Chapter 8
Freedom vs Security
I’m serialising my book “The Observing I: A guide to living a more authentic life” on Substack, with a new chapter being released every Wednesday. I’m a big believer that philosophy should be available to the masses, not locked behind paywalls or hidden away in dusty archives. So I’m making my book available here.
This is Chapter 8.
When I was a child, I used to love going on theme park rides. They were a real buzz. I remember seeing the photograph that they’d snap towards the end of the ride where everyone was screaming and waving their arms in the air.
Except for me. I was grinning like a mad man.
There was something liberating about the sense of danger, of being completely out of control of the situation.
I don’t like them much now. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more analytical. More risk averse. I look at the rides and wonder about the maintenance schedule. I want to see an assessment showing me deaths per capita, then I glance over at the person operating the ride and realise they barely look old enough to have finished school.
So, what’s making me now averse to risk? Is it because I’m more aware of the danger?
No, because there is no real danger with theme park rides. My rational mind knows that they’re likely less dangerous than the drive to get to the theme park was. They’re well designed, well maintained, and the people who operate then are trained to do so.
It’s the perception of risk that I’m focusing on, not the risk itself. I’m telling myself a story to convince myself that there is a rational reason behind my fears when, in fact, it’s nothing to do with the rides themselves. The honest answer here is that I’m just a bit older now and don’t like the adrenaline any more.
I don’t like the idea of being totally out of control, either. That was cool when I was younger, but now I prefer the idea of having some influence in the direction of my life. Being on that ride, operated by a person that I don’t know (and therefore do not trust), and just being carried along with no option to get off if I don’t like it - that does not play well to me.
To admit that it’s nothing to do with the rides but my change of taste in age, I have to recognise that I’m getting older and don’t like being totally out of control. Is that something that I want to do? Maybe not. So, I tell myself the story to avoid the truth that I don’t want to hear and instead make it about something else.
What stories are you telling yourself that prevent you from taking risks? Are they truths or, like my aversion to roller coasters, are they just tales that you’re telling yourself to avoid confronting something else?
Remember the importance of the internal narrative. Those stories that we’re telling ourselves will ultimately define our perceptions and shape our internal landscape.
I want to take a moment here to talk about that idea of it being ok to experience these ideas such as wanting to be in control of life. It reminds me of something I saw once by the son of a prominent Buddhist monk called Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
Gesar Mukpo, born in Boulder, Colorado and brought up in the West, is a film-maker who created the documentary Tulku in 2009. In part of the documentary, he visits the Shechen Monastery in Nepal, a place where he spent time studying at the age of 15 after his father died.
There’s a scene where he’s interviewing Reuben Derksen at the monastery, a man born in 1986 in Amsterdam but who grew up in Nepal and Bhutan. He spent three years living in a Buddhist monastery when he had finished school, and describes it as a profoundly negative experience.
Reuben had the idea of monks being holy and serene and wise. The reality, however, was quite different. He makes a fair point when he says “You put 600 men together, what do you expect you’re going to get?”. There were some at the monastery who were good leaders, who were practising every day, who were people that you could look up to.
Yet, in his words, “the monastery was a cesspool of jealousy, of gossip, of hate, of violence…very un-Buddhist, in a lot of ways”.
Indeed, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche himself was renowned for smoking cigars, drinking heavily, and having relationships with his students. I remember when I first read that, I was really surprised. Like Reuben, I thought Buddhists, especially the higher monks, were paragons of self-control, calm thought, and measured action.
It’s the distinction, in this case, that Buddhism and Buddhists are two very different things that’s important for us to recognise. One is the ideal that we hold ourselves up against and aspire towards, the other are human beings.
As human beings, we’re fraught with self-doubt, contradiction and the scars of our experiences. We all have aspirations and ideologies that we try to live by, but we’re ultimately feeling, fallible, fumbling people.
What’s important is that we exercise some compassion for ourselves when we fall out of line with those ideals that we’re trying to live against. I’m prone to it. Buddhist monks living in Nepal are prone to it. It’s ok for you to be prone to it as well.
It’s also important, if we want to grow as human beings, that we take some time to reflect on the reasons why our actions fall out of line with our ideals.
The whole point of an ideal is that it’s aspirational - it’s a place that we’re trying to reach. If we never question why we do things that go against our ideals, if we never stop to challenge ourselves or exercise some personal reflection, then those ideals will forever be aspirations. We’re never going to come close to attaining them.
Risk is an integral part of working towards our aspirations. If we want to become the person that we imagine we could be, then it’s going to require us to be ok with not being the person that we imagine from time to time, and for us to operate outside of our comfort zone.
We’re also going to have to work out the balance between two things: Freedom, and Security.
Security is our sense of comfort. We might have gotten ourselves into a well-paying job that isn’t necessarily making us happy, but we know that we’re always going to be able to pay the bills and lead a comfortable life outside of work.
It’s not satisfying our aspirational needs, but it is ensuring that we don’t have to worry about food, shelter, a decent pot of retirement savings, and supports us doing things that we do enjoy.
