[debacle]

No one is ever truly free. Maybe great, great ascetics who are so detached from the world that their freedom has become a prison of their own.

When I was young, I felt every bite at my freedom deeply. Having a job, a schedule, responsibilities. Each one was deleterious to my freedom in a way that, as a young man, I was unequipped to handle.

I've learned at some point in the last few years that we trade in our freedoms every day of our lives. If you have a driver's license or pasteurized milk in your refrigerator, you have traded in some way in your freedom.

What I see today is a contingent of people who don't value their freedom at all. They have no spiritual relationship with their existence as an individual - their identity is predicated on their characteristics and not their innate uniqueness.

Down that road is every manner of tyranny.

[bluetomcat]

Freedom is context-dependent. Living in a civilised society gives you different kinds of freedoms (and obligations) compared to living in some form of a hunter-gatherer society. Like, freedom to pick the desired room temperature from your AC remote, rather than freedom to roam around and hunt whatever animals you choose.

[long_time_gone]

I love your comment. I have a small question with this part:

> What I see today is a contingent of people who don't value their freedom at all. They have no spiritual relationship with their existence as an individual - their identity is predicated on their characteristics and not their innate uniqueness.

Is it possible there is some "hierarchy of needs" for freedom and that "characteristic freedom" must be achieved before "uniqueness freedom" can be achieved? Said another way, maybe these people actually can't feel innately free until they feel their characteristics are accepted as part of free society.

[debacle]

The answer is anxiety. Even before COVID, there was a great + growing anxiety about the world. It was palpable.

I think that our anxiety is normal, it is biological, and it is inevitable. We are not that much more evolved than we were 20,000 years ago, but the things we worried about then are almost trivial now, and the ways in which we managed those anxieties are ineffective against the anxieties of the day. You can't run away from global warming, the surveillance state, or our increasingly rewarding but terrifying relationship with our world.

We need a new spirituality to combat this anxiety - it wont go away on its own. We need mnemonics that placate the animalistic parts of our brain that are appropriate for our times, and we need to be able to identify when our anxieties are being preyed on by others.

[sysadm1n]

> No one is ever truly free

Freedom exists in the mind. Even the most oppressed enslaved people can still be free in their own head.

On the other hand, I use some proprietary non-free software, so I've traded my freedom to use certain technology, but other than that, I consider myself as always being free no matter what the circumstances. All the old sages have said something similar: 'You are enslaved the moment you think you are'