We Yearn For The Next Mile of Freedom

Before he died, my father would often tell me he came to this country for a better life. I think one of the things he meant was more freedom. One of his pains in his home country was that of corruption. An honest man like him struggled to live out his potential and make an honest living in his ancestral home.

And so he came here, in search of greater freedom and to live a better life. I have carried that yearning for freedom my whole life, probably because of his influence.

Luckily, in the United States in 2024, we enjoy a great many freedoms. We are not perfect, but much better than many alternatives. Namely, there are rights and liberties enshrined in our Constitution and laws, which outline the requests we may make of the state (rights) and the activities we may do without interference from the state (liberties).

Compared to 150 or 200 years ago, we can speak freely. We can assemble freely. We do have the right to a fair trial. We do have a much higher standard of living, and there are far fewer people living in abject poverty or dying from preventable diseases. These are good things.

However, it seems to me that there are still many constraints that encumber the freedom of regular, everyday people. These encumbrances are not imposed by the state. Rather, I mean the freedoms that are constrained by the way we treat each other or by the second and third-order effects of the way our economic, political, and social institutions are designed.

Here are some examples.

Many couples limit their family size for various reasons. These include financial constraints, limited access to childcare, long work hours, and a lack of support in emergencies. I feel this pressure as a parent, and it does constrain our choices. Is limiting family size based on cost, price, and support – despite living in the wealthiest society in the history of the world – really freedom?

We have tools for communication and affordable travel by road, rail, and air. Yet, we're lonely, depressed, and anxious at high rates. Suicide is a leading cause of death in some demographics and age groups. Sometimes it feels like having a therapist is a basic requirement to live a normal life in our stressed-out world. Is this really freedom?

Consider the workplace. Some of us endure bosses who mistreat us, steal credit, or even gaslight us. If they’re kind, they might still be incompetent, promoted beyond their capabilities. Every day we might endure this drudgery at work because we don’t have other options, or we’ve endured this treatment for so long that we think we are lesser than we are. Does this type of toxicity at work, where we spend thousands of hours a year, sound like freedom to you?

Something as mundane as driving brings its own fears. It's not just an accident that scares me, but the possibility of the other driver being armed and angry. In public, I never really know if a simple mistake or misunderstanding might lead to gun violence. Is this fear of moving about in public the freedom we envisioned?

And then there's the matter of conscience. Sometimes I feel so pessimistic about the prospects of future generations. We face an ecological crisis and a crisis of dysfunctional politics. I feel like every major institution has regular examples of corruption and scandal. I wonder: what kind of world will my descendants live in? Can I, in good conscience, bring children into this world? Is the toll our consciences take evidence of the freedom we were trying to build?

Is this really freedom? Are we really free yet? I don't think so. We have become so much more free in the past 200 years. And yet, this is not the freedom I envisioned.

These freedoms I'm questioning and longing for don't come solely from laws, regulations, and political institutions. There is, to be sure, improvement we can make in our laws, regulations, and institutions. But I wonder if improvements in institutions would suffer from diminishing marginal returns.

I think instead that this next mile of freedom will come not from changing our institutions but changing our character. The next mile of freedom, I think, will come from treating each other better – with more love, kindness, and goodness – which are generally beyond the reach of laws, regulations, and political institutions. Doing the work to trust each other is what I’m proposing, and trust can’t be legislated or litigated.

I am sitting here with greater freedom and privilege than even my grandfathers could have dreamed of as young men for the grandson they hadn’t yet begotten. And yet, I still do not feel free.

I yearn for freedom like I long for water when I’m thirsty or for my family and friends when I am lonely. Freedom, I think, is what allows people to thrive and for human societies to flourish. And despite all this wealth and despite the strength of our institutions and their improvement over the past 200 years, I still do not feel free.

At the same time, I think this is the nature of freedom. With each passing generation, we toil and work and negotiate and soul search to traverse a mile or two. When we are old, we look back, we are more free than where we started.

But as the generation we are eclipsing looks back, those of us up next look forward. We appreciate the distance we’ve come but look at the road ahead.

As I look out at this next mile ahead of us, I see some opportunity to continue the work of making political institutions more fair, perfect, and just sure. But more than that, I see the next mile of freedom as a journey of looking deep within, doing the inner work to grow our characters, purify our souls, and treat each other better.

Our next mile of freedom will be borne of the trust that our inner work creates. And I yearn for it.

This post, like many I write, is the sort of reflection that one would normally find in a personal journal, never to be shared. But I share this one because I don’t think I’m the only one who yearns for it. I think there are more of us that look out at the world in 2024 and think there’s more freedom than this.

Who are you, my friends, that yearn for it? If we want to traverse this next mile of freedom, we can’t just yearn for it individually; we must yearn for it together and openly.

If you also yearn for it, I would love to hear your story of where that yearning comes from and what the next mile of freedom is, as you see it. By sharing, I think we make it more possible that we will traverse this next mile in our lifetimes, in time for our children and our grandchildren, to look forward – to the next miles ahead.