At first glance, I know this sounds like a recruiting slogan for the armed forces, but the freedom I’m talking about here is the personal freedom we all seek starting at around age three and continuing into our old age. Time and time again, I’ve had patients present with some degree of frustration concerning personal freedom. They want to have their freedom: talk on the phone, drive the car, make a lot of money, travel, etc., but they don’t want to pay for it.
The way I’ve always explained it is to think of freedom like a coin. On one side you have that nice, shiny freedom just begging you to tear headlong into the world, collecting adventure and treasures wherever you may roam. But on the other side of that coin, maybe not so shiny or pretty to look at, is responsibility. The way society works is that freedom is the direct result of responsibility. The more you are willing to do, the more freedom you obtain. It’s really that simple. If you want to have freedom, pay your dues and it will come. If you try to take freedom before paying your dues, you’ll find that responsibility will still catch up to you, no matter how hard you run from it.
Let’s take the example of a teenager who hates his home life. Everyone always makes him do chores, he can’t use the phone because he’s on restriction, and he doesn’t even have a car. Man, oh man, the world sits squarely atop this young man’s chest. Now let’s say this young man, let’s call him Joe, decides he’s had it. He wants his freedom and he wants it yesterday, so he decides to run away. Joe lights out of the house with a few belongings and hits the open road.
For the first few hours, Joe is in heaven. No one is nagging him. He can do pretty much what he wants whenever he wants. He’s got a little money in his pocket, and anything in the world can be his, assuming it costs less than fifty bucks.
A few days come and go. Joe has taken to sleeping in back alleys and sheds to save his money, but even so, he’s dead broke in a five days. His back hurts from sleeping on concrete. Sweat and dirt have formed a fine patina on his skin because he had the bad fortune to liberate himself in the middle of the summer. He needs food and shelter soon, so he looks for a job.
He goes to some job interviews. He looks terrible. He smells. And he’s now a high school dropout. For some reason, no one wants to hire him. Finally, he gets a job cleaning out the toilets in public facilities. His boss is just plain mean, insisting that he wear his public works uniform at all times on the job. He has to work terrible hours, holidays, and weekends. But then he gets that first paycheck. Oh yeah! Things are looking up now. He finds a one-room studio apartment that eats up well over half the paycheck because he has to put down a security deposit. He doesn’t have enough money left over to get a mattress, much less any furniture. So he works harder. With overtime, he’s able to save up enough for a mattress and a nasty old couch.
One day while sitting on his couch, drinking a nice glass of tap water, he realizes he’s working way harder than he ever was at home. He’s putting up with more verbal harassment than his parents ever thought of dishing out from his sadistic boss, and he lives in much worse surroundings.
Okay, enough of Joe, but don’t think I’m being melodramatic. The story above is real life. I’ve seen it happen dozens of times in one variation or another. Many times, the price you pay for freedom can be much worse. And the rule doesn’t just apply to young people who are trying to break away from their parents. In any stage of life, you will be granted more freedom if you are willing to take on more responsibility. And the converse is true, if you don’t want to do anything, society will allow you to do that, but you’ll have almost no freedom.
But, you say, there is an exception to this rule–the trust fund child. There are some variants to this person, but it’s basically any person who comes by wealth they didn’t have to earn. This would, at first, seem to be an example of how you can have freedom without responsibility. But let’s look at the trust fund child a little closer.
Now these must be the happiest people in the world, right? They can do anything they want to do, and concerns about money rarely, if ever, cross their minds. They certainly don’t need to work, and why would they? It would just get in the way of fun time. Do you think these people are happy?
Not really. From my experience I could even say rarely, and here is the reason why. They have no challenge. For most people, life itself has a built in challenge: to survive. For more affluent nations this survival mode moves forward and the goal becomes to have a nice life and nice things, but it’s still done out of a perceived necessity. The trust fund child has no such drive. There is nothing to stop them from sleeping away the days for months on end. They can party, do drugs, go on wild adventures, anything in the world, but they will never have the need to struggle, at least somewhat, to exist. And I think this destroys them. Human beings, for whatever reason, have an innate need to work or to be needed. Freud said to work and to love were our two greats aims as humans, and though I don’t agree with Freud about everything, he was dead on here. We need a purpose. We need to find a balance between a challenging life and leisure. All challenge is no good. All leisure is no good. I’ll talk more about this later, but remember freedom always has a cost, and if you’re not willing to pay that cost, you have to be willing to live a relatively constrained life.
