After Freedom

I used to think that having fewer obligations would make it easier to do what I wanted to do. There were things I wanted to stop doing, and it seemed reasonable that once they were gone, what remained would be closer to the life I wanted.

I’ve had a fairly good opportunity to test this. I can move between countries and choose my own projects. Much of what people mean when they say they want more freedom is already available to me. Yet I found myself looking for something substantial to be responsible for. I wanted a reason to organise my days a certain way, even when I didn’t feel like it.

At first this seemed like a failure to appreciate what I had. Why work to escape obligations and then acquire new ones? But I’d been treating obligations as though their main effect was to prevent me from doing things. Some also make things possible. Having people expect you to turn up can be inconvenient, but it’s also part of belonging somewhere.

Marriage makes this particularly clear. If you describe getting married only in terms of the options it removes, it sounds like a peculiar decision. You choose one person and agree to stop looking, despite having met a negligible fraction of the available candidates.

But the relationship you’re choosing isn’t fixed at the moment you choose it. The decision to stay changes what the two of you can build. You can make plans that take years. You learn how to disagree without making every disagreement a referendum on the relationship. You become willing to reveal things that take longer to explain, and longer still for another person to understand.

Someone deciding whether to marry might compare their existing relationship with the possibility of meeting someone else. That’s a reasonable comparison. But it’s incomplete if it leaves out what the existing relationship could become through years of mutual commitment. Part of its future value depends on a decision that hasn’t been made yet.

The same difficulty appears in less obvious places. You can visit a city and assess its weather, restaurants, and cost of living. You can’t assess what it would feel like to have lived there for ten years by staying for a month. Some of what you’d be evaluating doesn’t exist yet. The friends who know your history, the people you run into without arranging it, the small ways you become useful to a place—all of these require your participation over time.

This is one reason commitment can make life more interesting even as it makes life less varied. What you learn in one year changes what you can notice in the next. A stranger tells you what they do for work. A friend can tell you why they’re thinking of giving it up, and you know enough to ask the question they’ve been avoiding.

There’s a kind of compounding here. Time spent doesn’t merely add more experiences. It changes the quality of the experiences available.

Work can develop this way too. When you begin a project, you mostly have the questions anyone would have. After working on it seriously, you start encountering questions that would never have occurred to you at the beginning. You notice a problem because you understand another problem. Something a customer says connects with something you tried six months earlier. Previous effort makes new effort more productive, and often more interesting.

Switching projects can teach you things too. Breadth has real value. But if you always switch when the obvious discoveries run out, you keep arriving at the point where your accumulated knowledge might become useful and then abandoning it.

The trouble is that the early benefits of exploration are easy to see. A new city is immediately new. A new project has unsolved problems without the accumulated frustrations of the old one. The benefits of staying often arrive more slowly, and you need some faith in their existence to stay long enough to find them.

That doesn’t mean commitment reliably turns a poor choice into a good one. Time can deepen trust, but it can also deepen resentment. A business can accumulate knowledge while continuing to make something nobody wants. Years invested are evidence of effort, not proof that more effort is deserved.

So “commit to something” is inadequate advice. The useful question is whether staying is allowing anything valuable to accumulate. Are you understanding the problem better? Are you becoming more honest with each other? Are repeated encounters turning into friendships? These developments can justify continuing even when daily life feels ordinary. Without them, duration alone doesn’t count for much.

This also changes what it means to choose well. You don’t necessarily need to find a business, person, or place so obviously exceptional that you stop noticing alternatives. You need enough reason to believe that continued attention will produce something worth having. Some of the evidence can only arrive after you begin.

Freedom remains useful throughout this. It lets you leave arrangements that are harmful or exhausted. It gives you room to explore when you genuinely don’t know what matters to you. But keeping every choice permanently open has a cost: you can’t fully participate in things that depend on other people believing you’ll be there.

A more committed life may contain fewer possibilities you could list in advance. It can also contain more that you weren’t capable of imagining at the start. When deciding whether to stay with something, those deserve a place in the calculation too.