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As I sat down to write this column, a tundra of white space stretched out before me, empty but for the blinking cursor goading me to get on with it. A blank page provides a good example of how freedom can feel – in theory you can fill it however you please but in practice you are constrained in so many ways. I’m not free to write whatever I want here because this issue has a theme (freedom) and I’ve agreed with the editor on how I’ll approach that topic in these 900 words. Beyond that, there are laws to discourage me from writing whatever I want about particular individuals or from attempting to incite you, the reader, to violent action. Social mores also weigh on my choices as I type this; I want you to think I’m wise and worthy of your attention. At every turn, I can identify locks placed upon my apparent freedom.
If I get distracted from writing for a moment and drift online, I’ll be bombarded with content that suggests I’m totally free to choose my path in life. You can start to feel like Renton in Trainspotting, listing off an ever more cynical selection of options: “Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage…”. Of course, he chooses heroin instead; opting, for a while at least, for obliteration over being buried in an avalanche of the quotidian.
Trainspotting was first published in 1993, in a world without Instagram and influencers. The tyranny of choice that bedevilled Irvine Welsh’s characters then feels almost quaint now. The persuasive industries that work so hard to tell us we can attain perfection if we just buy the right things and follow the right routines have so many more ways to reach us. The smartphones in our pockets are digital billboards, ever ready to remind us of our shortcomings. Perhaps the most common modern freedom is the freedom to feel inadequate.
I’m writing this while thinking of the late Kris Kristofferson, who died in October. In his first hit, Me and Bobby McGee, he wrote the line: “Freedom is just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” He wrapped up more about the human experience in those seven words than many philosophers manage to cover in whole volumes of theorising. The more you have, the more freedom becomes contingent and constrained. The knotted mess of our lives – our relationships and commitments – limits our choices. It’s not comfortable to think like that, though; we prefer to feel we’re free than to accept we’re often caged by habit and convenience.
We prefer to feel we’re free than to accept we’re caged by habit and convenience
In 2008, the journalist Jennifer Niesslein wrote for The Washington Post about the two years she spent following advice in self-help books to see if they could change her life as promised. She concluded that the various manuals just provided a distraction, “a nice set of blinders to help readers maintain the illusion that they’re masters of their own destinies”. When you’re encouraged to focus on yourself and your flaws, it stops you from looking at the systems and the society you live within. As Niesslein concluded: “It’s a slippery slope from claiming personal responsibility to every man for himself.”
When God (or gods) played a greater part in most people’s lives, the question of freedom was clearer-cut. In this increasingly secular age, without the promise of eternal life or the prospect of endless damnation, the apparent freedom of individual responsibility can be even more terrifying. That may explain why ideas like simulation theory – the proposition that we are all literally living in an artificial reality – have gained more prominence in recent years. The idea that we only perceive a fraction of our reality is a very old one – think of Plato’s shadows on the cave wall – but its modern iteration, as proposed by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, is inspired by the screens that surround us.
Where Plato’s shadows were cast by fire, the simulation in Bostrom’s theory is created by super-powerful computers in the hands of some future descendants of humanity. In it, we are just simulated minds to be studied by the unseen overlords. Doesn’t that sound like a convenient replacement for the old gods? While some advocates of the simulation theory say that watching how our free will plays out would be fascinating, it’s clear that for many who want to believe in this theory, the idea of everything being artificial is a way of freeing themselves from the terror of choice.
Until the day arrives when I look out of the window and see that blue sky has been replaced by a blue screen saying the simulation has crashed, I’ll continue to believe that our existence is more biological than technological. But there is something useful about facing up to the limits of our freedom and accepting them. When we treat life as a game with rules that we are not able to rip up and a board that we can’t flip over when we lose, it becomes a little easier to accept the highs and lows. We don’t start with a blank page and we are only partially responsible for what is written on it.
Mic Wright is a journalist based in London. He writes about technology, culture and politics
