hi Zac, thankyou for the words of encouragement and the resources you posted here about narcissism earlier, they were helpful. This is a bit of a late reply which happens because I only post here pretty occasionally with my "post seduction life" updates. It is now time for another one
So a big news is that I formally divorced my family of origin (with a few exceptions such as a sister, an aunt on my mother's side and an uncle on my father's side who are safe people). Although I had cut contact with my wider family a few years back, I recently decided to send them the goodbye letter, and this makes it formal in my eyes. In it I was quite analytical and I laid out firstly my reasons for writing, then I explained about my journey in discovering I was codependent following my divorce, explained how narcissism and codependency arises through one's upbringing, a little about the narcissistic family pattern (Golden Child, Scapegoat) and eventually to specifics about our family members and why I decided to leave.
I expect that my letter will be disregarded, as I know that similar letters from my sister were disregarded in the past, and also that my uncle and aunt have attempted to intercede on my behalf (not that I asked them to) and their attempts were also disregarded. Still, it was important to me to express those feelings. Before, I didn't want to burn my bridges, but as part of my recovery and GC journey I learned to have more confidence, so these days it is not a problem for me to pick a position and stick to it, and I have a lot more confidence than before that I can manage without the putative support from family, which was important before I undertook my journey since although imperfect they did provide some support.
In taking these decisions I took some inspiration from Zac and another user whose name I cannot recall, think it began with D... Dexsomething? This D-guy takes a very uncompromising view of seduction, he is also highly protective of his personal life which I think involves some kind of Internet business and he does not let girls get close to him, this may be a side effect of his quite abusive upbringing. Anyway, he posted years back about how he had cut his family of origin out of his life as they did not provide value to him in his eyes. This is the kind of thinking that you require a GC-training to develop and it's also about putting yourself and your own needs first, which is important for anyone wanting to be a high value man.
And now to some other topics which I hope will provide a model for some of the other guys out there to follow, at least as a sort of a general trajectory. Although I'm no longer active in seduction since I got married to Leticia whom I met through cold approach early in my seduction journey, and have started a second family... I have nevertheless continued to work on one aspect of seduction which is to make yourself the best man you can possibly be. I think you have to be realistic in your expectations here and to treat it as a process of development -- as there are many things about myself that I'm not yet satisfied with, on the other hand I am seeing results in the areas that are my focus. You can't focus on everything.
About my business and my efforts to develop an income other than 9-to-5 work, well I have to say that I am not quite there yet, but on the other hand due to my unique situation (a narcissistic family upbringing, yet within a family that was quite well off) I have been blessed with significant resources that I have been able to invest towards the expectation of creating such an income very shortly. I mentioned earlier in these pages about my last salaried position and how I used some GC techniques in the interview to increase my value in their eyes. I think I also mentioned about how after 2 years in the job I left the job to focus on my business development with my partner at the time. And also that I fell out with said partner.
Well, in the time since I fell out with my partner I focused on several aspects that were related to our business together but which I wanted to develop independently, such as teaching myself more about web technologies (since I am a software expert but until a few years ago I was not very proficient in web technologies, I was more proficient in backend technologies such as Internet protocols, databases and such). I developed an online store, although it has not sold anything yet. I set up an offshore company with e-commerce accounts that are linked to my store and have successfully processed test-payments. I made some progress on developing the products to sell in the online store, but have put this aside as I'll explain.
Anyway, so after a year or so in which the business I had with my partner was not developed (but only some of the independent aspects listed in the last paragraph), my former partner reached out to me apologizing for his role in the falling-out, he said that COVID lockdowns had affected his brain and also that he had had no idea I felt so strongly about some of the matters such as my percentage share in the business. For my part, I simply insisted that I get a decent share in the business. I was still happy for him to have the majority stake since he has been developing it for longer than I have and had mortgaged his house in the process, but after taking over the technical side and investing significant resources of my own (amounting to perhaps $200K of my professional time plus direct expenditures on the business from my personal funds), I demanded that I a proper share rather than being a minority partner. After a year of seeing his business not develop, he was ready to agree to this. My advice: know your value.
Therefore, things have been patched up and I have been working on the project again for the last 4-5 months and I believe we are on the verge of making a sale. C'mon! It would greatly satisfy me to be earning an income rather than burning cash that originated with my family long ago -- this cash was formerly locked up in my former family home, but has become available to my projects since my lengthy legal battle to finalize the divorce. Said legal battle was funded by the salaried position I mentioned above and was certainly not cheap as there were many hearings and mediations and each hearing or mediation cost in excess of $20K in lawyers fees and similar, so I probably funded $60K or so and I also had help from my uncle.
