What does it really mean to be free?

Reimagining the mind’s relationship with autonomy

Where I live, we’re beginning to trade the slow, dark, stultifying days of winter for the suddenly light and expansive days of spring. Amid this perennial transformation, I’ve found myself crawling toward a sense of freedom — or an emergence from a lethargic winter hibernation.

The human mind’s irresistible pull toward a sense of freedom is often taken for granted — it’s considered one of our inalienable features, an uncontested aspect of our nature. But, like most aspects of our mental lives, it seems that there’s much more to this instinctive value.

When examining the human mind, I find it’s often useful to look back to its early days, to its initial formation. There’s a certain richness there that we can’t always find in the quieter, more predictable adult brain. And when it comes to freedom, in particular, children are notorious for their outbursts for the sake of securing the right to their own self-directed, autonomous behavior. In our early years, we’re always looking for opportunities to assert our restless, ill-defined will, thanks in large part to a burgeoning self-awareness.

For so long as children, we’re merely an extension of our caregivers, hardly able to perceive that we are, in fact, separate from them. But, suddenly, in the toddler years, there’s a newfound sense of self and agency, an acknowledgement of desire and an expanding set of tools to make it known. It’s amid this primitive early noise that our relationship with autonomy is born and taken to its logical end: a lifelong quest for a life free of constraint.

This would be interesting, but not especially question-raising, if it weren’t for children’s simultaneous inner craving for routine, order, and rules. It’s been well-documented among child development researchers and educators that children thrive most when planted in rule-based worlds that give clear boundaries, expectations, and consequences. Nothing draconian — there must always be room for creativity and self-expression — but unyielding boundaries, nonetheless. Children of overly permissive parents are notoriously anxiety-riddled and directionless. They have freedom, but it’s not circumscribed. For the small, developing mind, this boundlessness is overwhelming, a threat to its ability to build a cohesive and intelligible worldview.

But this tension does not die out in childhood as we grow into our minds. It’s not as though we age and discover that our capacity for freedom is substantially larger than it’s ever been before. If anything, the inverse happens. When faced with the gargantuan freedom of adulthood, many shy away from it, wishing instead for the old, familiar constraints of a safe, well-regulated childhood.¹

But this is the crux of adulthood — or, more precisely, maturity. It’s the realization that, at our core, there is total and utter freedom. Where we once saw only rules and expectations and behavioral barriers, we grow to understand that none truly exist.

This idea is at the heart of the twentieth century’s existentialist movement — and this particular line of thought is most closely aligned with Jean-Paul Sartre and his famous depiction of our existential angst in the face of our unfettered freedom. For Sartre, it’s when we finally come to accept that much of the world’s behavior, including our own, is a societal charade, that we come face to face with a sort of mind-warping vertigo. As if teetering on the edge of a tall precipice, we must choose whether to plunge headfirst into the true, authentic, free version of ourselves or retreat into our familiar existence of bad faith.

I’ve always enjoyed, with reservation, Sartre’s philosophical metaphor here. To me, his idea is an early incarnation of our current self-improvement culture and its obsession with abandoning our old, inauthentic selves to make room for our new, liberated selves — though it preserves a certain philosophical authority that the modern culture fails to command².

That said, I’m not convinced it captures the full picture of our relationship with freedom. The body is a homeostatic machine; it survives on a principle of regulation, balance. Dysregulation is a product of too much or too little — a threat to the system’s delicate, internal balance. Freedom, it appears, is no exception.

Sartre asks us to wade into the abyss, to confront our freedom head-on and then emerge on the other side as a new person — free of the constraints of social expectation, meaning-making myths, self-narrative. For Sartre, each of these layers of social existence merely oppresses the inner nothingness at our core, dressing it up against our will and converting us into the playthings of pleasant society. Consequently, the solution to this existential drama is to dive off the precipice, to reject these constraints, to free ourselves of the things that permit our social existence.

And yet, it seems unlikely that nearly all of us have developed and sustained the socially lubricating behaviors we have simply in an effort to deny our freedom and relieve any accompanying anxiety. In fact, the leading theory for our species’ global dominance does not rely on our free and unfettered consciousness, but on our unprecedented tendency to deploy that consciousness in cooperative and constrained ways.

