I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
I’m thinking about making choices in my life today, big and small.
How free are we to choose? Very free, but we choose within what the existentialists call the facticity of our circumstances: our history, demographics, resources financial social and otherwise, the current state of the world, and so forth: the entire situation of our lives that provides us with possibility and constraint.
Sartre used the term mauvaise foi to describe acting only according to what our culture would seem to demand of us, instead of declaring and becoming who we are through our free choices.
From Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentalists’ Café:
For Sartre, we show bad faith whenver we portray ourselves as passive creations of our race, class, job, history, nation, family, heredity, childhood influences, events, or even hidden drives in our subconscious which we claim are out of our control…. [For] each of us — for me — to be in good faith means not making excuses for myself. We cannot say… ‘I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so.’ We do say such things, all the time, but we are in bad faith when we do it.
None of this means that I make choices in a completely open field or void. I am always in some sort of pre-existing ‘situation’, out of which I must act. I actually need these ‘situations’, or what Sartre calls ‘facticity’, in order to act meaningfully at all. Without it, my freedom would be only the unsatisfying freedom of someone floating in space — perhaps a high jumper who makes a great leap only to find herself drifting off in zero gravity, her jump counting for nothing. Freedom does not mean entirely unconstrained movement, and it certainly does not mean acting randomly. We often mistake the very things that enable us to be free — context, meaning, facticity, situation, a general direction in our lives — for things that define us and take away our freedom. It is only with all of these that we can be free in a real sense.
At midlife, I find it more and more important to act not out of Sartre’s bad faith — what I think my history and situation demands of me, what I should do — but rather out of an acknowledged sense of freedom and responsibilty for my life.
This is a kind of authenticity, but not that kind where I must act out of some static version of myself that has always existed. Instead, I want to act as a way of becoming who I might become.
Sometimes that means making choices that come with unpleasant consequences.
In his article Your Power to Choose is Unlimited, Oliver Burkeman makes the question of acting with your inborn freedom more practical:
The astounding reality—in the words of Sheldon B. Kopp, a genial and brilliant American psychotherapist who died in 1999—is that you’re pretty much free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.
Consequences aren’t optional. Every choice you make comes with some sort of consequences, because at any instant you can only pick one path, and must deal with the repercussions of not picking any of the others. Spending a week’s holiday in Rome means not spending that same week in Paris. Avoiding a conflict in the short term means letting a bad situation fester.
Freedom isn’t a matter of somehow wriggling free of the costs of your choice—that’s never an option. It means realizing that nothing can stop you from doing anything at all, so long as you’re willing to pay those costs. Unless you’re being physically coerced into doing something, the notion that you “have to” do it just means that you don’t want to pay the price of refusing to do it. After all, it’s perfectly possible for you to quit your job with no backup plan. You could book a one-way ticket to Rio de Janeiro, or rob a bank, or tell your social media followers your honest views.
But I find this a bit too facile. We don’t know ahead of time what our choices will bring, so in contemplating a possible course of action you’re not simply deciding whether to accept the known consequences that go with that course. You can only make some guess at consequences but not predict them with any reliability. If you quit your job without another one and you don’t have ample savings, you might soon find yourself hounded by collection calls. If you tell your social media followers your honest views, you might start an online ruckus.
So making a choice is not a simple matter of figuring out and accepting the consequences of that choice. You have to accept the uncertainty that goes along with the outcome.
The consequences of a choice to act will play out over time, in complicated ways.
If you end a romantic relationship, will you find another that is any better? How long it might take? What might a quest for new romance look like? There’s no way to know with certainty.
If you take early retirement, will your savings last as long as you live? Will you miss being employed?
If you decide to self-publish a book, will you be able to market it effectively, and see it reach the audience you hope it will reach?
Acting so as to become the person you might be and hope to be is maybe a little bit easier to grapple with than trying to determine consequences and outcome.
Instead of asking, “what consequences might happen if I quit my job, and do I accept those consequences?” you might ask, “who do I want to become via my career choices?”
Do I want to continue as a full-time employed technologist?, a software leader in her fifties might ask.
But even that is hard to do, because you don’t know who you will become via some choices. I had some vague notion of becoming an artist or a writer when I left technology. But I also had an idea I might found an AI startup or go to work for an animal shelter or start a business as an art photographer.
Beyond that, choices are made sometimes within difficult emotional settings, under pressure. Freedom is enacted by humans who don’t know the outcomes that might ensue, don’t really know who they want to become, and aren’t in total rational control of their decisions.
Sartre wrote that we are “condemned to be free.” There’s no divine plan or predetermined course of action we must follow. We are alone responsible for our choices. This is not liberating, even though the word “freedom” makes it sound like it is.