Freedom, Uncertainty, and Days Gone By

When I was a child, what I wanted from freedom was actually very concrete.

I did not have a phone in elementary school, so I was always longing to play with one. Sometimes I would even sneak into my parents' room in the middle of the night and take theirs. Later, when I went to boarding school, there were even more restrictions: I could not go home every day, I had little access to electronic devices, and it was difficult to learn what was happening in the outside world. The school had rules for everything; at night, even talking could count as a violation. Looking back, some of those rules now seem almost ridiculous. But living under them at the time, my longing for freedom was real.

People seem to be like that. What we cannot have always feels especially precious.

Strangely, though, it was during those years when I had so little freedom that I did many things I now find difficult to do.

I would read in my spare time, print out passages I liked, and spend time with classical Chinese poetry. It was not for memorization or exams. I simply enjoyed it and read it as I would any book for pleasure. None of this was nearly as easy to access as it is today, yet I genuinely seemed willing to give it my time.

Now everything is different.

I am about to graduate from university, and I already have much of the freedom I once dreamed of. No one tells me what I must do or when I must do it, and no one keeps me from the outside world. With a single app on my phone, I can find more poetry than I could ever finish reading. Books, music, and almost anything I might want to learn about are all far easier to reach than before.

And yet I rarely reach for them.

In my free time, I can read, play games, scroll through videos, listen to something, or simply do nothing. The choices keep multiplying, and distractions keep getting cheaper. As a result, the things that ask me to truly settle down and concentrate have become harder and harder to begin.

This is probably what troubles me most right now. I used to believe that my surroundings were what held me back. Once I escaped those restrictions, I thought I would have more time to read more books, discover more of the world, and become a better person than I had been.

But after gaining that freedom, I did not improve the way I expected. In some sense, I even feel that this free world has corrupted me.

What leaves me even more uncertain is that I do not know what kind of life I actually want.

Online, I am always seeing somebody's “high-energy” day: waking and sleeping early, working out, studying, working, cooking, and arranging every hour neatly. By comparison, my own days could certainly be called idle. Strangely, though, I do not feel the supposed gap in quality of life all that strongly. My life is a little bland. It could be better, or it could be worse, and either seems somehow acceptable. When people talk about a happy life or a beautiful life, I sometimes find it hard even to imagine what that is supposed to look like.

So I do not want to discuss here what a “beautiful life” ought to be. I do not have an answer yet.

I am only becoming more aware that freedom is not as simple as I imagined when I was young. When I did not have it, I treasured so many things. Once I finally gained it, some of them began to feel strangely insipid.

That does not mean my old pursuits were mistaken, nor can it be reduced to fickleness or greed. Perhaps the most compelling moment in many things is never the moment we possess them. Perhaps it is the time before—when we imagine them over and over and, within our limits, keep finding ways to draw closer.

Now I finally have the freedom I once wanted.

But sometimes I remember those nights when I secretly played with a phone, those days at boarding school when I counted down until I could go home, and the poems I once printed out and read slowly. I still feel a certain regret.

I would buy osmanthus wine and take it boating—yet it could never be the same as traveling in my youth.