By Oliver Burkeman
When you say “I am busy!”-- what does it mean?
You might feel that you can't spend half an hour working on an exhilarating creative project because there are too many emails to be answered or too many household chores that need to be completed. You almost never have to meet any work deadline, honor any commitment, answer an email (or six), fulfill a family obligation or anything else. It is a fact that you're pretty much free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences of the choices you have made.
Consequences aren't really optional and avoidance behavior seldom works very well. Every choice you make comes with some sort of consequences because at any instance you can only pick one path and must deal with the repercussions of not picking any of the others, for example if you went to London on Tuesday you probably didn’t go to Paris on the same day.
The English comedian Peter Cook is said to have responded when invited by a friend to have dinner with Prince Andrew, “Oh dear, after checking my diary, I find I'm watching television that night.”
Freedom isn't a matter of somehow wriggling free of the costs of your choice. That's never an option. It means realizing that nothing can stop you from doing anything at all; so long as you're willing to pay the cost. Unless you're being physically coerced into doing something, the notion that you must do something just means that you don't want to pay the price of not doing it.
The economist Thomas Sowell summed things up by saying that there are no solutions only trade offs. The only question to ask about any choice is... “What is the price and is it worth paying?” If we are being honest with ourselves, the temptation is often to exaggerate potential consequences so as to spare ourselves the burden of making a bold choice. Of course, we could turn the situation into a major drama but the simple fact is that the choice remains.
Whatever choice you make, so long as you make it in the spirit of facing the consequences, the result will be personal freedom from limitation. Real freedom comes from making an informed decision and becoming comfortable with the consequences of that decision. The biggest secret of all is that a decision can potentially be changed, at least to some degree. There will always be trade offs— the option is to choose the trade off that you like or prefer. If you don’t really like any of the available trade offs you still get to make a choice of the perceived choices. Remember that the facts remain and things usually turn out better than expected anyhow.
10/13/24