One area of disagreement with my business partner is in the topic of offshore incorporation and offshore banking -- my partner wants to do things the legal "on shore" way and I have eventually acquiesced to this, as compromise is always necessary in any partnership and it simply wasn't worth further arguments. Also, I guess doing things on-shore will provide me some additional protection in case my partner turns out to be treacherous after we have an income. I think this could be part of his concern as well, since I had set up offshore entities and bank accounts and was offering to do the relevant financial engineering for the business, so I think he might have been concerned that I could do something wrong with the money.
Anyway, after a few years of learning about the murky world of offshore incorporation and banking, mainly "learning by doing", I feel like I have more or less achieved one of the goals I set for myself as part of making myself the best man I can possibly be -- which is to become independent of Government interference in my finances. I recommend that other GC men undertake this goal, although its relative importance will depend on where you are at in your seduction and life journeys. I will say though, that it is a very expensive undertaking, and I would not attempt it unless you have at least $10K per year to spend on agents fees and such. If you are in early-career stage and suppose you're in a junior to mid level position on $60K to $80K then I am not sure you can spare this $10K per year, but if you can, then DO IT. Although it may turn out to be a net loss (as it is in my case at present) you need to treat it as kind of like a tuition fee, since you will not be able to learn about the area otherwise.
At this point I want to digress to say something about politics, before I return to the main thread about internationalization and making yourself independent of Government. I'm extremely unhappy about where politics is going in the Western world at the moment. I would not class myself on the left (Democratic; Labour) or the right (Republican; Conservative) as such, since I see the political continuum as more of a triangle: you have the big-Government socialists at one corner, the big-Government conservatives at another corner, and the small-Government libertarians at the remaining corner. These latter are a tiny minority, since the normie population has been thoroughly conditioned to see Government as essential or at least a necessary evil. I am one of them. In fact I go further than simple libertarianism since I am an anarcho-capitalist and I follow the writings of Rothbard. A less extreme position is to be a minarchist, and in that case you would be following the writings of von Mises among other notables.
I'm very unhappy to find myself living in a surveillance / nanny state (Australia) and I think the average person does not really comprehend how much things have changed since we were young (I'm 46). Back then you still had a lot of freedom and although the Police would occasionally pick you up for things like illegal motorbike riding in the bush and bring you home to your parents and give all concerned a bit of a lecture, no real damage was done, and the Police still commanded a fair bit of respect in the community. Nowadays, that is out the window -- it is POSSIBLE that partly the change is due to my perspective (getting red pilled) but I think it is also an actual change. Police simply behave as enforcers for the regime and that's about it. They hardly even maintain the pretence of solving crimes, etc, anymore. To the Police we are simply cattle to be controlled, or to some extent a resource to be exploited. Roads provide a fertile source for exploitation (traffic fines) but it's by no means limited to this.
And Government's science of wealth extraction from the populace has reached a very advanced stage in Australia. My wife's family who live in Vietnam are a bit jealous of our lifestyle and think we are very rich, but unfortunately this is in relative terms since it is extremely expensive to live in Australia. Most services are provided by some kind of monopoly (think Jemena the electricity distributor, or NBN the broadband network) and to own shares in one of these monopolies is to own a license to extract wealth from Australians indefinitely. Government taxes are numerous and very burdensome. Scarcely a week goes by without some new assessment or similar landing my mailbox. Even my apartment building has its own "Government" (the owners corporation / body corporate) and they of course extract their pound of flesh on a regular basis. As in regular Government, I think there is a certain cronyism in how the owners corporation is run, as obviously their goal is to move "public" wealth to their own pockets!
With the COVID thing and now the war in Ukraine, the pace has really picked up, and Governments (especially my Government here in Australia) are usurping citizens' freedom to a degree that was unthinkable a decade ago. Censorship is considered normal and essential, people are dying left and right from COVID vaccine-induced heart attacks, strokes, etc while the "safe and effective" narrative continues to have primacy at least in the mainstream media. Woke culture has made life a nightmare for any sane person (for instance in my last salaried position the people in the office were very woke and there were things you simply weren't allowed to say, I know because I said them and weathered the consequences but I only did this when I was ready to abandon ship). The trans acceptance movement would strike me as just silly (and in general I would be happy to indulge people in their wish to be addressed a certain way etc), except for the incredible danger to young adults with bodily mutilation.
Returning to the surveillance-state aspect, there are a couple of things that really bother me. One is that in Australia they no longer even try to hide the extent of their financial surveillance, indeed they treat it as a convenience for you. For instance, when I fill in my tax return through the Government app (which is admittedly a lot easier than the old paper-based system), it lists out many of the financial transactions I have made that year, such as buying or selling shares, and pre-fills the relevant sections and taxes. At this point you can still override it (for instance if the surveillance picks up transactions I did in my wife's name and I wish to move them over to my return rather than hers) but I expect that soon you will not be. Probably we will simply be taxed in real time. Another thing that really bothers me is in Australia's highway system, there are cameras everywhere, and I mean EVERYWHERE. You can't drive more than a few minutes without seeing one. Theoretically these are for traffic monitoring, but I believe they are also recording license plates of everyone who drives past.
