The Situation I Am Thinking About
You decide to go outside to the park to get some fresh air, but as you are exiting the house, a man with a firearm stops you and ushers you back into your home. He gives you one instruction, whatever he says, you obey. If you do not obey his command or attempt to leave home, you will be shot.
He stands to watch you, hypothetically, for the rest of your life, right up until the day you die. He never gives you any command, so you can do as you please; some may say this is freedom. However, you are stuck in the confines of your house.
Are you free?
You Are Not Free
There has been research, and it suggests that children as young as four fear death. I feel that children develop this fear of death at that age without being taught about it as the mind imagines the worst, especially with the little information we have been given about the world at this young age; the mind takes this uncertain environment and imagines the worst outcome.
It looks like that, as a species, we have evolved to have some kind of impulse self-guarding system. We have evolved so that we are programmed to avoid premature death.
Our minds work in such a way that it translates the objective into subjective. For instance, it transforms light wavelengths into colours, sound frequency into growls and squeaks.
The certainty of death means that we need to create ways of coping. I feel that the fear of death decreases as we get older. The older we get, the closer we step towards death and consequently, we learn to accept the inevitability of the process and fear it less.
Being Free and Not Free
I think the issue here is that we do not have a clear word for free and not free. Other contrasts such as young and old, tall and short are clear which category they fall into, but something like free and unfree is a much hazier area.
The more you try and meet the two in the middle, the vaguer it gets. If you were to ask me, "Are you free?" in the scenario above, I would argue that it does not have a definite answer. It depends on the individual's definition of freedom, and the concept is quite ambiguous for me to just answer on behalf of everybody.
Many would argue you are free as you can do what you like, but others say you are being held hostage with the fear of death.
I don't think of death a lot at age 45, but it does come up now and then. :) When it does, I use it as motivation to moving forward and doing more.
The type of freedom I do think about the most is Financial Freedom. I think of it every day and work on it everyday. :)
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