Personal Freedom

Through a combination of intentional effort and uncontrollable circumstance, I now command more personal agency in my life than I ever have before. I have more discretion on how and where I spend my time compared to years past due to advancing my professional trade skills to attain a role that pays well without excessive demands on my time that has also evolved to allow largely remote working arrangements due to the COVID impacts on the working environment.

I have been steadily working my way towards attaining this level of freedom for years and in the past the movement towards this level of autonomy has been incremental and steady. Now with the rapid evolution over the last two years, I’ve been thrust with considerably more discretion and responsibility in a short span of time. I can only compare it to the windfall of winning a lottery as I suddenly have much more of a resource than I previously did and I’ll admit I struggle to channel that abundance of resource productively.

Over this summer, my life situation has stabilized and I’ve lost the benefit of an external excuse to blame for my haphazard management of my own schedule. Left now with a stable routine of responsibilities to care for, I’m forced to confront my manager, me, to air my grievances over my lack of progress. It’s our most productive and beneficial exercise, to be honest with ourselves about those things we subconsciously know we are falling short on. Slowly I’ve felt the guilt mounting, the stress compounding, the dissonance between what I aspire to be compared to the reality of how I spend my time.

Some people crave a return to the routine and structure of going into the office typically citing the social costs of being isolated at a home office. But being liberated from this obligation is the source of the time windfall I now enjoy. To me it’s as if a lottery winner wished to return their winnings due to the social cost of alienating their friends and family. Each person must surely weight the benefits and consequences of a lifestyle, but for me, turning away from this degree of personal freedom is simply inconceivable especially considering I expected to work for many years to arrive at even a diluted version of my current circumstance.

So acknowledging the incredible opportunity and gift this transformation represents and acknowledging the high personal cost paid in human lives and societal turmoil, I’ll confront my ongoing struggle, discipline. Absent the demands of the traditional office routine, the success of my days have truly become a reflection of my own personal discipline. When I wake, how often I cook, how tidy my house, how I put to work those extra couple of hours each day. At times during quarantine and remote work, I’ve brought to bear an incredible amount of effort towards personal and professional ends. Ultimately though, my time in isolation has been one of cycles of productivity separated by periods of outright lethargy.

I’ve struggled to attribute the root of this behavior, I note how in the “past” I would get a fair dose of motivation for action due to social pressures from having company or trying to make a positive impression when I was out in the world. This compelled me to clean, work out, and pursue constructive projects more consistently. Now lacking social pressure, there is a less frequent external stimulus for my own constructive behaviors. Then there is the relatively lack of scarcity of time which promotes a less efficient use of that time, since there is plenty more of it to go around.

But most concerning is the magnified impression of routine and a lack of variance or nuance to mark the passage of time. As a result, days, weeks, and months passed indiscriminately without milestones to mark them as they faded into obscurity. Day by day, routines emerged formed by the minimal requirements of work and sustenance supplemented by momentary pleasuring seeking in TV, games, and substances to escape the monotony of each repeating cycle. Without firm objectives and timelines of my own nor the external pressures or triggers that compelled constructive action in the past, my default orientation became one of lethargy instead of action.

With this new status quo being one of inaction, any constructive activity represented a departure from the norm requiring notable mental energy just to engage. So now each day I confront myself with the choice, the freedom, of being either productive or leisurely and in reflection I know that leisure has taken far too much priority. I’m forced to revisit my values and while personal freedom is at the top, personal growth accompanies it. I could surely abandon or revisit this value structure, but in spite of my deviation away from it, I still find it to be the most compelling foundation for a prosperous and empowering future.

So for me, my conclusion is that I need to be more faithful to myself, to my values. I need to reprogram myself to operate at a state of action where the constructive use of my personal freedom represents a majority of my time spent. I’ll employ key tactics which I’ve leaned on in the past, the weekly practice, selective reliance on external schedules, and consuming music and books over TV. My call to action for you is to reflect on how your routines have changed, how you spend your time, and then compare that to your values. Ultimately, we must bring these into alignment to avoid a devastating reality check once we’ve wandered too far astray of ourselves to recognize where we’re going.