You're Too Old to Believe that The Best Things in Life Are Free
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
Nothing comes to us for free. The very best things, including freedom itself, take a lifetime of hard work
Google the phrase, The best things in life are free, and you’ll get a selection of sayings, movies, songs and the rest all extolling the virtues of giving up our attachments to objects and belongings.
There is of course inherent wisdom in this, but in today’s world, the phrase takes on a different meaning. If you go to Unsplash and type in the word “free,” you get all kinds of photos of places which for many, if not most of us, are expensive to reach.
A parrot in the wild, for many, means an expensive trip to where there ARE parrots in the wild.
Not free.
The above photo of a boat on the bay, say, is both a place to get to, or owning one, which is another issue. If it’s about the experience of boating, the boat isn’t free (ask any boat owner), or someone who lives in the inner city with no way to get to a place like this to watch the boat on the water.
Clean air and water aren’t free. There is no place on earth any more where pollution, microplastics and the like haven’t permeated everything.
Coke and Nestle et. al. have designs on the world’s water supplies, and have every intention of making us pay a great deal for decent water.
Not free.
Having clean air in our homes? Ask anyone who lives out West like I do. That means having an air purifier inside the house. Outside, in late summer, the air is so choked with wildfire smoke that the sun itself is on vacay.
The Northeast is finding out the hard way that pollution isn’t just from industry, cars and the like as eastern forests burn.
Water? We have to purify it. Those old ads from Coors Brewing talked about pure water from the Rocky Mountains. No such thing. Drink any of that water even in the highest lakes and you’re likely to suffer a severe bout of girardia, thank you human poop.
Freedom is the most expensive. We in America imagine ourselves as free, but nothing could be further from the truth. We suffer food and alcohol cravings. Opioids. Street drugs. Cell phones and streaming movies and whatever it is that keeps us from being fully in life, with one another.
Not free.
Too many of us are imprisoned in sick bodies, the result of allowing ourselves to be suckered into eating very bad food, suckered into giving up physical activity for extreme comfort and Netflix.
We imagine ourselves free to be what and who we like. In a nation consumed by porn, so many children are traumatized by sexual assault, and my hand is up here, that millions of us spend years imprisoned by that trauma.
Some never find a way to be free of self-hate and body dysmorphia. Too many cascade their pain onto their offspring, imprisoning them as well.
There is great profit to be made from self-hate, trillions are spent each year to fix what wasn’t wrong with us in the first place.
Not free.
Each of us is born into a culture with norms and strict limitations, many of which we can’t even see or identify, they are so much a part of our existence. We don’t realize how restrictive they are if we don’t educate ourselves. Don’t question.
Conspiracy theories and political hatreds, for example. People who are whipsawed by all the awful -isms which divide us, are trapped by those beliefs. They aren’t free, not by any measure.
Restrictive religious dogma, baseless beliefs, threats of annihilation by people who hate us, all kinds of fears and worries ensnare and control us.
We love to think of America as the land of the free. The only thing we gained was freedom from one kind of yoke, the King, a mad George III.
We as a new nation continued to place yokes on otherwise free people and call it profitable commerce.
We promptly put quite a few more yokes around our own necks, also in the name of profit. From birth now we are addicted to our phones, then addicted to sugar and lousy ultra-processed foods, then addicted to anti-depression meds because of our bad habits, then addicted to more meds because of our ailing bodies. Then get early-onset dementia and can’t safely leave a room.
Not free.
You and I are Way Too Old to believe that the best things in life are free.
What about free will? More than a few folks would have us believe we are the victims of our whims, and we just can’t help ourselves.
While this may strike you as a little too esoteric, I’m going there anyway.
Real freedom has much to do with giving up all notions of personal agency. Such as the idea that you and I are fully in charge of our lives.
We aren’t, much to our chagrin.
True freedom involves real effort, the willingness to accept that we adhere to hundreds of natural laws we can’t see, conditions we can’t control.
Natural laws, before you ask, like gravity, which some people genuinely don’t seem to understand, right about the time they topple backwards over a cliff while taking a selfie.
Freedom from loneliness and isolation take real effort to make ourselves vulnerable, to make new friends, to risk rejection.