Freedom is our sense of abandon and pursuit of authenticity. It’s us following our true dreams and ambitions, at the expense of our personal comfort. We’re stepping outside of that place that we know, and into a realm that’s beyond our sense of control.
I want to go back to Sam’s story for a moment. Remember that Sam loved to paint when he was a kid and, through circumstance and a fair dose of external conditioning, went on to work for an insurance firm.
At that point in his life, Sam was choosing security over freedom. He knew that he’d be able to financially support himself, and that he’d have a secure career in front of him (let’s be fair, no one necessarily expects redundancy). What he wasn’t doing was putting effort into pursuing something that was important to him - his artistic interests.
What’s the inherent risk involved in doing anything that we know isn’t a guaranteed success? Failure. Whether or not we’re comfortable taking risks will have a lot to do with how we perceive failure, and how failure impacts our sense of self-worth.
If we allow ourselves to become the failure or, conversely, to become the success, then we’re going to be much more likely to gravitate towards doing things that we know we’re going to succeed at. It makes us feel good when we succeed, it gives us a sense of accomplishment and personal validation.
It’s no surprise that many of us have this relationship with success and failure. As I mentioned before, we’re trained to think that way the moment we step into formal education. Even earlier, in some cases, thanks to the rampant infectiousness of generational memes.
Now, I mention that word meme there, and your mind has probably gone to straight to something like:
However, the idea of memes can actually be traced back to pre-internet days, initially coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene”.
Memes are like genes - both transmit information. Memes, however, aren’t biological. They carry cultural information down the ages. Think of religion, fashion trends, political ideologies. All the stuff we inherit from our family, friends, and society.
They can also impact our sense of failure and success. The cultural narrative can shape our understanding of what it means to be successful, often emphasising certain achievements or character traits that would fall under that umbrella. A good salary, a prestigious career, an ambitious drive.
You’ll see it creeping into cultural proverbs. Rise and grind or failure is not an option. They tell a powerful story about a culture’s perception of success, and it’s something that we need to be aware of when it comes to thinking about our authentic aspirations.
That balance of freedom and security is a personal choice, and the ratio will depend on taste. Some of us are happy in security - we like having that perceived safety net beneath us. It keeps things consistent, rhythmic, predictable. There’s a lot to be said for the comfort zone, but does spending our lives within it ever lead to a sense of true fulfilment?
The American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron (a student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche) talks about getting out of our comfort zone in her book “When things fall apart”. There’s a particular paragraph in it that I think is very pertinent:
To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.
For some reason, when I read this, I always visualise a tiny man in a suit throwing himself out of a bird’s nest only to land in another bird’s nest below. This weirdly makes sense, though, and I’ll talk about why.
The bird’s nest is obviously our comfort zone. We feel secure, safe, and our needs are met. This becomes problematic, however, if we decide to stay there indefinitely. When I say problematic, it’s not going to cause you any harm, but I guarantee you that it will significantly hinder your sense of fulfilment and genuine quality of life in the long run.
What happens to us when we reside in that place of comfort and security? Nothing. And that’s where it becomes problematic. We aren’t in a place of growth, we aren’t challenging ourselves, and our scope of experience remains a narrow one.
Then there’s the danger of something coming along and disturbing the nest. What do we do when, like in Sam’s example, we’re made redundant and our nest becomes a shredded mess? How do we cope, and would we even know how to if we aren’t accustomed to managing change and the unexpected?
In the risk averse world of the comfort zone, we rely on predictability and patterns. It makes our minds lazy and, without anything to challenge us or our perspectives, we grow stagnant and old.
When we take the leap, it will be unsettling, and it can be frightening. All of our plans and expectations are thrown to the wind. Those little stories we tell ourselves foretelling our own future fall to irrelevance.
Getting out of the nest doesn’t have to be a drastic shake up. If we aren’t entirely comfortable with the prospect of change, then we can start by changing something small. Easing us into the unexpected world beyond.
You may have always wanted to learn a new skill or, for example, another language, but either never found (read “made”) the time or were reluctant to try for fear of not making the cut or doing well at it. To borrow from the Stoics, what better time to start than now, for now is all we have. Get uncomfortable, leave that nest behind, and take the leap.
Did you notice in that quote from Pema Chodron that she mentions being “continually thrown out of the nest”? Continually. Thrown.
This is where our ability to adapt comes in. As human beings, we’re very good at becoming accustomed to change, despite our sometimes reticence to do so. When we throw ourselves from the proverbial nest, we’ll eventually find ourselves landing in a new one.
We’ll get familiar with the risks that we’ve taken, able to manage them and adapt until the unexpected becomes expected. Eventually those risks we were so afraid of before we made the jump won’t be risks anymore - they’ll be the status quo.
At this point, we find ourselves in yet another nest. Yet another comfort zone. We’ve met the original challenges we set for ourselves. Whether we’ve succeeded or failed doesn’t matter. We’ve experienced them, and in doing so we’ve opened ourselves up to the challenges that came with them. They’ve allowed us to push upon and expand our experiential boundaries.
