Freedom doesn’t make the mosquitoes go away

We’re hungry, tired and building a shelter out of branches. We don’t know where the hell we are. We’re not really allowed to have opinions on whether it’s cold, whether there’s rain, or whether there are mosquitoes.

And there are mosquitoes.

I signed up for a survival course. Learning to build a shelter was part of it, but a surprising amount of the training was mental. Okay, now that you have all those unpleasant feelings, what do you do with them?

Years earlier, in high school, the grown-ups kept telling me this was the easiest time of my life. In some ways, they were right. I had my basic needs covered and plenty of opportunities ahead. There was a lot less to worry about.

But I remember feeling that I hadn’t chosen any of this. I was being put through something, and that made the whole thing much less enjoyable. I didn’t feel free. I also don’t think I had yet learned how to take a situation I hadn’t chosen and make something of it.

The survival course was considerably less comfortable. Yet I took something useful from it that I hadn’t managed to learn at school: how to keep deciding what to do when I disliked the circumstances.

So how much does having an easier time actually tell us about being free?

There was an important detail about the course: we could quit. I had chosen to attend, and continuing was a decision I could keep making. The hunger, exhaustion and mosquitoes didn’t disappear because I stayed. But they didn’t answer the question of what I would do next, either.

That’s where agency comes in. How much say do I have in my next move?

Having more options helps. It gives us alternatives to things we don’t want to do. Making a commitment can help too, depending on what it makes possible and what it takes out of our hands. Neither the number of open doors nor the number of decisions already made tells the whole story.

Freedom is a scale. I’m more free when I have more say in what happens next, even if the choices available to me are imperfect. I don’t get to decide that there are no constraints.

That distinction is part of what pushed me toward freelancing and entrepreneurship. It hasn’t made things easy by any means. At various points, it cost me money compared with taking a more traditional engineering path. It also brought a lot of questions that didn’t come with pre-made answers.

Where am I going to work from? Where will I find my next client? How do I make sure this makes financial sense?

Having to answer those questions didn’t always feel liberating. In the end, though, it felt more rewarding than having a set of answers pushed onto me. Whatever pile of crap comes my way, I had my say in it.

That doesn’t mean I chose every problem. Problems occur. Health doesn’t always cooperate. Other people make decisions. We’re still human; we’re going to die one day. There isn’t a final arrangement of life where all the constraints have been removed forever.

And there’s a limit to how far this reflection travels. I chose the survival course and could leave it. Someone who can’t cover their basic needs is in a very different situation. Telling them freedom is a mindset would ignore the circumstances restricting their choices. More actual options matter.

But where we do have room to move, it helps to examine what’s keeping us still. Sometimes “I can’t” describes an external barrier. Sometimes it describes a possibility we’ve already ruled out in our own minds. Those deserve different responses.

I’ve got this set of cards in my hand. What am I going to do with it?

Some constraints can be changed, and changing them may be the most useful next move. Others will still be there tomorrow. We can spend a long time waiting for those to disappear before making a decision they don’t actually prevent us from making.

We can also judge a choice by the wrong promise. If I expect more freedom to leave me with fewer problems and fewer unanswered questions, I may be disappointed by something that gives me more say. Answering those questions is work. It’s also an opportunity to choose answers that haven’t been supplied for me.

Back on the course, we still didn’t know where the hell we were. There were still mosquitoes. Continuing didn’t give me control over either of those things. It gave me practice in deciding what to do with them—and the option to stop was part of what made continuing a choice.