a large group of dissenters in Portugal on Facebook in the beginning. Which over time turned into numerous Telegram groups of aware people. For all kinds of issues. From house rentals to off grid technical issues, from missing pets to dating.

Once in Portugal, we discovered the existence of websites like workaway.info and pureportugalholidays.com/work-exchange/. Someone has a house and land and is looking for volunteers to do all kinds of different jobs, in exchange for board and lodging. Often it’s 5 hours of work a day, 5 days a week. For years, it was mostly students who took advantage of this. Living abroad for a while, getting different experiences. That has since changed.

With the number of people escaping the matrix by buying a house with a lot of land in another place skyrocketing, the need for help is also rising. And, thanks to the pandemic, many people are leaving the matrix and looking for a cheap place to live. After all, how do you make ends meet when you no longer have a job/business and travel with your entire possessions (and often children)? Many leave with savings and hope to get by with that for a long time. And often they are idealists, who would like to make the world a better place, and as long as they haven’t found the right place themselves, would like to help others realise their dream.

All in all, that sounds like a very noble thing. And we too took advantage of a similar construction in the summer of 2021. Then we were on a piece of land for 6 months with our own caravan, tent and solar system. There was running cold water. And we made our own (together with the owners) compost toilet, with washing-up area and outdoor shower (with cold water only).
In return, we had to help for 1 hour a day. The man wanted to build luxury cabins for campers and Leo was handy enough with helping him with the building and doing the electricity and plumbing etc.
If there was no work, we would have to pay €250 a month. We thought that was too much because we got nothing for it. A place to defecate and a cold shower in the open air. No electricity and no place to do our laundry.

Fine when it’s hot, but not so nice when it’s colder and there’s a strong cold wind. But… so we thought, there is enough to do, so we don’t have to pay that rent.

Wrong… Because, as officials came from the municipality, the project fell silent after a few months. For the man had started building, without waiting for the permit. And he also started a kind of simple camper spot for 10 euros a night, where people also got nothing more than a toilet and a cold shower. This started to catch the neighbourhood’s eye, and as a result there was visual check and he had to stop doing what he was doing. And so we even had to pay rent for the last few months!!! A wise lesson for next time.

MISUSE
As the number of people travelling and taking a different route grows, I also see how much abuse is being taken of this group.

You are expected to work x number of hours. And in return, you get food, a place to sleep, electricity, sometimes wifi and of course a place to shower and sometimes to do laundry, but often not. Food is sometimes made for you. But you no longer have a choice in what you eat. Eating what you feel like eating then no longer exists. Talk about living in freedom 😉 .

But what about the clothes that get broken because you’re there working for someone else? And, of course, all the normal wear and tear. With footwear, with tools (hubby regularly used our own tools, for example, because they weren’t available on site). When you go driving, your car does consume fuel. Buying new clothes, even second-hand, is not free. Doing laundry costs at least €4 per wash in Europe. And what about insurance? Where are those paid from?

IT GET’S WORSE THOUGH
To my surprise, there are also places that even want you to pay them, for the costs they incur for you AND at the same time they still demand x-number of hours of labour per day from you. From what I have heard, these costs range from €5 to €12.50.

To me, this is the new slavery. It is another matrix that is now emerging that, thanks to a lack of money, makes choices people think they are living in freedom, but actually (often over time) get stuck again.

NB: We have also seen an extremely large group of people coming to Portugal who want to join a ready-made community WITHOUT any investment. And completely ignoring the fact how much time, energy ánd money goes into building a community. Not only building spaces, but also the trees, plants, tools are big expenses. I therefore find it unimaginable that there is also a large group of people who both don’t want to pay anything and want to get into a well-spread bed. Where there is no pioneering spirit to start something new together. Not in the last place because there is only a small number of communities. The number of people who would like to live in a community has exploded and that the supply of communities is therefore far too small. And that a lot more pioneers, WITH MONEY AND A VISION, are needed to buy land and build something new in all countries.

For this reason, having a decentralised passive income, where you don’t have to worry about how money comes in, might still be the only way to a life outside the matrix without jumping into  a new slavery. Because in the end, that is true freedom. Read about NRGY, which helps us to live free,