In The Constraints on Freedom, I had brought up the impact of the loss of three basic freedoms at a personal level. The freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements. A big lesson from the book I got it from is that even at a civilisational level, ‘the map is not the terrain’ i.e. the granular trade-offs, impacts, and daily wins and losses of different societies don’t get covered in broad strokes. At an individual level, therefore, mapping one’s worldview and practices purely according to popular discourse and aping lessons from ‘experts’ blindly is probably not a great idea. This post is a start to framing my own can-need-want list and specific actions I would like to take to give myself (and hopefully some others around me) more basic freedom, and a bit more. I am framing this around three aspects.
Financial Freedom
This has a role in all the three basic freedoms. Let’s take the freedom to disobey. As I mentioned in my previous post, this boils down to physical or economic power. I am leaving emotional power out of the equation because I believe I am reasonably on top of that. While I don’t think I’m going to go Bruce Lee or MMA on this, I definitely want to ensure the economic component is solved for. Shane Parrish once wrote, “You’re free when no one can buy your time“. That’s exactly what I want to do in my professional life. At this point, my concession to self is that I will only work with people I want to. But all work that is done for income involves trade-offs. So the goal is to get to a level of financial freedom so I can play with whatever I want without bothering about professional growth. i.e. disobey what society deems as laws for the professional. I am also super conscious of how health can throw a spanner, therefore that gets factored into ‘my number’.
The other thing that gets factored in is the money for travel. This partially solves for the ‘freedom to go anywhere’. ‘Anywhere’ is not really unlimited – it is based on our wants, and the trade-offs we are fine with. As a base, I am now comfortable with Bangalore. The climate has ensured that we aren’t considering Cochin as an option. For now. Is Portugal or SE Asia or LatAm an option? Indeed they are. Do we want that? No. But yes, living in communities that fulfil certain criteria. While we’re fine with where we are now, we also have a plan to revisit this in possibly 5 years, based on what we need/want then. This last bit is also related to the third kind of freedom.
The freedom to create new social arrangements. Again, I am limiting this to things we would want. Some of it already gets covered in the professional freedom context. When I am not worried about income, my social arrangements need not be for career growth or peer validation. I can also choose to work on social or community projects.
Intentionality
The only thing that really separates us from everything else nature created. Everything non-living obeys the laws of nature and physics and everything (else) living goes by (only) instinct.
Financial freedom provides a great start to expanding one’s space and time. However neither are unlimited. Freedom is thus about having a say in the choice architecture and living an intentional life through conscious choices. Also, it doesn’t just stop at where someone else’s nose begins, but involves trade-offs.
In the era of productivity-p0rn, the discourse around intentional life is mostly about sharply focusing on a domain where your passion and talent are, and thereby increase productivity and becoming an alpha. Or at least a known expert. I am not a fan primarily because of two reasons. The first is that if you have to make yourself productive for the thing you love to do, it does seem ironical. The same thing that puts me off annual books-I-will-read targets. I would do this as a professional, but wouldn’t do it in other areas of my life. (That’s granularity too, to toggle one’s wiring as per context. Not that it’s easy.) The second is centred around my freedom and what has been aptly phrased by Ivan Illich as defending “alternatives to economics” not simply “economic alternatives.” Fundamentally, freedom from ‘the market’. I discovered this in a brilliant article titled Your attention is not a resource, which among other things points out the entanglement of attention and money, and the dark spiral of the gig economy manifesting itself everywhere! To be noted, these two points are not really the author’s own perspectives, which is around not treating attention as a resource and assuming that at any given moment, we have as much attention as we need to do good as opposed to chasing ‘value’.
Intentionality is thus related to the last sentence. The freedom to choose the good over value. Like I said, financial freedom provides the optionality, but if those gazillionaires who have financial freedom chose ‘good’ over ‘value’, this would be a different world. I fully acknowledge that ‘good’ is subjective, and maybe those gazillionaires are doing what they define as ‘good’.
Habits
I am a creature of habit. And sometimes my habits become creatures that stay around long after their shelf life. This has an impact on the freedom that I haven’t really brought up yet – time. I read an excellent post recently – Routine Maintenance (a very smart title!). From the time we switched from nature to mechanical contraptions to tell time, time became currency, something that could be spent or saved, and people increasingly turned to machines to make life more efficient. With time (pun unintended), the monastery gave way to the factory. Ritual dissolved into routine.
Obviously, these daily patterns do help in discipline, structure, and thus narrative legibility to a person or a group’s existence. And habits are indeed a way to off-load cognitive overhead. Just as with productivity, I apply this a lot in my professional life, but am increasingly careful about porting it to other spheres of my life. Because, at their most extreme, habits can slide into addictions and compulsions, patterns that resist our conscious efforts to break them. As the author points out, this could potentially become ‘life hacking’. I often joke about it as the kind that tries to make sleep productive! But these days, that’s not an exaggeration as “lifestyle automation” is rampant. I have been writing about this for a while, Default in our stars was probably the last.
Habits are possibly a micro-version of intentionality. Thus lifestyle automation to me is a devolution from the kind of intentionality I brought up earlier. The middle path is Simone Weil’s take – freedom is not merely the absence of necessity; rather, it involves achieving the right balance between thought and action. If we think of habits in place of tools in “we shape our tools and then the tools shape us“, we probably need a meta-habit of reviewing our habits and aligning them with our intentions. Matching strategy to resources, as Clayton Christensen et al. point out in How to Measure Your Life. I have yet to start work on this.
End game
In The Bells of Old Tokyo, a cafe owner named Daibo tells the author Anna Sherman, ‘If each of us has our own timeframe, it’s the same as time not existing. We would be so much happier if we did things by our own clock. Being forced to conform to what works for somebody else, well, that makes you crazy.‘ At this point, time is a big component of what I define as freedom. Both at a micro level (stimulus and response) as well as in terms of intentionality.
I used to think of freedom as an end, but the more I start doing things that I like to do, I realise it’s only a means. I see financial freedom-intentionality-habits running in parallel to society-self image-self. With the (first) three in alignment, I should be able to free my mind and time, and work on this – “If I need things to be a certain way, I’m held hostage by them“. That probably is true freedom.
