After reading my article on “Rethinking the Meaning of Freedom”, I decided to go back and reevaluate my definitions of freedom. My definition of freedom was in contrast to what society taught me, the definition of freedom is freedom from fear. I have come to realize that freedom is the ability to choose your own ways of living, and to make your lifestyle choices regardless of what others may think or say.
I think that for many of us, freedom is not what society thinks freedom is. We all want to live free. And yet our society can sometimes make it difficult to live free. I remember back when I was a kid, I had to live in a very small town. My parents, and most of the townspeople, were very protective of my well being. They would get very angry at me when I couldn’t afford to go to the local school or to a certain restaurant.
I had to live in a small town and to do that you had to be able to speak with some authority. As a result, many kids my age were not accepted by the other kids in town. I remember going to school with other kids who had the same problem. So you can imagine a lot of this is because some people believe that education is for those who have money, not those who are really capable of earning their own way.
I think the big issue with this is that we expect our parents to “give us enough to go to college”, and yet we have a lot of kids who are not prepared. This is a problem not just for the kids who need to go to college, but also for those who want to go to college without being able to afford it.
I think that the main problem is that we are not making parents more responsible. We are only making them more responsible. There is no free lunch.
But I think it is also a major problem for adults. We expect people to be able to earn their own way, but we don’t expect that they are going to be able to earn it well. In fact, I think it is very unlikely that adult people can earn their own way. People’s needs for money, time, and other things are largely outside their control.
The other major problem I think is that we have failed to instill in adults the ability to think for themselves. We have made them so busy, brain-saturated, and overwhelmed with all of the responsibilities which they have as adults that they have not been able to think for themselves. We have also made them so stressed out with all of the things they must do which they have no control over, that they have not felt the need to think for themselves.
Most of our activities are focused on making people laugh, or at least laugh enough to really enjoy the game. We have to make them think for themselves. If we allow ourselves the luxury of thinking for ourselves, we can just sit back and enjoy the moment. It’s not like a lot of the other people who actually sit down and have some fun at that point are actually having fun while we are sitting down.
Well, yes and no. Yes, we do have a bunch of freedom to fail at things here, but we don’t have the freedom to fail at them when we feel like we failed at something. We have to do what we have to do. We have to learn that. But if we don’t learn that, then we’ll never be able to learn it.
The goal of learning is to get us past the things we fail at, like the fact that all these other people are not learning to go to school and get a lot of books, but just that. Or to do it in a different way. Maybe we just do it the easy way, but if we do it the obvious way we can learn it.