Freedom Beyond Choice

Choice may be a necessary condition of freedom, but it’s not a sufficient one. Many people who have thousands of choices have never been much freer than a greyhound chasing a mechanical lure.

The thing that will make us happy — now caught, now boring — barely gets a nod as we charge off after the thing that will make us really happy.

“We think that freedom lies in making choices based on our desires,” Steve Hagen wrote. “But when we see our circumstances, we see much more than our desires. We see how the current situation has come to be.”

“Our only choice of consequence lies in whether or not we’re awake.”