Freedom To Not Do

Well, this is a pretty interesting blog post, which is in making in various forms for a few weeks already. It is something I realized pretty recently, after being at the entirely other spectrum, fully believing that freedom is the ability to do something. And yeah, it is, but also it is a pretty far off the center of what freedom can be.

Let’s start with what freedom means for people. This can’t be easily assessed, maybe if we get the popular concepts and ideas from the mainstream. But ultimately, freedom for each of us is a little different. It all comes down to the beliefs, current situation that you are right now, and everything that influences your options and your thinking.

Most will be something around on the left of the spectrum, but still pretty close to the center. Meaning that you will feel pretty free and define your freedom as “I can do everything that fits into my schedule, responsibilities and financial capabilities” with the context of material things like buying stuff or doing something, potentially with someone. The people with much money (wow) from time to time will be more on the farther left side, with the mentality of “I have money for pretty much everything, it just the matter of me having a feeling for it”. You can see the picture, I believe.

Now we have the right side, which I will name “spiritual freedom” and accordingly, the left one will be “materialistic freedom”. The titles I gave them suggest that we are operating on different fields of thinking, yet still in the same idea - freedom.

Again, from the center to far right, there is a broad spectrum of possibilities. But they are all connected with one thing, the changes made in you, using your own thoughts and actions inside. So, being pretty close to the center but leaning towards the right, you would still say “I can do everything that fits into my schedule, responsibilities and financial capabilities”, but now you will take it into a different context. The “everything” now includes the possibility of changing your way of thinking and taking actions. Now, you can set a goal for, let’s say, getting less upset when you hear the dog bark.

You reframed your definition of freedom to include the internal ones that are often forgotten. Congrats, your ability tree now has the thought control level 1. Far right is the same as far left but with exclusion of anything material. So you will be mentally locked out of changing your external situation, but you can change yourself. You are poor, but feeling rich, basically. (Poor as in homeless, the food is hard to get by etc.)

One can also add a second dimension, but this is a topic that I will leave for the discussion until I feel confident enough in my ability to describe it and operate on the idea itself.

Cheers.