Freedom doesn’t come with pre-made answers

You can gain freedom and find that your life contains more unanswered questions than before.

Where am I going to work from? Where will the next client come from? How do I make sure this makes financial sense? Who decides what happens when things go wrong?

Someone else answering those questions can be a considerable relief. Having to answer them yourself can be exhausting. Yet those unanswered questions may be part of what you wanted when you wanted more freedom.

That makes freedom a little difficult to judge by how comfortable it feels.

The questions you get to answer

Keeping your options open and making a commitment can both contribute to freedom. Neither tells you much on its own. An option matters because it gives you a possible next move. A commitment matters partly because of what it lets you decide, and what it takes out of your hands.

For me, the useful word here is agency: how much say do you have in what happens next?

When I started freelancing and became an entrepreneur, I took on questions that didn’t come with pre-made answers. It didn’t always feel liberating. It did feel more rewarding than having a set of answers pushed onto me. Or, less elegantly: whatever pile of crap comes my way, I had my say in it.

There’s a cost hidden in that sentence. You also get to live with your answers.

More agency can mean more uncertainty, more decisions and more responsibility. If we expect freedom to feel like the removal of all those things, we may fail to recognize it when it arrives. We might even mistake the relief of having everything decided for us for the freedom to decide.

That relief has value. The question is what we’re exchanging for it.

The cards in your hand

There are two ways this can go wrong.

One is to think that a sufficiently good decision will remove constraints altogether. Choose the right career, make enough money, arrange life correctly, and eventually nothing will push you around.

But problems keep occurring. Health doesn’t always cooperate. Other people have a say. We don’t get to opt out of being human. A choice can improve the next set of options without ending the need to choose.

The other mistake is to turn agency into a claim that circumstances don’t matter.

Someone who cannot cover their basic needs needs those constraints taken seriously. Telling them freedom is a mindset, or any kind of bullshit like that, ignores the very thing limiting their next move.

Having more options really does help. The ability to respond within a constraint does not make the constraint imaginary, fair or harmless.

At the same time, some limits exist in our perception. “I can’t do that” can describe an external barrier. It can also describe something we haven’t given ourselves permission to attempt. Treating those as identical closes off a question before we’ve examined it.

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

That question doesn’t pretend the cards are good. It asks where a decision is still possible.

You can have opinions about the rain

A survival course once made this distinction unusually concrete for me. We were hungry, tired and building shelters out of branches. We didn’t know where the hell we were. We weren’t really allowed to have opinions on whether it was cold, whether it was raining, or whether there were mosquitoes.

And there were mosquitoes.

The training kept returning to a question: now that you have all those unpleasant feelings, what do you do with them?

We could quit. Continuing was a decision we kept making within conditions we couldn’t rearrange.

There’s an obvious limit to the example: I chose to attend. Voluntary discomfort is not the same as being trapped in hardship. But that choice made something visible. Feeling miserable and still having a say in your next move can coexist.

The weather didn’t have to improve for another decision to become possible.

More say, rather than no constraints

It’s tempting to call a life free or unfree, as though there were a point where the constraints finally disappear. But it’s a scale. More say in your next move is more freedom, even if the move is difficult and the available choices are imperfect.

This leaves a less comfortable way to look at our decisions. We can ask how much trouble they will remove. We can also ask which questions we’ll get to answer afterward.

Sometimes those point in the same direction. Sometimes they don’t.

An unanswered question can be a burden. It can also be a decision that still belongs to you.