Society places demands upon us that we agree to in order to be part of any kind of nation or state, no matter how uncivil at the moment.
Some of those demands are terribly important.
Those aren’t the ones I’m addressing.
If we enslave others with our -isms and our hate, we aren’t free. Our prejudices chain us to those we enslave, whether it’s because of race, creed, religion or otherwise.
Even retirement beckons us with the false notion of freedom as well. We nurture the notion of endless days at the beach, sucking on mai-tais for the rest of our natural lives.
It costs to be able to do that. Second, the bigger cost is to our well-being. When we suddenly stop work, we often lose our purpose in life.
In this, freedom is a mirage. The wrong retirement is just another prison, especially if we assumed that simply letting loose our work habits means freedom.
A lifelong friend just retired comfortably from a career in HVAC, his savings and union pension allowing him plenty of options. He just shared with me how bored he was, a deadly combination of nothing to do and kids who really don’t want granddad around that much unless he’s paying for everything.
I’ve belabored this enough. You may disagree with me, even vehemently. To that I would suggest- and please don’t hit me with your lapop- that we are so inculcated with the notion of our relative freedom as dictated to us as free to eat, drink and stupefy ourselves to death as we wish (just for example), that we don’t realize how imprisoned we are.
We get nothing in life for free.
Once we can embrace that notion, and I’m still working at it, that’s the beginning of freedom.
How very Socratic, right? Realizing that we know nothing is the beginning of wisdom. Our ignorance (and to be fair, our sometimes pig-headed stupidity, and I am of course referring to myself) imprisons us.
To unburden ourselves, to find some way to lighten our load, takes great strength of character. When we admit that we’re trapped by the invisible wires of self-hatred or unworthiness, when we know we are operating at the mercy of forces we often can’t control, that’s the beginning of freedom.
But just the beginning.
The only real freedom, then, is free will, which we can direct towards growth or to continue, as we are, effectively in Skinner’s Box.
We are not obliged to remain imprisoned.
In his book Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote,
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Thoreau wasn’t likely addressing lives of Aboriginal, the Bantu or the Mongolian nomad. Chances are that he’d had little interaction with any of the sort. While it’s a conceit to speak for all people, he has a point.
We are all living under the pressures of both natural and unnatural (man-made) laws which are so normalized we don’t question them.
We get ill from what we ingest (all nutrients, including sick ideas), we get deeply depressed from what we believe, we do damage to one another because of our hatreds and ignorance and racism, we waste years of our lives being sucked into our phones when those we love ache for our attention and company.
These cost us all terribly.
You and I are Way Too Old to believe that anything worth having is free.
When the cost becomes too great, we begin to question. When we see, we have a choice.
Then we get to do the hard work of releasing ourselves, as best we can, from the bonds which cost us so dearly.
When and if we are willing to do those things, we may be free to enjoy the bonds which are truly worth having: friends, family, pets, commitments to community, our service to others, free of the anxieties and cravings which suck us away from the people and purpose we love.
All the sacrifices those worthy endeavors take are effort enough. True spiritual development requires super-efforts. Life takes effort.
The beauty is that you and I can choose what deserves our effort.
And that choice is, indeed, free.
Thanks for hanging out with me for a few minutes out of your day. I hope this wasn’t too heavy. If it was useful to you, kindly consider
If someone you know is struggling, and boy have I been there, and this perspective might be useful, please also consider
Either way your comments are most welcome. I read them with interest and appreciate the time spent in responding.
This?? It was kind of profound for me. Like, ALL of it. This was so well written and all I can say in response is that the only way we'll truly achieve freedom is to free our minds. I guess it's the only way we can save ourselves from the outer world.
Thank you for debunking the myth about what's free in life and giving us a hard dose of reality. I lament that the wrong value is placed on certain things in life because of the monetary value attached to them, and because money is what we need in order to survive. As you wrote, access to many of those nice things in life isn't free at all. I also think that certain "free" things are free or cheap because a big population of "invisible people" have served as slaves or cheap labor thousands of miles away. Making the ultimate choice of what deserves our time and effort is indeed free but requires hard sacrifices--and possibly a shakeup of our worldview and paradigm.