The only reliable way to gain more freedom

More freedom has been a goal of mine for a long time. First, I wanted freedom from my parent’s rules and restrictions. So I went to college.

After college, I wanted the freedom from having to work a day job. So I started a business.

Once that was up and running, I wanted the freedom never to have to work at all.

Now, I mostly seek mental freedom. Freedom from decisions. Freedom from overwhelm. Freedom from my mind constantly desiring more. Freedom from the thoughts that I’m not doing enough or doing the right things.

As an entrepreneur with young kids, that kind of freedom is elusive. There’s always more I could be doing. I could be working out harder. I could be more effective with how I invest my time. I could be having more fun, spending more time with my kids, or giving to charity. The list goes on.

In the process of seeking freedom, I’ve realized that more freedom (no matter what kind) can only be gained in three ways:

1. Luck
2. Acceptance
3. Constraints

Luck is an obvious one. If you win the lottery, you now have financial freedom. Unless you’re a complete idiot or your luck suddenly reverses, you’ll never have to work again. Or, if a coyote eats your girlfriend’s cat, you are now free of having cat hair on your clothes and cat pee on your furniture. These are both great examples of luck bringing freedom. There’s no doubt that either would improve your life.

The only problem is that luck is unreliable, so let’s forget about it on our quest for more freedom and focus on the other two.

Reliable strategy for gaining freedom #1 – Acceptance

Acceptance is when you fully accept your circumstances, both the good and the bad. You completely submit to your fate and just experience the world. You stop trying to change, fix, or improve things and instead allow the currents of life to take you where they will.

Acceptance can immediately free you of anxiety, stress, and worry. In fact, it can free you of most negative emotions. It has an incredible ability to lift the weight of the world off of your shoulders and allow you to breathe easy, even if only temporarily.

“everything is perfect and complete, just the way it is.”

Stressed about an upcoming deadline? Just accept that you might not get it done, or if you do, the results won’t be as good as you hoped. Be OK with whatever results you get. Let go of the desire for status or material possessions and just chill the fuck out, because ultimately, who really cares?

Whenever I find myself in a state of worry or stress, I say to myself, “everything is perfect and complete, just the way it is.” And almost like magic, I feel the stress and negative emotions lift away. This simple phrase reminds me that challenge and struggle always have and always will exist. It reminds me that I will never arrive at peace and happiness where everything on my to-do list is done. That doesn’t exist. As soon as I solve one problem, a new one pops up. That’s how life is, and it’s perfect and complete just the way it is, even with all of the struggle, sadness, pain, inequality, and crying kids.

Acceptance feels amazing.

I’m not saying it’s easy, however. It does require awareness and perspective. It requires you to understand that you’ll never arrive at success and happiness anyway, so there’s no point in getting all worked up or rushing. It requires you to realize you are operating with a primitive mind that evolved to survive in a primitive world and that much of your behavior is totally irrational given the context of the modern world. And finally, it requires that you remember to think of these things. It’s not easy without practice.

But just like everything, acceptance has some downsides. First, it’s temporary. I’ve noticed that one moment it will have me in a state of gratitude, and then five minutes later, one of my kids starts crying, the dog starts barking, I stub my toe on the way to soothe my kid, and then I notice how the skin on my hands looks older than it did yesterday. Just like that, my mental peace evaporates.

The other problem with acceptance as a path to freedom is that it can be overused. It’s an incredible tool, and I’m thankful for Buddhism for shining light on it. But is it worth setting as the end goal? Should you strive to remain in a constant state of presence and acceptance, free of desire and negative emotions?

I don’t think so. I view acceptance as a coping mechanism that everyone should embrace to make life’s challenges more bearable, but not as a singular focus in life. Living a life of constant acceptance is like opting out of life and rejecting the human condition. Sure, it frees you from negative emotions, but it also strips the highs. Life is a rollercoaster, and if you take away the lows, you end up flattening the ride. That’s no fun.

Sitting on a park bench all day bathing in presence probably makes life more bearable, but it also becomes boring and meaningless. Otherwise, Eckhart Tolle would have never written a single book.

Here’s how I look at it. Acceptance is great to strive for when interacting with your kids, but not while providing for them. It’s great for relaxing at the end of the day, but I’m relieved that firefighters have a sense of urgency when trying to save lives.

Reliable strategy for gaining freedom #2 – Constraints

There’s a paradox of freedom. In order to attain or maintain your freedom, you have to apply constraints in some way. You have to restrict yourself.

To gain freedom, you must give up freedom.

This is obvious when you look at something like financial freedom. In order to become financially free or get to the point where you no longer have to work to support your current and future lifestyle, you have to constrain how you spend your time or your money.

The obvious way to financial freedom is to save money (restrict your spending). A better way is to focus on making lots of money and then investing it. But to do that, you have to invest your time doing things like building businesses, investing, learning skills, and acquiring knowledge and connections. You’ll likely need to be intentional about who you spend your time with as well. To attain financial freedom later, you have to give up the freedom to choose how you spend your time and money now.

In my last article, I wrote about the dark side of freedom. I talked about how the more freedom you have, the more decisions you have to make. While the idea of freedom is great, too much freedom ends up locking you in a prison of constant decisions making where you have to decide what to do with every waking moment. So, in that case, to free yourself from the prison of constant decisions, you must restrict your options by committing to something. You must give up your freedom to choose in order to free yourself from the responsibility of choosing.

Another example is health. If you want to be free of disease, illness, or physical disability, you must restrict yourself in many ways. You’ll have to limit what you eat. You’ll have to limit your behavior by avoiding sedentary behavior. You’ll have to restrict your time and invest some of it doing physical activity. You’ll have to opt-out of overly strenuous or dangerous behaviors that are likely to injure you. As a result of those restrictions, you gain freedom of movement. You can lift heavy things, run fast, walk far, and play sports. You may even free yourself of most modern diseases.

When it comes to health, wealth, and relationships, you are often trading the freedom to do things now for the freedom to be able to do them later or for longer.

This also applies if your goal is mental freedom (freedom from anxiety, stress, overwhelm, etc.). If you are using the tool of acceptance to gain mental freedom, as I illustrated above, then even that implies some constraints because, to accept your reality, you have to restrict your ambitions and goals. To be free of the anxiety you have over an upcoming deadline, you must restrict how much you allow yourself to care about the results. Mental peace often means giving up on your goals, limiting status, and restricting desires.

Conclusion

You can easily gain restriction without gaining freedom, but you can’t gain freedom without some restriction (unless you get lucky).

Gaining freedom is usually trading one form of restriction for another – usually trading one form that you don’t like for one that is more acceptable.

So instead of searching for easy ways to gain more freedom, start searching for the right constraint to apply to your behavior. Once you find it and apply it, the freedom you seek will naturally emerge.