I feel like most people have never experienced actual “freedom.”
From K–12 through college, we are trained—explicitly or implicitly—for work. We’re asked “what we want to be when we grow up,” but our answers are constrained by what we’ve already seen. The world is pre-configured. A narrow menu of roles is presented as “normal,” while anything outside it is framed as unrealistic, irresponsible, or uninteresting.
So we get in line.
What we call reality is often just a highly engineered bubble—economic, social, political—internally coherent, yet fundamentally incompatible with what humans need to thrive. Unconditional security. Time. Curiosity. Movement. Community. Meaning.
When that bubble breaks—through a pandemic, automation, job loss, or sudden financial independence—many people don’t feel liberated. They feel lost.
Not because freedom is bad, but because freedom was never practiced.
We weren’t taught how to direct ourselves without external pressure. How to ask what we want without permission. How to live when survival isn’t the primary organizing principle. Work became identity, and when the role disappears, so does the self—at least temporarily.
This isn’t a personal failure, it’s a missing curriculum.
Humans do need structure—but chosen, adaptive, humane structure. Not existence held hostage by productivity. Not meaning outsourced to systems built around extraction and efficiency.
Most people aren’t unfree because they lack options.
They’re unfree because they were never taught how to inhabit freedom.