So, what do we do now? Do we stay here, content with the progress that we’ve made so far? Or do we leap again?
I think you know the answer to that. We’ve got to keep moving out towards the things that are going to challenge us if we want to continue on a path of growth.
Movement is life.
When we’re leaping from the nest, we’ve got to make sure we aren’t leaping too far. If we overshoot, we’ll end up falling into the Danger Zone. This is a place not inhabited by Kenny Loggins and homoerotic 80s cinema, but of excessive risk.
What happens to us when we put ourselves in that danger zone? We’re going to be well past the point of challenge, and into a world of potential harm and trauma. I’m going to do a bit more storytelling at this point, and talk about one of my experiences of dancing in the Danger Zone.
I was in my early thirties and working as a software developer at a charity. I was a reasonably good developer, and I was getting to a point in my life where I needed a new challenge. So, I applied for a Technical Lead role at a fairly large digital agency.
The interview went well. I sold myself and my skills as best I could, and they offered me the role about a week or so later. I was enthused and excited to be challenging myself and doing something new.
At this point, I was in the Challenge Zone. I was pushing on the boundaries of my comfort. A few weeks later, I’m at the digital agency. I found the management of my peers and my new responsibilities a tough experience but I was determined to meet it head on.
A few months into the role, and I’m starting to feel the burn. Although I was ok with getting the work done, I wasn’t great at saying no to people. So, people being people, my colleagues were coming to me with a lot of extra work that I enthusiastically took on. In my mind, I was telling myself the story that “getting this done will be a challenge and people will respect me for it”. What was actually going on was that I was striving to please others without looking after my own wellbeing.
I was lacking an ability to recognise and maintain my boundaries, and subsequently started drowning in managing the team, managing my workload, and the reporting that management expected of me. I was working in the evenings and on the weekends. I was tired and frustrated and questioning why the hell I had taken this on in the first place.
I had officially entered the Danger Zone. This was no longer a challenge. This was a slow and begrudging march towards a meltdown. Yet I still didn’t see it. I was still telling myself the story that “this needs to get done, it’s part of the job”, instead of recognising that the real reason behind it was that I didn’t want to upset anyone or let anyone down. Even though the expectations on the amount of work that I had to do were unrealistic.
Instead of pushing back and saying “no, that’s not getting done. Jog on.”, I resentfully did it whilst damaging my own mental health and my relationships with the people that I actually cared about around me.
The Danger Zone, as you can see, is not a place of growth. It’s damaging and destructive, and it’s important for us to have the self-awareness to be able to see when we venture into it and to pull ourselves back.
I, clearly, wasn’t ready for that challenge. What I needed was a bit more time and experience and to resolve that people-pleasing drive before I went into a role like that. Then I would have been equipped to manage it better, and manage myself better too.
That lack of self-awareness meant that I ended up causing myself harm in the long run. Now, thankfully, I’ve been able to identify all of that and would be much better equipped if I found myself in a similar position again. So, there are some positives to take from it.
Bear this in mind when you take on risks and challenge yourself. Exercise caution and personal reflection, rather than blindly pushing forwards like I did. You need to always be asking yourself “am I ok with this challenge?”. You’ll know that you’re ok with it because you’ll feel stretched and it will be tough, but you’ll meet it without resenting it, or resenting yourself.
The likely end result of us throwing ourselves into our Danger Zone will be us running back to the comfort zone and staying put, having done ourselves some damage and not wanting to expose ourselves to any more suffering by challenging ourselves further. We’ll associate “challenge” with “pain and failure”, when it wasn’t that we were challenging ourselves - we were putting ourselves in a place of harm.
This is why I am, once again, coming back to self-awareness, and why it is so important for us to exercise it when we’re on a journey of personal growth.
You’ll probably have noticed the last bit of that quote from Pema Chodron as well - to live is to be willing to die over and over again. It’s a powerful moment when we realise that our entire lives are change, irrespective of the thickness or the height of the walls of our comfort zone.
Today, we are not the person we were yesterday, in the same way that tomorrow we will not be the person we are today.
We are constantly being shaped and moulded by our experiences. Each one altering our dimensions and changing our perspective, even though it may be by a small amount.
It’s ironic then, for those of us who thrive in the constancy of the nest, that we are locked in a state of flux. Change is an inherent part of life, yet we can still find ourselves afraid of it even though it’s something we’re doing all the time.
This is what she means when she says that we must be prepared to die in order to live. We must be ready to shed the old us, the comfortable us, the one that likes being wrapped up warmly with a full belly and no worries. To be reborn with fresh perspectives and renewed vigour.
Who would you rather be, at the end of your life? The person that looks back and feels content that they trod a path of their own making, or the one who dances with their regrets at having walked the safer road?
Taking risks can make life better, or it can introduce turbulence and struggle. The important thing is how we meet the resulting change.
Change will only hurt us if we allow ourselves to become its victim. If we look it in the eyes and approach it without fear, then we’re empowering ourselves to take action, and we’re dissolving our own resistance to it.
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