The Cost of Freedom
We lose so much more than financial security — we lose ourselves
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Perpetually working to pay debts to afford existence suffocates living. We sell our time to buy our survival and spend most of our lives worrying about life’s future price. Financial stress negates the freedom to experience life, yet we accept the burden as if there’s no other option, and we suffer for it. The effort relentlessly wondering how we’re going to afford life depletes the energy to consider ourselves, society, and the environment.
Humanity mentally adapts to a superficial life and tries to domesticate our instincts, but they’re insuppressible. Alcohol or other drugs, consumerism, TV, video games, social media, and any reliable escapism grants some reprieve from the socioeconomic pressure, but they aren’t sustainable. Short-term fixes as a substitute for what should naturally exist in our daily life don’t suffice and isn’t a fair trade.
We distract ourselves as much as possible, but we can’t separate from our primal instincts because we can’t outrun ourselves. We learn techniques to turn off our minds from the world if we’re fortunate, but it’s not easy. Bitterness overwhelms and defeats us when we’re endlessly running a marathon to nowhere, and eventually, the deprivation blurs our identity.
We’re emotional with inherent needs, but we have to schedule a time to be ourselves. If permitted and affordable, a two-week (hopefully, paid) vacation consists of unwinding, but it takes at least two weeks to feel human again. Anxiety from daily participation in a stressful environment and ongoing obligations doesn’t dissolve because we’re never free.
Society’s anger and alienation didn’t mysteriously appear — they’re symptoms of a broken culture, and disconnecting from our community isolates us, but we don’t like to be alone. Subsets of the population struggling to conform to the “normie” pursuit of wealth and success agenda revert to nihilist subcultures and fringe groups. Civil unrest is synonymous with extreme inequality and failed governance.
“People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.”― Robert D…
