Good morning ladies and gentleman.
What is freedom? Americans and their presidents have been shouting about freedom for decades, however as with many concepts in modern day vocabulary, it lacks a specific universal definition, to the point where the dictionary definition doesn’t really hold any relevance.
Anyway the general idea of freedom in America is based on The American dream- an idea developed by historian James Truslow Adams in the 1930’s, the idea by which equality is available to any American allowing aspirations and goals to be achieved.
Human beings are naturally goal orientated people, going about their business, working through an imaginary tick list to deal with the single tasks that need doing each day, from finishing the reports at work to buying food at the supermarket. Even at the supermarket people are goal orientated, quantifying everything they need in another tick, list, only leaving when they’re list of “goals” have been ticked off.
However, is this freedom? Once you get to the end of your list of goals, you go to sleep and aspire to complete the next set of goals the next day, convincing yourself that you have too much to do to aspire to what you want to spend time doing, to live the way you feel like would make you the happiest. Is this freedom? or as it simply doing as we are supposed to, as we have a tendency to ignore the bigger goals, the bigger aspirations we should be driving towards. These surely are the goals that matters, yet we almost actively avoid thinking about them. Why?
Freedom cannot be really defined, especially today. People are spending longer and longer working in jobs they don’t find particularly interesting, trying to balance life and work, as if when we walk into work we aren’t really that person with the dreams, with the drive, with the desire for freedom. Why do we do this? We act as if our work should be part of our life, as if its there for a purpose but it isn’t who we are. We keep the job because we are supposed to, limit our freedom because it might risk the comfortable life we have gotten used to.
Maybe you move up in the company and become more successful, you make a little more money, so maybe you should be considered a success. You live your life in two separate bubbles, the successful businessperson, and the “real” you, problem being the more time you spend working you wind up being less and less confident in who you are, because you end up spending more time “ignoring them” and keeping so busy in your work. This where the lines start to blur, as we have had this idea throughout the world that once we become successful, in business, in life, in money, property, whatever, that our lives will instantly become better, we will have that sense of fulfillment and we will be free.
What is freedom- what does it mean to you in your life?
Until next time. DR
Random motivation picture.
