Freedom Has No Reset Button

I had another one of my weak moments and opened a tabloid.

The great sensation of the day was that a mid-forties influencer now had a six-pack.

Fair enough.

What interested me more was the philosophy attached to it:

“Change your energy and your habits. Create a new identity. Just make the decision. Every day, you can choose again who you want to be.”

It sounds uplifting.

Philosophically, it is rather thin.

Because life does not happen in a vacuum.

Of course people can change. They can lose weight, become stronger, learn new skills, leave bad habits behind, change careers, move countries, rebuild relationships, and sometimes alter the course of their lives quite dramatically.

But we do not wake up in the morning as blank pages.

We bring a body with us.

A past.

Habits.

Age.

Money.

Obligations.

Talents.

Injuries.

Temperament.

Genetics.

Other people.

And thousands of earlier decisions whose consequences do not disappear simply because we feel unusually determined over breakfast.

Take Mount Everest.

Someone who has spent ten years sitting in front of the television can certainly wake up tomorrow and decide:

I want to climb Everest.

That decision may be real.

It may even matter.

But the next morning he is not standing near the summit.

More likely, he starts by walking once around a football field.

Then twice.

Perhaps later he tries to run.

Eventually he manages a few kilometres.

Then maybe a hill.

Then a small mountain.

Later, perhaps, a proper 2,000-metre peak.

And somewhere along the way, something happens that self-help culture rarely talks about:

Reality answers back.

Perhaps he discovers that he has extraordinary endurance.

Perhaps he loves mountains.

Perhaps he hates them.

Perhaps altitude makes him violently ill.

Perhaps his knees cannot cope.

Perhaps he discovers physical abilities he never knew he had.

Perhaps he meets a limit that training can move.

Perhaps he meets another limit that cannot be moved very far at all.

The important point is this:

He cannot know all of that on day one.

Our possibilities are not fully available to us through imagination.

We discover them through action.

That is why I distrust the sentence, “Every day, you can choose who you want to be.”

It confuses freedom with omnipotence.

Free will does not mean that reality is obliged to obey our decision.

It means that we can choose a direction.

Then we begin walking.

And only on the way do we discover how far that road can actually take us.

This may be the central mistake of much of self-help culture. It treats identity like a consumer product.

Create your new self.

As if an internal menu appeared:

Athlete.

Entrepreneur.

Mountaineer.

Successful person.

Happy person.

Please select.

But identity usually does not work that way.

You do not first become a mountaineer and then climb mountains.

You go into the mountains.

You get cold.

You train.

You turn back because the weather changes.

You make mistakes.

You learn your body.

You improve.

And at some point you look back and realize:

Apparently, I have become someone who climbs mountains.

Identity is not simply a decision.

It is the sediment left behind by many decisions.

None of this makes change impossible.

Quite the opposite.

It makes change more interesting.

Freedom is not the absence of limits.

Freedom is the ability to move, to test yourself against reality, and to discover which limits are real, which were merely habits, and which can be pushed.

That is less Instagram-friendly than:

“Create a new identity.”

It takes longer.

It often looks unimpressive.

Sometimes it looks like failure.

And it may teach us something the self-help industry is not especially eager to sell:

You can change many things. But you cannot become everything.

Perhaps that is the real act of freedom:

not allowing yourself to be blinded by the illusion that you can be anything, but discovering through action what you can become.