On Freedom
Or, how to make sense of what matters
By the time this essay is published, it will have been a solid two weeks since I last engaged with the news.
Or podcasts.
It’s been liberating.
It’s also been challenging.
There’s a part of me that feels disconnected, untethered from what’s happening in the nation.
And yet, I find myself more balanced.
Less distracted.
More focused.
Better able to regulate my own thoughts while still engaging meaningfully with others.
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Stepping Back
Even in this self-imposed news fast, I remain loosely aware of events.
There was a brief government shutdown.
There’s ongoing controversy over funding for DHS (thank you, USAA, for the assist).
I know the Super Bowl was played—Patriots versus Seahawks, apparently—and someone won.
There was, of course, the musical and political controversy surrounding the dueling halftime shows.
And yet, I find myself asking: does knowing any of this actually make me a better person?
A better neighbor?
A better citizen?
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Freedom From, Freedom To
Midway through Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace has his character Marathe observe, simply, “choosing is everything.”
That line gestures toward a crucial distinction: freedom from versus freedom to.
For many of us, freedom is understood almost entirely as freedom from—freedom from being told what to do, what to believe, how to live (with the usual nod to moral, ethical, and legal limits).
No one, at the end of the day, can really tell us what to do.
We are free from interference in our individual, atomized lives.
But Wallace was after something deeper.
Freedom is not merely the absence of constraint.
It is the presence of choice—and the capacity to choose wisely.
To choose deliberately.
To choose something other than the loud insistence of the vox populi.
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Learning How to Choose
Albert Ellis, the founder of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, once noted, “One of the great tragedies of life is that we don’t teach parents basic psychology.”
Ellis worried less about bad intentions than about unexamined beliefs—about emotional reactivity and poor modeling passed quietly from parent to child long before formal education ever begins.
His point wasn’t to shame parents, but to argue that emotional literacy should be as fundamental as reading or math, especially for those entrusted with raising the next generation.
Many of us, as parents, cling fiercely to freedom from—freedom from being told how to raise our children.
Debates over phones in schools, vaccines, library books, and curricula all orbit this same belief: don’t tell me what to do.
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The Discipline of Freedom
And yet, have we paused to ask why?
Why are we so passionate about freedom from, and so hesitant about freedom to?
As Marathe later asks, “How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?”
Adult freedom demands ongoing self-interrogation.
It requires us to notice how we ourselves are being shaped—by habits, by media, by fear, by convenience.
Epictetus puts it plainly: “No man is free who is not master of himself.”
Freedom, in the Stoic sense, is inseparable from restraint, patience, and choice under pressure. Seneca echoes this when he writes, “We should choose someone whose life, conversation, and expressive face have satisfied us—someone we may keep always before our eyes as a guardian and a model.”
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Becoming Worth Imitating
Which brings us, inevitably, to learning.
If we hope not to pass along our own emotional baggage—especially to children who depend on us for guidance—we must be intentional about whom we learn from and what we model.
Freedom, properly understood, is not a withdrawal from responsibility but a commitment to formation.
To becoming better versions of ourselves.
Better parents.
Better citizens.
And only then—only when freedom is paired with wisdom—do we gain the freedom to choose in ways that genuinely serve the common good.
That, it seems to me, is the kind of freedom worth practicing.