Freedom Without a Price Tag
During Covid, I learned something about freedom. The strange thing is that I barely noticed it at the time.
I was unvaccinated, and within a remarkably short period my life became smaller. I could no longer go to certain restaurants, hotels were out too, and travel became difficult or impossible. The restaurants did not bother me much. Hotels mattered even less. But not being able to travel touched something different.
It was less the journey itself than the possibility of it. Crossing a border. Getting into the car and driving somewhere else. Not having to wonder whether I would be allowed to book a hotel room in another country. Things I had barely thought about before suddenly became conditions.
Perhaps a large part of our freedom consists of things we do not even recognize as freedom while they are still available to us.
What surprises me almost more today than the restrictions themselves is how quickly I got used to them.
At the time, there was a great deal of talk about a new normal. One kept hearing that some things might never return, that travel would change permanently, that work would change, that social life would change. Looking back, it is easier to separate prediction, political language and the simple uncertainty of that period. But at the time we were living inside it. Nobody knew whether, six months later, things would be more or less as they had been before, or whether we were learning how to live in a permanently altered world.
And human beings are remarkably good at getting used to things.
So am I.
If I could not travel, I found something else to do. I went on Amazon, browsed websites, wandered through department stores and drugstores. I bought things. Not completely useless things. That would be too convenient in retrospect. Most of them had some purpose. It was simply that I had apparently managed rather well without them before.
For a while, I even enjoyed it.
Today I sometimes see an object in a department store that I bought back then, or something similar, and think: My God, what exactly was I doing with myself?
Only later did I understand that there may have been more to it than boredom.
I had lost one kind of freedom and gone looking for another.
Consumption is extraordinarily well suited to the task. It gives us a sense of possibility. We can compare, choose, reject, order. This jacket or that one. This device or a better one. Delivery tomorrow or the day after. Even when the world outside has narrowed, the internet still presents us with what looks like an almost infinite landscape of decisions.
I could not decide whether to drive to Italy the next day.
But I could choose between forty-seven pairs of headphones.
It sounds ridiculous, and to some extent it is. That is precisely why it interests me now. The substitute freedom did not necessarily feel like substitute freedom at the time. You adapt. You shift your desires. You find other fields in which to act. And eventually you can forget that what you are now allowed to choose is not the same thing as what you were once able to do.
Perhaps adaptability is one of our greatest strengths. Perhaps it is occasionally dangerous too. Human beings can become accustomed to astonishingly much, especially when enough small decisions remain available within the new boundaries.
At roughly the same time, I discovered something else.
Lake Constance.
Not Lake Constance as an excursion destination with parking, restaurants and admission tickets. Just the lake. Drive there, take off your clothes, get into the water and swim.
There was remarkably little to choose from.
The water was cold or warm. The sky was grey or blue. Sometimes the lake was calm, sometimes unpleasantly rough. I could swim farther out or turn back. There was not much more to decide.
And yet that limited range of choices somehow felt larger than a department store full of possibilities.
One day in September, I came out of the water. The lake had already grown a little colder. Nearby were a few mountain bikers of the kind one often sees in Switzerland, particularly among pensioners and other people fortunate enough to have the time to spend a weekday exercising at length.
I looked at their equipment. The bicycle, of course, was not simply a bicycle. It was a branded electric mountain bike. The clothes were not an old pair of trousers and a T-shirt that happened to be lying around in a cupboard. Everything was functional. Shoes, trousers, jacket, gloves, and probably some other material whose special properties I did not understand.
I did not find any of this ridiculous. Quite the opposite. They were outside and moving. I liked that.
But as I stood there, still wet from the lake, another thought occurred to me.
Even our escape from consumption is remarkably quick to become consumption again.
We want to go out into nature, and the first thing we discover is what we apparently need to buy in order to do it. The bicycle, the shoes, the jacket, the watch, the water bottle. For almost every simple human activity there now exists an entire product world explaining why we ought to be better equipped for it.
I know the same thing from motorcycling. Some people may ride ten days a year, preferably in good weather. Yet you can still find them in motorcycle shops buying new clothing, examining the latest gloves and adding accessories. At some point the preparation for the activity seems almost to become the activity itself.
There is nothing wrong with that either. I simply recognize something in it now.
Buying can place itself between us and the experience.
We become increasingly well prepared for life and sometimes spend remarkably little time actually living it.
Perhaps that is why I liked that moment at the lake so much. I needed almost nothing. The lake did not ask about my equipment. It wanted no certificate. It did not know my vaccination status. There were no opening hours, no user account and no premium version. It did not even try to sell me anything.
It was simply there.
And I could enter it.
Perhaps Thoreau meant something similar when he wrote about wanting to live deliberately and suck out all the marrow of life. I understand that sentence less heroically now than I once did. To live closer to the bone may not mean doing particularly wild things. It may simply mean allowing as little as possible to come between oneself and direct experience.
Not experiencing more.
Experiencing more directly.
When I walk through a drugstore today, I sometimes think of Socrates. He is said to have looked at the goods in the marketplace and marvelled at how many things there were that he did not need. Whether he said exactly that hardly matters. The thought is good enough to have survived for two and a half thousand years.
I understand it better now.
In front of me are a hundred possibilities for marginally optimizing my life. One shampoo promises stronger hair, a cream promises better skin, some supplement promises more energy. Even a razor now seems to represent a minor technological revolution.
And sometimes I genuinely think: how astonishingly many things there are that I can do without.
It does not feel like deprivation.
Quite the opposite.
Perhaps we sometimes confuse freedom with choice. The larger the selection, the freer we imagine ourselves to be. Millions of products can arrive at our doors tomorrow. We possess a freedom of consumption beyond anything a Roman emperor could have dreamed of.
And yet choice is only one kind of freedom.
There is another, older freedom. It does not consist in being able to choose between as many things as possible, but in needing as few of them as possible.
Perhaps that is the strangest thing I took away from that period. When my world became smaller, my first response was to make more choices within the smaller world.
Today I am more interested in the opposite.
Not more choice, but more world. Not more things between myself and life, but fewer.
It is difficult to find that freedom in a department store. It is easier to find in the forest. In the mountains too.
And sometimes freedom is simply lying there in front of you.
It has no price and no brand. Nobody designed it for a target group. You do not have to register, order anything, or even prepare particularly well for it. It promises no improvement and does not insist that you first own the correct equipment.
Sometimes it is simply a lake on a September day. The water is already a little too cold, the sky perhaps not even particularly beautiful, and on the shore stand a few people with very good bicycles.
Then you take off your clothes and swim into it.