I use both the terms cooperative and constrained here because effective cooperation implicitly depends on behavioral constraint. Sure, perhaps we are hubs of animated nothingness able to execute any behavior that springs to mind, but, even more importantly, we have the ability not to do the thing that springs to mind. We have evolved a large and active prefrontal cortex that, among many other things, plays an enormous role in inhibiting behavior, in quieting the impulsiveness that characterizes much of the rest of the animal kingdom. We’ve achieved much of what we have as a species because of this conspicuous constraint on our behavior, not in spite of it.

One of the hallmark examples of our socially motivated constraint is our acceptance of (and often ardent support for) the modern state. Government, by its nature, is an apparatus of social cohesion. While we could exist in an anarchical “state of nature,” many of us are grateful to give up a fairly large portion of our freedom in exchange for state protection, order, and services³. Though the system is, again by its nature, coercive, we don’t really mind all that much. This isn’t a Sartrean indication of our weakness or our unwillingness to acknowledge our freedom of consciousness, but rather a uniquely human wisdom informing us that we aren’t particularly powerful (and are actually quite vulnerable) on our own⁴.

But our self-imposed constraint runs much deeper than statehood. It’s a minute-by-minute process of social awareness, empathy, censorship, inhibition, sensitivity. Taken to the extreme, these behaviors can lead to a particularly corrosive self-diminishment — but the rejection of them altogether is an even more dangerous rejection of social cohesion. Without these skills, we struggle to form strong relationships because, though we might be more authentic versions of ourselves, we fail to adjust and modulate ourselves based on the people we’re around and the situations in which we find ourselves. We’re prone to say and do only whatever feels right to us, which is a recipe for social ostracism⁵.

It’s here that we realize our freedom is a wonderful condition of human life, but it, in and of itself, does not make us what we are. Unchecked, our freedom pulls us further from the real conditions of our humanity: our cooperative, sensitive, and yes, at times, inhibitive nature.

Most paradoxically, might it be our inhibition, at least in some cases, that unveils our truest self? Human impulses rarely align with our highest goals or our most noble ambitions. Left to our own devices, we tend to slip into all those comfortable, indulgent behaviors that Sartre would disparage, the behaviors that appear freely chosen but are really the products of our undisciplined, un-actualized self.

If you’re scrolling the self-improvement side of the internet, you’ll likely come across a phrase along the lines of “discipline is freedom.”⁶ Like all aphorisms, it’s a bit reductive, but it still manages to speak to the paradoxical nature of our freedom. What many think of as freedom — the ability to do whatever I want, whenever I want — can quickly transform into a pattern of hedonistic, self-eroding behavior.

Meanwhile, it’s only through discipline that we can accomplish anything of significance — whether that’s our long-term health, our craft, or our career. It’s through a disciplined, demonstrably “unfree” approach to life that we unearth our actual freedom to be who and what we want, unclouded by the vices that otherwise govern and manipulate us.

In this way, our vertigo may emerge not from the swirling mass of our freedom, but from the tension between our freedom and our inhibition — the two forming an interplay that becomes nearly impossible to disentangle. Through both our collective and individual inhibition, we manage to produce a real and untouchable freedom that far outstrips our more trivial notions of what it means to be free.

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Human institutions and the digital rebellion

So, what do we do with our alternately vying freedom to and freedom not to?

Well, we largely find ourselves at the nexus of this conflict. Like children who outwardly bemoan constraint but inwardly crave it, we want, more than anything, to feel free — but within all those manageable constraints that make life worth living. We think we want unlimited options, but when faced with them, we find ourselves paralyzed by choice and endless opportunity — a common phenomenon known as “analysis paralysis.”

To cope with this classic symptom of Sartre’s vertigo, we’ve established all sorts of institutional guardrails that cushion us against the disorientation of unfettered freedom. There’s marriage, which forces us to choose a single partner and make a life with them. Marriage, in turn, exists for many in the larger framework of communal religion, which provides a clear and accessible blueprint for life and without which many struggle to pinpoint exactly what defines “the good life.”⁷ Even our modern conception of work still depends in part on preserving a sense of structure that most people unconsciously crave — despite rapidly evolving tools and conditions making more and more work able to be done wherever and whenever.

