You’ve probably heard the spiel.
The US is the freest country in the world. Capitalism (democracy) is synonymous with freedom. People today have more freedom than they’ve ever had in the past!
But do we really?
What does freedom actually mean, and how much of it do we really have?
It’s an interesting concept, freedom.
The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.
Can you really act, speak, or think as you want?
Your instinctive reaction might be to jump in and say “YES, of course!”
You might even be indignant or offended that I would suggest such a ludicrous idea that we are not-free.
I mean, we’re all members of the Free World, aren’t we?
Slavery “ended” in the US with the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery way back in 1865.
Technically, we’re free to live where we choose, socialize with whom we prefer, practice our chosen religion, and generally go about our lives as we please.
But dig a little deeper and things become more murky.
I was chatting with a friend the other day about the idea of individual autonomy.
It’s interesting, how much we think we have autonomy (control, a say) over our own lives — but many of our decisions are already made for us.
If you work a traditional 9-5 job, you’ve given up control over a large chunk of your day.
The time you wake up is determined by what time you have to get to work, and how long it takes for you to get to your workplace (lucky you, if you work from home and your commute is no longer than the time it takes for you to walk from your bedroom to your kitchen table).
Maybe you drive, and you have to factor in how much traffic there is on any given day. Or you take the train and you need to time your departure from your home (and the time you wake up) to match the train schedule.
If you have kids, your schedule is determined by theirs to the point where it may even feel that you don’t have any control over your own time.
While you’re at work, your boss (or the company) determines how you spend your time — working on tasks that are assigned to you, at your desk that has been assigned to you.
Take one too many breaks to stretch your legs (because staying sedentary might give you a heart attack) and run the risk of Ruth from Accounting ratting you out to your manager who will call you in for “a chat” about taking breaks on company time.
You have to eat your lunch sometime between 12 noon and 2 pm — god forbid that you get hungry earlier because you missed breakfast trying to catch the 8:17 Blue Line so you wouldn’t be late for the Daily Morning Huddle.
It’s almost a surprise that taking toilet breaks isn’t monitored — although if you work in an Amazon warehouse, you wouldn’t be so lucky, and you would have given up the freedom to relieve yourself as your body needs to.
Still, you could argue that working a job is the price we pay for living in a “free” society with all the modern amenities that make life comfortable.
Unfortunately, for many people (more than 8 million of them in the US, at least), working just one job isn’t enough to pay the bills and support themselves and their families.
So even more of their time is sold off to corporations in exchange for a barely livable wage that allows them to…stave off homelessness, hunger, and even death for a few more days.
Bleak.
For those of us who are lucky enough to work just one job, yeah we give up the freedom to choose what time to wake up, what do to with ourselves for most of the daylight hours in summer (and all of them in winter), and even what time to eat our meals, to have the freedom to do whatever we want after work and during those measly two weeks of paid time off.
Except… do we really have freedom in that?
We come home to our Netflix and HBO and Amazon Prime and social media apps, consuming insipid content that dulls our senses and eases the pain of being alive (because if it’s not painful to be alive and be forced not to do the things you want to do so you can exchange your labor for the chance to be alive, then I don’t know what is) — too tired/exhausted/drained/frustrated to do anything else but wait for the day to end so we can do it all over again tomorrow.
Sure, we’re technically free to do a lot of things — read a book, go on a bike ride, take a hike in nature, have a dance party in PJs — but when was the last time you actually exercised that freedom?
Imagine you’re walking on the street and a person jumps out at you with a gun pointed at your head, demanding your wallet.
Sure, you hand it over out of your own free will, but nobody would argue that it was your choice to do so.
Not doing so would have gotten you hurt or killed.
You have the freedom of choice, yes. But when the odds are stacked so heavily against you to influence your choice in one direction over the other, is that really a choice you make freely?
Our society is the person with the gun pointed at your head.
Everything in our society is designed to give you the illusion of free choice, but ultimately, the decisions have already been made for you.
From the time you are born, your parents decide everything for you. Yes, you have some autonomy, but that is slowly whittled away as you enter the school system — designed to force you into a box where you can barely move, where you have to ask for permission even to pee, suppressing the natural instincts we are all born with. And as we progress through these systems, we find ourselves going with the flow, making decisions as if they were our own but rarely are we even aware of the plenitude of choice before us because the powers-that-be have already decided how we should occupy our time and live our lives, even down to the foods we eat and the clothes we wear.
We think we have a choice but really, we’re not any better off than the child that’s asked “Do you want your sandwich cut into squares or triangles?” At the end of the day, what that kid is eating is the sandwich and the life we’re living is the one someone else has already decided for us.
So where do we go from here?
(I feel like I ask this question a lot — and I don’t often have answers. Some days, I feel it is my purpose here on this earth to ask these questions so that other people who have ideas that could be answers come forth to share them with us.)
((Someone once told me that the point of these conversations is not to convince anybody, but to find the ones who are convinced so we can create something better together.))
(((I digress.)))
So where do we go from here?
I saw a clip of an interview with Ijeoma Oluo, author of Be a Revolution (which I’m currently listening to as an audiobook on my library app), in which she says:
This idea that the systems that we have right now are the best we could hope for… is really damaging. It’s damaging on multiple levels.
It stops us from addressing systemic issues. But also, it erases all of the beautiful creativity in our communities that aren’t being currently served by systems.
….
The idea that there’s nothing you can do is by design. That’s really manufactured. This idea that it’s too big, it’s too hard, nothing can be done, and nothing is being done.
SO.
Things can be done, things can be changed. We don’t have to uphold these systems if they no longer serve us.
I think the first step is recognizing that these systems we live under are designed to keep us occupied, tired, exhausted, and drained so that we don’t start searching for alternatives.
As an invitation, consider: what would it look like for you to prioritize something the system is not pushing to us?
You don’t have to quit your cushy (but absolutely soulless) job tomorrow and escape to an off-the-grid farm if that feels out of reach, but what if — the next time you feel tempted to scroll Instagram, dull your senses by binge-watching Love Island on Netflix, or drown your misery in a bottle of Barolo 1984, you asked yourself what you actually wanted to do… and did that instead?
What if all of us started taking tiny steps in the direction of the lives we want to live, the world we want to live in instead?
Instead of simply resigning ourselves to this life we currently have, let’s start imagining better of ourselves — and then creating it.
Because if not us, then who?
If not now, then when?
If you found some value in this article, please consider showing your appreciation by making a small one-time contribution below.
Interested in working with me in a 1:1 capacity? Some new options are available: Check them out here. Or reach out via email. Custom packages available (and I offer non-travel-related coaching too!)