Okay well as soon as the principle was admitted (before my time) that registration and licensing was needed for efficient road management, it was going to end up here. And much the same applies with tax file numbers (social security numbers for you Yanks out there), once the principle is admitted (before my time) then it will end up as a digital ID (happening now). But there is also the creeping surveillance aspect that we are NOT aware of, like the facial recognition technology used in city streets, I BELIEVE we have it in Australia but I don't really know. It scares me. And I am sure that the counter-terrorism police and security services are doing a lot to track our online habits. Since I regularly read rt.com and southfront.org (which give a Russia-centric view of the Ukraine conflict) I expect I would be on some watchlists somewhere. I also read XYZ News which is a white nationalist organization, I do not really agree with their white nationalist or Christian views but their articles are still good.
There is also the education system here in Australia which is utterly pathetic in terms of teaching you anything you really need to know (literacy and numeracy have been plummeting for years) and I am well aware of this since my older children from my first marriage have been through the system, I had initially positive views of it since they went to a Government school in an affluent area and such schools tend to be better resourced than others, but over time this positive view soured. They are teaching very woke principles and they are also effectively implanting the view that Government is beneficial in all regards. My children will now argue and contradict me with woke crap despite the efforts I have always taken to inoculate them against it. Sigh. And then again there are the masks and the COVID crap. Until recently children 8 and over were forced to wear masks all day, and this is a grave crime. I have taken my younger children out of the mainstream and we are homeschooling.
Based on all these factors I strongly fear for the future, and I feel that we will soon be living in a totalitarian dictatorship similar to the situation that Russians found themselves in after the Bolshevik revolution. You always think it cannot happen here. Well it can. There are differing views on how to deal with this. Some people believe we should go down fighting, see Solzhenitsyn/Gulag Archipelago where he says "why didn't we ambush the security services when we knew they were coming to deport us to the camps?" ... and of course there are some brave people in medicine and Government and other positions of influence who are speaking out and trying to beat back the tyranny. But overall I feel that the tide of history is against us. I believe it was Doug Casey (an international investor whose articles and interviews I follow) who said that history is like a boulder rolling down the hill -- the best you can do is to get out of the way.
So, my strategy over the past few years has been to plan my escape and plan how to preserve the freedom and wealth of myself and my family. I started on the financial engineering side before COVID, and I was also making plans to deal with the citizenship side when COVID hit, although I had not acted on those plans yet. During the long lockdowns and the period where you were not allowed to leave Australia, I was absolutely furious at the impingement on my freedom and I was also unhappy because my plans to travel to some of the countries offering citizenship and check them out in person were thwarted. I started making plans to acquire an ocean-going yacht in order to leave Australia illegally, or possibly to bribe a freighter captain to stow us away in the hold if I possibly could, or even to become a sailor on such a ship myself if I really needed to (since I have engineering degrees these would represent a bit of a headstart).
So during this time I started to engage with a Citizenship-by-Investment programme, one which does not require you to leave your home country or visit or live in the country physically -- since we could not leave Australia physically at the time. I made an application a year and a half ago, and it takes them a really long time to process the application and carry out their due diligence checks (the so-called "Island Time" phenomenon) but they have now accepted us and the matter is progressing, I believe the passports will be issued for myself and my family quite shortly. In regards to the cost of this approach, well it is significant and I accept that many men on GC will not have this option available to them. However, it may be more affordable than you think, and that's why I have decided to write here about my experiences. (Of course if you are a young man without dependents then it may be simpler to pursue an approach of obtaining working visas and eventually naturalization, but I did not have the luxury of time and I also could not easily move the family around the world, so it was simpler to just purchase a citizenship).
As COVID is now over and you can travel again, I took the precaution of visiting my intended country to check things out and make sure my agent is honest. After being here physically I have some mixed feelings about whether myself and my family could actually live and thrive here. But I think the important thing is simply to have your escape route planned. You don't want to be caught flat footed, as people were in Nazi Germany when the Nazis came to power, or say East Berlin when the wall went up. As well as having our alternate citizenship and my overseas incorporation and banking setup, I also have resources stashed away all over the world, for instance some precious metals in an offshore vault, several bank accounts with emergency USD funds, etc. These would facilitate a quick escape should the repression in my country intensify.
If you are interested to carry out some of these steps, do feel free to AMA either here or by PM. I am happy to share experiences/advice.