And though these are the exact institutions that Sartre railed against for coloring our view of our inherent, unbridled freedom, he could not have foreseen one of our most pernicious ones: the modern digital sphere.

Paradoxically once again, we find ourselves trapped between a hankering for freedom and a repulsion for actual freedom. In response, we’ve unequivocally turned to the digital sphere for an elusive sense of boundlessness in space and time. Online, we are bodiless, free from the normal signals of time’s passage as we stare deeper into the dim blue glow. There’s a sense that we are infinite, unburdened by the relentless finitude of our biological being. It’s become a sort of digital rebellion, an attempt to opt out of the perpetual and paradoxical challenge of existing with a sense of inordinate freedom in a finite, three-dimensional world.

In this way, digital technology becomes a tool of mindless hedonism — an addictive outlet for all of our unspent and subverted freedom.⁸ And so, in the process of shedding both the self-imposed constraints we’ve carefully fabricated and the undeniable limits of our biology, we become imprisoned by the very thing that promised to liberate us.

I suspect that much of this cycle stems from our implicit — though often ignored — understanding that much of our thought and motivation, and even, at times, our behavior, eludes our conscious control. We’re a mixed bag of influences driving who and what we are at any given moment — whether from our culture, our upbringing, our genetic makeup, or what we had for breakfast. As a species, though, we’re deeply attached to a precious sense of agency in the world. When we catch glimpses of its lapses, an incessant desire for freedom rushes in to fill its place. That desire is quickly met with a hearty dose of Sartrean vertigo, which we, in turn, numb with the disembodied ethereality of digital experience.

Unable to make up our minds, we float through much of life in a hazy mix of action, inhibition, escapism, and illusion — alternately embracing and rejecting the freedom that animates us. And though many advise with platitudes about authenticity and agency, I think there’s something to be said for the more dynamic mixture at the heart of our existence.

We are creatures of action, but we are also creatures of habit, for good reason. We depend on life-sustaining institutions, myths, cultural expectations, and now even digital platforms to shepherd us through an otherwise unnavigable and vertigo-inducing existence. We are at once the jailer and the imprisoned, recognizing at last that our freedom is not absolute and is perhaps more of a balancing act than we’ve ever come to appreciate.

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Thank you for reading. If you found this article valuable, I hope you’ll “like” and restack it to help others come across it.

1. It’s important to note that here I’m talking about existential freedom, not political freedom. Political freedom simply involves the absence of societal constraints — the liberty to live, work, marry, worship, dress, shop, speak, and vote in the ways we choose, free of institutional barriers. Once we have the privilege of living in a politically free society, it’s the much larger question of our existential freedom with which we must contend.

2. That’s really just my way of saying that it feels significant in a way that modern culture’s superficiality could never compare to.

3. This idea is largely the product of western 18th century philosophers advocating for a social contract, in which a country’s people acknowledge the limitation of their freedom in exchange for state-provided security and rule of law.

4. I should clarify that this doesn’t mean that our current conceptions of the state are flawless, just that they embody potential manifestations of inhibition in action on a grand scale.

5. There’s a famous theory of self-esteem, known as the sociometer theory, that defines self-esteem like a thermometer, rising and falling in direct response to our social acceptance. Though it’s disputed, the theory makes a compelling case for the notion that our behavior is often one big social feedback loop driving us toward the behaviors that align us with others and away from those that offend. Some might bristle at our accommodating nature, but it sets the foundation for our cooperative edge.

6. Owing largely to this book, I discovered.

7. Here I’m echoing Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s sentiment existentially interesting sentiment: “Without God, all things are permitted” — commonly attributed to his novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

8. Fellow Substack writer,

Omar F. Najjarine

, describes how “pleasure-seeking and escapism rise to meet the pain of burnout and endless fatigue” in the modern economy of wage work. Without sufficient freedom and intellectual nourishment from our daily work, we’re prone to lapse into hedonistic sedation during the few available hours — often readily supplied by our digital devices.