A more practical standard for measuring freedom should be: Whether your understanding of how things work is closer to the essence, Whether you are relatively close to high-value resources, Whether the actual cost of accessing resources is relatively low. This is not entirely equivalent to the amount of money.

Not understanding the essence of how things work can lead to treating cosplay sincerely as a career pursuit, exhausting oneself to make others look good, only seeing the superficial benefits while ignoring the risks and costs. When viewed over a longer time span, it becomes a very laughable situation.

Only after understanding the true mechanisms of how things operate can one have the ability to determine what constitutes high-value resources. At this point, being closer to high-value resources becomes very important. This way, at some critical turning points, you can quickly access and acquire high-value resources that others cannot, or are even unaware of. The exponential gap, the difference between development and bankruptcy, is drawn this way. For example, people are misled into yearning for a pastoral life in the wilderness, only to realize later that being closest to a good hospital is the most important. Other choices are merely distractions that divert your attention. There are countless similar examples in the abstract.

If you don't look to the future and analyze what will be high-value resources, you will end up doing something absurd, like a local landlord who is obsessed with hoarding pork and corn for a lifetime and is very stubborn about not letting go.

For key high-value resources, one should overcome laziness and fear of difficulty, and try to get involved personally, directly engaging at close range, rather than outsourcing through intermediaries. Otherwise, tasks that could be completed at low cost in just a few minutes by doing it oneself may take many days when outsourced to others, increasing uncertainty and potentially raising costs by one or even several orders of magnitude, adding unnecessary psychological, time, and financial constraints. Another more subtle point is that the more tasks you can quickly and cheaply handle, the more motivated you become to explore, and you become increasingly adept in this area. The number of tasks you can manage at low cost grows, and the sense of freedom and flow becomes stronger.