The Trouble with Freedom.

Lucy is talking about freedom today. In her case it’s the freedom to do pretty much whatever she wants for a while, now the exams are over. I know the feeling well, as we all do. We even have a name for it: the Friday Feeling, because it’s what we get every Friday night when we leave work or school behind for the weekend. I have noticed, however, that a lot of people have a problem with too much of this kind of freedom.

It’s a well known fact that some people struggle with retirement, and it’s hardly surprising. From the day we start school to the day we leave work for good, we’re conditioned to walk a regimented treadmill, doing what the employer requires us to do rather than what we as individuals regard as priorities. In most cases, life at the workplace isn’t so much about doing what needs to be done, but rather what the employer expects of us. It might seem like a small distinction, but it’s a very telling one.

This is largely a product of the industrial age, of course, when factories needed to establish the treadmill principle in order to increase efficiency. That process has been given a name, too: the ‘work ethic’ we call it, and generation after generation has been conditioned to regard it as one of life’s most honourable qualities.

And it seems that a lot of people like it that way. They like having their life regimented and organised for the benefit of an employer; they like being told what to do because it saves having to make decisions. It avoids having to decide whether today is a day for sowing seeds, or mending nets, or building a new barn. They turn up for school or work every morning at the same time for fifty or sixty years and do what’s expected of them. And they’re left in no doubt from an early age that the major goal in life is to ‘get a job,’ because that’s the best and easiest way to become successful and prosperous, and the only realistic way to make their contribution to society. What’s more, because of the way society is structured in the post-industrial age, it’s right. Walking the treadmill is the easiest way to belong, and the modern age couldn’t even function as it does without it. And that’s how people come to view their job as their primary focus outside the family.

So what happens when they retire? That focus gets removed and replaced by a measure of freedom that they haven’t been trained to exercise. The freedom to come and go as they please might be enjoyable for a week or two, as it was when they used to go on an annual holiday, but there’s no going back to work at the end of it. The freedom is now open ended, and it seems that many people don’t know how to use it. And so they feel lost, lacking purpose, lacking direction, lacking focus, and maybe even lacking a fundamental belief in the right to be here. Even those with hobbies aren’t necessarily let off the hook, because hobbies are generally things you can choose to do as and when you want. They’re part of the new freedom; they lack the treadmill principle. I’ve even heard retired people say that they had to go out and get a part time job with fixed hours in order to ‘have a reason to get up in the morning.’

I find this sad, but I don’t know what we can do about it now without the most radical restructuring of society, and few people would be happy to accept the cost of such a change. My hope is that the small number of people who, like me, find the treadmill torturous will see what’s going on while they’re still young enough to push their lives in a more independent direction. I left it until I was thirty two, and by that age most people have got commitments hanging around their necks that make the change of direction more difficult.