My first post is still up, promising you freedom
On 4 February 2021 I published the very first post on this site. It is called You Hold The Keys To Your Freedom: 8 Practical Steps to Your Liberation. It runs to three and a half thousand words, and it is still up there, exactly as I wrote it back then. This piece is meant to be read right next to it, on purpose. Same author, same subject, five years apart… and, as you will see, two rather different men.
Please, don't get me wrong here: I am not about to call the man who wrote it a fool. He was not. He meant every single word (and that, mind you, is the part worth looking at, isn't it?). What has changed is not my opinion of you. What has changed is what I think freedom is, and who on earth I thought I was to hand it out to you in numbered steps.
So, open both, if you like. The old post promises. This one does not, and by the end I trust you will see why the second is, by far, the more useful of the two.
In 2021 I gave you eight steps and ninety days
The old post opens with a run of questions, and the first one goes like this: "Are you feeling trapped in a situation that, for the life of you, you cannot see how to get out from?" Then come three surveys (85% of people worldwide hate their jobs, according to one of them: 85%!), five reasons why you don't feel free, and, finally, the eight practical steps, each one with its own proud heading.
And, oh boy, are these steps confident! Accept the situation. Know yourself. Set a goal and take one step towards it, then "commit to yourself that you'll take at least one such small step every day, for the next 90 days." Focus on the next step. Trust your intuition. Learn marketing. Learn digital skills. Enjoy the doing. The whole set, I wrote, was "tested and proven in practice, not just in theory." No less!
It ends the way this kind of post always does. Read this article one more time, it says, and then: "Wow, I'm really proud of you!" See, I had read a great many articles like it… and now I had written one myself. And, come to think of it, so have you, probably, in one form or another: that plan you made for yourself on a bad Sunday has the very same headings, right?
One sentence knew better, and I buried it
Now, here is what jumped out at me when I read it again. In the third section, well before the steps begin, there is a sentence that simply does not belong with the rest. It says that I was "still to arrive at a place where I could truly shout out loud: 'I now have complete freedom to do whatever I want, whenever I want it'." And then, just one line later: "Who knows, perhaps such a place is never to be reached…"
That is the truest sentence in the whole post… and it is in there almost by accident. Everything around it promises the very arrival it doubts. I wrote the doubt, and then I wrote nearly three thousand words straight past it, as if it had been a passing mood and not the one solid fact I had in my hands.
Haven't you done the same, in your own words? You knew, at some point, that there was no place to get to, and you kept going towards it anyway. Because knowing that and having a plan are two different comforts, and the plan is the one people pay for.
Freedom was an exit then, and there is no exit
In 2021, freedom was somewhere else. The post is full of prison talk: invisible bars, walls, guards, "numerous other inmates just like you". Well, if that is where you are, then freedom is obviously outside, what you need is a way out, and a way out comes (where else?) in steps.
Now, let me tell you where I stand today: there is no outside. Not because the bars are unbreakable (they are not), but because they are made of the wanting-out itself. Every step you take towards the exit is one more brick in the wall you want to leave behind. I have written elsewhere that there is no way to free yourself, only the one you make as you go. The place you actually live, the only place anyone has EVER lived, is the threshold: not inside, not outside, and not on the way from the one to the other either.
Granted, this is not a comforting thing to hear (believe me, it was not comforting to find out). But where does that leave the eight steps? Steps need a destination. Take the destination away, and what you are left with is not despair… What you are left with is your life, as it is, no longer treated as a mere passage to somewhere else.
Two of the steps were selling you something
I have to say this once, and then I promise to leave it alone. Steps six and seven were not about your freedom at all. One told you to learn marketing, the other to learn digital skills, and the second one ended with an affiliate link and the words "I invite you to check this out."
That is selling, whatever I chose to call it at the time. The post promised you a way out of a prison and then, three-quarters of the way through, offered you a course. Did I see the contradiction back then? I don't think so. The genre had taught me that helping and selling are one and the same gesture, and the genre, as it turns out, was dead wrong.
By the way, before you ask: yes, there is an affiliate link in this piece too. It is on the book, in the very next section, and if you buy it, Amazon pays me a small commission. I am not hiding that behind a nicer word. What separates the two links is this: the book is what this post is about, and the course was the way out that the old post had promised.
Please understand that I am not confessing this in order to be forgiven for it. I am pointing at it as the clearest evidence in the entire post that its writer had a destination in mind for himself, too, and that the eight steps were, at least partly, his own.
Byung-Chul Han showed that this freedom is a compulsion
Byung-Chul Han was born in Seoul in 1959, studied philosophy in Germany, and taught for years in Berlin. In 2010 he brought out a short book, since translated into many languages, whose English title is The Burnout Society. Its argument is simple, and not a pleasant one either.
The old world, he says, ran on prohibition: you may not. The present one runs on possibility: you can. Nobody orders the modern person about any more. The modern person orders himself around, and calls that… freedom! Han's name for this figure is the achievement-subject, and the achievement-subject, he writes, "exploits itself until it burns out". Nobody is standing over you with a whip, you see. The whip is in your own hand, and you are rather proud of that, too.
Read my third step of 2021 again, with all this in mind. One small step every day, for ninety days, towards a goal you set for yourself, and you will be "amazed" at the end. That is not a way out of the prison, is it? That is the self-improvement trap: the prison with the guard removed and YOU appointed in his place. He says all of this in little more than seventy pages.
Four of the steps are true, and I keep them
Here comes the part I owe the old post. Four of its steps are true, and I would happily put my name to them today.
Accept the situation as it is: yes, though I would cut the promise that calm will follow and then "transform into clarity". Know yourself: yes, and the line I used back then still stands ("Moses gave to the ancient Jewish people ten commandments. Ancient Greeks, on the other hand, had only one"). Trust your intuition: yes. Enjoy the doing and let it be: yes, absolutely. In fact, the little breathing exercise at the end of the post is the one honest instruction in it, precisely because it makes no demand whatsoever on your future.
What I did not see in 2021, though, is this. These four were never steps. A step goes somewhere, and none of these four does. They are what remains when the steps run out: no destination, no ninety days, nothing to be amazed by at the end. I dressed them up as a programme because a programme is what you were looking for (and, if I am honest, what I wanted as well).
Read the first post and mark what you would sign
So, here is something you can do with the old post, the next time you have half an hour and no wish whatsoever to be improved.
Read it once, as a stranger would. Then read it again with a pen in your hand, and mark every sentence you would still put your own name under. Not the ones that sound good (there are plenty of those), but the ones you would sign.
You will find, I think, that the marked sentences are the quiet ones. They simply say what is the case. The unmarked ones promise: amazed, liberated, ninety days, proven. Then ask yourself which of the two sets you wanted to be true when you first read something like it, years ago, in somebody else's words. The promises, of course! (Who reads an eight-step post for the quiet sentences?) And that wish, you see, is what every eight-step post feeds on, and it is no weakness in you. It is only the same old urge to get out that the writer had, sold right back to you, with headings.
The 2021 post stays up, and I am not correcting it
The old post stays exactly as it is, and I am not correcting it.
All I can say now is smaller than eight steps, much smaller. It has taken me five years, and a good deal I would not have chosen, to reach it. The man who wrote that post wanted freedom for you, and the wanting was real. What he thought he had, the keys, he did not have. Nobody does, because there is no lock… and looking for the keys is most of what the prison was made of in the first place.
What I can offer now is another human being like you, a little way ahead on the same road.
The eight steps are still there, one click away, and so is this piece. The same person wrote both, five years apart. Back then he was looking for the exit. Today he is not.