I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
In Escape from Freedom (1941), Erich Fromm writes of the human urge to seek a source of authority and control to escape the dread you feel upon realizing your frreedom to choose. Fromm wrote as a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime to settle in the United States. Fromm thought that modern freedom liberated people but isolated them, and once they were free from traditional structures, they sought to escape the anxiety and loneliness that resulted by submitting to authoritarian systems like Nazism.
In the modern age, I see a people fleeing freedom in the same way that Fromm wrote about, by aligning themselves with authoritarian regimes. This is enslaving one’s self to an ideology and to a cult leader because it feels easier and safer than thinking for yourself.
But there is another way people flee freedom: by turning over their attention and interest to meaningless content online. Curiously, this can also contribute to choosing alignment with authoritarianism, as when people are swayed by misinformation and malinformation they get online.
I’m guilty of escaping from freedom by consuming meaninglessness online. I spend far too much time scrolling Twitter or Reddit, creating a feeling in myself that I’m doing something productive when I’m really just escaping from the freedom I have as a human being in this world.
Yesterday I wrote about releasement, the concept from Meister Eckhart and Martin Heidegger about achieving freedom from the will (vs. freedom of the will). I was thinking that when you waste time on social media or otherwise online (endlessly chatting with an LLM, for example) you are free from the will but not in a way you’d really want to be because you’re not doing something meaningful, you’re not exercising your freedom in any useful way.
I came up with a two-by-two matrix, showing what you get when cross deliberate vs nondeliberate action with freedom-of-the vs freedom-from-the will. The upper left corner is where Byung-Chul Han’s achievement society lives. Releasement, sought by Eckhart and Heidegger, lives in the lower left corner. In the upper right corner, where a creative probably wants to be, you get to a place of flow, spontaneity, and play. I think this is also where habitual and desired activity takes place. It is not willed it just happens, once a routine is made automatic. In the lower left-hand corner we find ceaseless social media scrolling, overuse of psychoactive substances, and binging streaming tv when you do it more than you want.
Han recommends the vita contemplativa, a kind of releasement, as an antidote to the achievement society’s active attention to productivity and achievement. With that advice, he is suggesting moving to freedom-from-the-will under conscious intention (lower left-hand corner).
I don’t think that’s enough though, and he doesn’t apparently either, as he keeps writing books not just being inactive in deep thought.
I want much of my life to dwell in the diagonal from lower left to upper right, in freedom from the will doing things I want to do (contemplating? being with loved ones?) and also freely creating (writing, painting, cooking) without having to push myself to do it (doing those things in flow, playfully, in an inspired way).
There is some way in which the diagonal from the upper left to lower right don’t actually bring freedom. Often the goals that are pursued in the upper left are imposed by society: more money, more consumption, more social prestige, more praise for your worldly achievements; the achievement society in action where we become masters of our own internal slaves. In the lower right, you’re not choosing what really matters to you; you’re acting out of compulsion instead.
I’m not really sure that’s the right two-by-two matrix. What about one with meaningfulness vs meaninglessness as a dimension? Here’s what Chat and I came up with:
Chat proposed a path of transformation through the matrix.
From Restless Striving → burnout
To Apathy / Numbing → collapse
Then, through conscious awareness of that emptiness, one can re-emerge into Releasement — the bottom-left quadrant, where awareness returns and meaning reappears without effort.
And, it didn’t say, from Releasement you can move to Purposeful Action / Creative Engagement.
Also, better titles for the quadrants:
Upper Left: Purposeful agency — meaning through creation.
Upper Right: Restless ego — meaning lost in striving.
Lower Left: Releasement — meaning regained through presence.
Lower Right: Compulsive drift — meaning and will both collapsed.
I like this version better, I think. I might turn this into a newsletter article.