Do You Know What the Most Important Kind of Freedom Is?

 

The quickest way to spot dead people is to look at their eyes.

There’s a vacancy. When they blink back at you, there’s no luster. No hope.

If our eyes are windows to the soul, why have so many of us permanently drawn the shades? Maybe because we’re trapped in a kind of default setting.

I was a cop for over 26-years, and I met a lot of dead people. Some of them were my colleagues.

I’m not talking about bodies with toe tags in the morgue. I’m referring to the living dead. People who are going through the motions, but not really living.

In Richard Paul Evans’s book, “The Walk”, a kind woman who works in a diner shares this nugget of wisdom:

I meet dead people at the diner every day. People who have given up. That’s all death requires of us, to give up living. The thing is, the only real sign of life is growth. And growth requires pain. So to choose life is to accept pain. Some people go to such lengths to avoid pain that they give up on life. They bury their hearts or they drink themselves numb until they don’t feel anything anymore. The irony is, in the end, their escape becomes more painful than what they are avoiding. Ultimately we decide whether our lives are good or bad, ugly or beautiful. Some people in this world have stopped looking for beauty, then wonder why their lives are so ugly. Everyone carries divinity in them. Only through helping others can we save ourselves.

I read “The Walk” during a challenging year in my law enforcement career. It wasn’t the suicides, highway fatalities, or domestic violence incidents that rattled my faith in humanity.

It was the sense of purposelessness I saw in so many people.

To choose life is to accept pain

Books have always been a refuge for me. Great authors, through their stories and essays, help us see things more clearly. For example, reading “The Walk” underscored an important life lesson for me:

To choose life is to accept pain.

Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel “The Old Man and the Sea,” echoes the notion that we need purpose in our lives. And since nothing worthwhile is ever easy in life, chasing purpose invites some pain along the way.

That’s why Santiago, Hemingway’s elderly fisherman, says to himself, “My big fish must be somewhere.”

The lesson in “The Old Man and the Sea” is that the journey through life is the reward. The key is to live with courage and integrity.

To have a purpose.

The late author David Foster Wallace gave a memorable commencement speech in 2005 to Kenyon College. The speech was titled “This Is Water.”

Like Richard Paul Evans’s book “The Walk,” Wallace’s speech “This Is Water” warns against living a walking dead or “default setting” kind of life.

So, what exactly is a “default setting” kind of life?

You can be shaped, or you can be broken

With time and a little bit of life experience, a lot of us start to suffer from what David Foster Wallace describes as “blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.”

Our arrogance is sometimes blind to us. We celebrate the stuff we’re right about and disregard or ignore our mistakes.

We think we are the center of the universe. This self-centeredness is kind of our “default setting”, according to Wallace. After all, we are the center of all our experiences. Yes, there may be other people and things going on, but it’s all filtered through our senses.

Wallace argues that “learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”

The reality is that much of adult life consists of boredom, repetition, disappointments, and frustration. It’s the traffic jams, long lines at the grocery store, elevator music at the dentist’s office, laundry you forgot to do, and a million other daily indignities.

Our natural default setting is to make everything about us. So when the elderly woman holds up the grocery store line to study her coupons, we take it personally. She’s delaying us from getting home.

But what if we took a moment to realize that the elderly woman is the center of her world. And in her world, she’s on a fixed income because her husband died unexpectedly. Her children don’t visit her, and those grocery store visits provide a few precious minutes of social interaction.

You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard… How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. — David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

There is actually no such thing as atheism

According to David Foster Wallace, “in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”

It’s one thing to worship a god, spiritual deity, or noble truth that pulls us out of our self-centeredness and into the service of others.

Unfortunately, many choose to worship money, looks, power, or intellect. Doing so doesn’t usually end well. Such false gods, according to Wallace, “…will eat you alive.”

We see the destruction of people worshiping false gods all the time. Politicians addicted to power at the expense of ethics. Aging actors abusing plastic surgery to grasp at distant youth. Entrepreneurs who would sell their own mother to make a buck. And academics so impressed with their credentials they can’t see how pompous they are.

If we’re honest, we’ve all fallen under the spell of these false gods at one time or another in our lives. But if we ever want to get past the deadness of default living, we need to find a true purpose. Deeper meaning.

In his commencement address, Wallace drives home the point:

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

To care about other people and to sacrifice for them

People usually seek higher education in universities in order to become educated, gain marketable skills, and grow personally. They believe that a university diploma is a ticket to a better life.

It’s true that people with higher education generally go on to get better jobs than less educated folks. But the point of higher education used to be about more than just money, prestige, or getting a corner office. It was supposed to be about becoming a well-adjusted person.

There are lots of highly educated people out there, working in elegant offices, who have fallen into a default life. They’re unhappy and don’t know why. The false gods they worship haven’t given them true purpose or fulfillment.

The problem is that true freedom is not found in wealth, looks, status, or power. If we are to find true happiness and freedom in our lives, we need to look outside of ourselves.

David Foster Wallace wraps up his commencement speech with the following:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

Take care of your children. Think of your spouse before yourself. Help your neighbor carry in her groceries. Be there for those in need.

Do these things, and you’ll sleep well at night. You’ll live an authentic life, and experience the kind of freedom that only comes from caring about others more than yourself.

Before you go

I’m John P. Weiss. I draw cartoons, paint, and write about life. To follow along, sign up for my free Saturday Newsletter here.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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Artworks by John P. Weiss