The Freedom to Just Be

I didn’t like being a child. I remember lying about my age wishing I was older, willing the time to pass faster towards that seemingly unattainable 18th-year mark. I looked ahead towards adulthood with unfaltering enthusiasm and vivacity. I longed for the things that I thought adulthood would bring me, I longed for freedom and happiness, I longed for deep friendships and sincere relationships, for opportunities and experiences panning the whole world.

Of course, now well into adulthood I realize how wrong I was. The reality didn’t hit like a brick, instead it descended in bits and pieces over the years. Failures, disappointments, mistakes, they all served their purpose and taught me their intrinsic lessons, and yes, I believe that on most occasions they made me a better and stronger person.

But the hit that has hurt the most and that has since dulled that hunger and energy for life I once felt, was the realization that adulthood took away the thing I valued most, the freedom to just be.

In today’s culture, we are pushed to do, to achieve. We are conditioned from early age that one has to work hard to be successful, to be better than their colleague when promotion comes along, to be smarter, richer, prettier. We learn to long for approval from others and perhaps also their envy to make us feel worthy. We are pressured to find our purpose in life very early on and dedicate most of our lives to succeeding at it with the threat that if we don’t manage we will be branded as failures.

There is no argument that having a strong sense of purpose in life is great and liberating. There are few and far between who just know, who feel their inner calling and have both the resources and opportunity to pursue it. Those are the lucky ones.

Then there are those who have dedicated their life to success at all costs, who sacrifice other aspects of their lives to face the challenges and use the stress and adversity to fuel them further along the path. And then there is the majority somewhere in the middle, people who do because they must. They may not have found their true passion or they have but do not have the resources to pursue it, so they are stuck in a rut doing something they don’t necessarily like, only to be able to exist and survive.

In the UK, the average working person spends eight hours a day working, add two hours of commuting, five times a week. Out of two weekend days, one day is usually spent catching up on housework, grocery shopping and other chores, which leaves them with one full day to themselves.

That is 52 days per year. On average, a worker gets 28 days annual holiday allowance plus 8 public holidays. Viewed in numbers, an average person spends roughly 75 percent of a year working and only 25 percent living. 75 percent doing and only 25 percent being.

If you are like me and belong to the less fortunate ones that have not been able to find or realize their purpose in life, you may know how life can be an uphill struggle. We exert ourselves, pressured by society to achieve more success, more respect, more wealth. We have to constantly prove our worth to employers, engage in a fallacious dance in order to sell ourselves and secure a better position.

We learn to assign happiness to materialistic values; ‘I will be happy when I get that job, that house, that car…’ because it is what seems to make sense but that happiness never comes even if the possessions do. We look to more fortunate peers with envy and resentment, because they get to have more and be happier, at least on the surface.

We feel like failures when we don’t do as well or achieve as much, we feel people’s pitying gaze on the back of our heads and hear their mocking whispers in the background hum. We feel that we are not good enough, that we are not okay just the way we are, so we try harder to please, we accept being treated unfairly in order to keep climbing up the ladder, often sacrificing our health and personal relationships in the process.

We are bound by invisible shackles to a huge corporate behemoth that keeps our heads above the water for just long enough for us to still be profitable. We produce, acquire, spend, in an infinite cycle that we cannot let go of. We cannot just stop, just breathe, just be, because if we did our basic human existence would be at risk. Becoming homeless and destitute is not as distant as many people think.

All it takes is to not be quite as efficient, healthy or productive as the next person and one can find themselves without a job, without a home, without a lifeline. Stranded in a concrete wilderness beneath the sophisticated architecture of our civilized culture, devoid of their basic human needs, struggling to find shelter, food, water and evade danger. Having people who could have once been your colleagues or friends look down on you as if you were the last piece of scum as they trot past you on their high horse.

With this kind of daunting threat constantly hanging over our heads to drive us into obedience, we conform. We obey. We produce, acquire, spend. When questioned, people will answer; ‘It’s just the way it is.’, ‘Everyone has to do it.’, ‘That’s life.’.

But no one has yet answered the underlying question, ‘Why?’ Why is it not okay to just be, to enjoy the human experience without constant pressure to race towards an ever-distant goal? Why is it not okay for all of us to have our basic human needs met without having to prove ourselves worthy?

Why is it not okay to be just the way we are without having to pretend to be someone else in order to earn the right to live? Why is it not okay to just be good enough as we are? Why is it that in a society that proclaims freedom we seem to be more enslaved than ever?