Free Will Isn’t Free
I’m 32 and feeling flirty and fun! I’m in a period of life where I am single and living on my own and have started dating around again and making more friends. I’m not trying to find ‘the one’, but I want to meet new people, go new places, and have new memorable experiences to look back on— which is all well and fine, but it’s taught me that free will is not free.
free will /ˌfrē ˈwil/ noun
the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
Free will is understood to be doing whatever the hell you want, which I am all for. However, free will is never without costs.
For example, you can go out on the town and hang out with whoever you want, maybe get crazy and try illicit drugs when they offer them to you(please don’t do this, it’s never worth it), but the costs are the risks to your health, the risk of addiction, and risks to your future/career.
That’s a pretty obvious example, but the cost of free will is often more subtle.
For me, the cost of exercising my free will is noticing the shift in how I view myself and how people view and treat me. In the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty inconsequential, but it’s worth noting.
I’m confident in my body, and I dress accordingly especially when going out. The ‘cost’ is that it puts me on display, and that can attract attention from the wrong types of people. It can also influence people to treat me with less respect, if they hold misogynistic views.
I don’t believe in things like purity culture or virginity. I’m not promiscuous, or “sleeping around”, but by rejecting these pious ideals and allowing myself to seek pleasure when I want it, the cost is how others see me. Small minded people will write me off as being immoral. They may treat me as if I have no morals or ethics at all.
I go to shows by myself, the cost of this is that there is a risk being a woman out alone at night. There is potential for danger, could be car accidents, drunk drivers, sexual assault and human trafficking, etc.
I identify most closely with leftist views. I am non religious and am a feminist. I used free will and my own abilities to think for myself to arrive here. The cost is social ostracization from peers and family.
Ultimately, you decide whether or not to care about the perceived costs.
Using your free will is never free to you. There’s a great deal of empowerment in deciding who you want to be and how to carry on in the world, but you’ll get push back, criticism, judgement, and treated differently when you step outside of the proverbial box. As a former people pleaser, I’ll tell you that people are never pleased, and I’ll end with a classic adage: you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
A free spirit isn’t some special person with unique or weird attributes, just a person who decided somewhere along the way that there may be a cost with free will, but nothing says they are the ones paying that cost. Those that judge and expect you to live by their arbitrary rules pay the cost of missing out of truly knowing you, and frankly, themselves.