Freedom

What does it mean to achieve freedom? When is a person free? Let’s break this down today. To understand what freedom is, let us first define freedom. Freedom is having autonomy to do whatever we wish. This is a very raw and broad definition of freedom. For some additional context, let’s define what is the opposite of freedom, or what does it mean to not be free? We could define it broadly as something controlling us; something hindering our autonomy. Now this “something” and “us” will also have to be defined, and that is what brings us to the main topic of this blog. We will consider several different definitions of “something” and “us” and this, in my opinion, will help us understand freedom in a much more nuanced way. ...

Today’s topic is controversial and it is something I have been thinking about lately. Can you achieve freedom by restricting yourself? Seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Let me explain. Long back, our ancestors, the hunter gatherers, had a lot of freedom. They used to wander around in forests to collect food. They did not stay at one place for long. Then time passed by, we learned agriculture and we had to restrict ourselves to one location. We lost freedom of continuously moving from one location to another because our lifestyle demanded that we stay in one location. We restricted ourselves to a single location and we freed ourselves from the worry of “will I have to stay hungry tonight?”. You might be starting to get the point here. ...