Prisoner of work, why we seek freedom

Have you ever wondered why everybody seems to be in search of freedom? why the most popular ideas are always those of us freeing ourselves from something, whether it's oppression or the system, well that's simply because, in a bid to maintain our freedom, we’ve created systems that eventually entrap us so we end up in this vicious cycle. The reflection doesn’t go all that far, imagine you were free right now to do whatever you want (realistically speaking), that might entail you having all the money, resources, and energy you want but to maintain this, you will have to put rules in place rules (systems) which will guarantee the longevity of your freedom.

Eventually, these rules entrap you, somewhere down the line you will seek freedom, if not you then those who come after you. Whether it's a good system or a bad system, the human mind grows tired of that consistency and seeks something different, this is the vicious cycle we are stuck in.

Fighting the System

I say all this because there is a growing resentment towards what people call “the system” which is pretty much just a set of rules some old guys put in place to guarantee their way of life and that now we’ve grown tired of because it's no longer in our favor. What most people tend to stick on is just the closest manifestation of all that, which is the government but many more questions go far beyond just the way the government operates. There are more questions like;

• how did the current system of education come to be
• who defined some social norms and rules
• why do we do certain things the way we do them
• Who are those who maintain the current systems in place
• What defined the rules of happiness etc

These aren’t controversial questions and it's not like they don’t have answers, they certainly do and every law in the book can be explained pretty much. All of it makes sense logically but the issue here is that we are taking issue with the logic itself. A simple example of this is when logic dictates that some people do well over others, well so far those “others” have just taken it with a grin but now we see them fighting back and asking themselves who came up with this logic. A stretch of this reasoning would be that a huge chunk of research, education, and development happens in the United States, which means you essentially have a country that pushes its views and beliefs on the rest of the world. This is good and fine as long as you trust them to fight for the truth and the interest of everyone, but what if this isn’t the case anymore, what if their interests align with something opposite to the interest of another country? would you trust them to stay true to their beliefs and not try and influence the information they put out at least in a certain way?

Where we come from

Let me dumb the question down for you, “if a person can cheat legally, why won’t they cheat?” because when the only limit is moral then that doesn’t stop people from cheating. This article isn’t about the West anyways, my point here is that we have systems in place that have essentially become prisons to us and we no longer feel comfortable with them anymore.

A good example of that is the workforce, basically, you are born, you spend 20–30 years of your life learning, then the other 30–40 years have to be spent working while trying to get the little bits of happiness you can, then for the remainder of 20–30 years you might have left will be spent dealing with illness and fighting for the love of your kids. There are definitely many things wrong with this but one aspect of all of this we can take out from here is the “purpose”, which is the fuel that even allows us to do any of this.

Those who built the pillars of society were able to make slavery a purpose for us, this could only be deliberate but not necessarily malicious. It's easy to think that everything was done maliciously or the people were just out for themselves but you can’t factor out the historical context and the choices that had to be made. Whatever we enjoy today as technological advancement which makes our lives better was only possible through decades or even centuries of hard work, how do you obtain that hard work? through a well-designed system that promotes that.

So please, if you have an alternative to society’s way of managing innovation then I’m all ears. You have to understand that, man’s evolution has been an iterative process filled with a lot of trial and error, even today there are still laws and norms that get revised. Every time something hasn’t been working well for society, we’ve changed it, we’ve learned from our mistakes and even though we still make mistakes, the general trend is towards a better life. The problem is that the iterative method we use unfortunately isn’t always taking into account the full context or even able to do so, there are many exceptions for every law, circumstance, environment, and events are very varied depending on where, who, and what you are all about. If any man had a global view of the world and could influence the laws then certainly many mistakes could be avoided but that is not the case, and quite frankly, thats not the potential fix.

What we can do

My fight here isn’t to say that I love the system and we shouldn’t change it or there is nothing we can do about it, what I am struggling to make you understand is that the world isn’t a duality. It's not good versus evil like most people will try to paint it out to be, at best even if you succeed to change the system you’ll just replace it with something someone else will also dislike, at worst you’ll just end up hurting the whole population.

Nevertheless, this isn’t to say that there is no hope, there is always hope as long as someone believes in it.

Instead of us trying to destroy the system and starting fresh, every system is designed to be able to evolve into a new reality, this might come through changing a lot of aspects of this system or just a couple of things. All I want is for people to be well aware of what they are giving up on and where they are headed outlining clearly the expected outcomes. If you want to take down schools, what will replace them? you want to revamp society, what structure will you put in place?

One last but very important aspect of it all is “future proof”. There is no shortage of great ideas, and there is no shortage of better ideas, we could all be living our best lives right now doing the things we love the most but the reason we can’t do that is because it's not sustainable over the long term. So it's not just about you coming up with a better idea, but you must be able to test it out and ensure that it works over time, not just at the moment. A simple example is the fact that even though we might have enough resources to feed everyone or make everyone a millionaire, doing so will prove counterproductive simply because once everyone is a millionaire, no one is a millionaire, and added to that, no one wants to work anymore.

No matter what system you put in place, it not only has to be easy to understand and implement, but it also has to be able to deal with the complexities of society and also prove efficient from the unset to challenge the current system in place. Needless to say this is very hard to do.

Thanks for reading ☺️