Freedom. Is it even possible?
By: Harry Seitz
Tags: Life, Escape, Freedom, Philosophy, Expectations

Is it possible?

There’s Nothing But the Past

Several writers and scientists have made this point, and it’s a biological reality.

It takes time for our perceptions to reach our brains, meaning that whatever we’re experiencing has actually already happened.

I just lit a cigarette, but by the time my mind registered the decision, it had already been made.

Which begs the question whether or not it was a decision at all.

The debate about whether or not we have freewill has persisted for centuries, so for the sake argument, I’m going to dedicate myself to the proposition that we do.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re free, or that freedom is even possible.

The World

The number one predictor of your socioeconomic status is that of your parents.

If you’re born poor, you’re going to live in a rough neighborhood, go to a bad school, and probably won’t be able to afford to go to college.

Assuming you get a loan, you’ll be carrying that debt for years, or maybe even decades.

And perhaps most importantly, your expectations are already anchored in poverty.

Anchoring is a cognitive bias that allows the first piece of information we receive to unduly influence us.

For example, I replicated an old study in graduate school wherein the subjects were presented with either a high or low number, then asked a question they were unlikely to know the answer to, like how many bats Mariano Rivera has broken.

The participants were told that the numbers they saw before each question had absolutely nothing to do with any of the answers.

Still, those presented with low numbers made lower guesses, while those presented with high numbers made significantly higher guesses.

Now imagine that first piece of information is your entire childhood, or your most formative years.

Your internal barometer will be set on poverty. Anything else will seem tenuous and unnatural.

Society

All of us are born into a culture that shapes us in ways so pervasive we don’t even notice them.

Even when we travel, or live in other countries, we notice all of the ways that the people there have been shaped by their cultures, but rarely reflect that the same applies to us.

We accept the conditions we do, like the amount we have to work to survive, because we were born into them, while a person from Finland would probably consider most of our situations inhuman.

Do you like your job, your home, or even your partner?

If you won the lottery tomorrow, would you keep any of them?

The more we have to do that we don’t want to, the less free that we are. And if you don’t even like your home or your partner, what’s the point?

Options

We’re free to move to other countries, or even drop out of society entirely, but what kind of freedom is that?

No matter where you moved, you’d still need money, which for most of us would mean finding yet another job that likely isn’t ideal, and depending on the country, learning a second language.

Life might be cheaper or easier, but we would still be tethered to similar obligations, and the effort of making the change typically isn’t worth it. It’s easier to just stay where we are, where we at least have an idea of what life has in store in for us.

If you went off to live in a forest or a cave, you would probably die. And if you did manage to survive, you’d spend most of your time hunting and gathering. You’d bathe and do your laundry in cold rivers or lakes, and have no safety net at all unless you stayed relatively close to civilization.

In short, your life would be even more difficult than it already is.

Conclusion

Some writers and philosophers believe that true freedom is outside of the boundaries of what’s considered to be sane. How can you escape your upbringing and culture and still be anyone resembling a “normal” person?

Most of us equate freedom with money. But if you want money so you can escape from your life, you have to begin to question exactly how free you actually are.

I don’t know what real freedom is, or if it’s even possible, but I do know that most of us could use a little bit more of it.

Quitting my job isn’t an option, but finding one that has more meaning to me is. If I was doing something I felt that mattered, it wouldn’t feel as much like a job.

And again, many of our boundaries are self-imposed from within. We are prisoners of our expectations, positive and negative, and no one is perfect. If you implicitly define yourself as poor or single or miserable, you’re likely to remain that way, but luckily, interactions with our own minds are a two-way street.

I’ve criticized self-help articles for promising the statistically impossible, but having the right mindset can help. If you decide that you are worthy of happiness, fulfillment, and partnership, and start treating yourself that way, you’d at least be giving yourself a fighting chance, which is the only real freedom that any of us have.