What Is Freedom?

I could not understand how people can deliberately abuse their freedom. I guess that people are naturally afraid of decision-making. This might explain why reducing choices to the minimum might soothe them a little bit.

And give them some comfort of having no obligation to take a decision. According to Iyengar and Lepper (2000), people often feel less satisfied and more overwhelmed when facing a large array of options. This helps explain why narrowing choices down can feel like relief rather than loss. 

Why Would Anyone Give Up Their Freedom?

Yesterday, I had a chat with a friend who is hesitating about leaving academia. And since she got a postdoc offer – from a person she just first met – she decided to just take it and try one more time. And this is such a great recipe for failure: to lock yourself together with an unknown person for years somewhere in some lab in the continental part of the US… I also talked to a friend who just decided to buy an apartment in the city.

Since apartments in the Netherlands are very hard to sell, and you may not sell them under their official value regulated by the government. This is, again, such a great recipe for creating an attachment to something you do not want… According to Arkes and Blumer (1985), people keep investing in a losing course simply because they already invested: the sunk-cost effect.

What Did I Want Most at Fourteen?

I remember the day when I was fourteen and attending a class in Polish literature. The teacher asked us once to list our most important values in life, and I ranked ‘freedom’ the highest.

Unlike in all the other girls’ lists, love did not even get to the podium on my list. And if I had to do this list again, ‘happiness (caused by freedom)’ would most probably get to the top.

How Do I Expand My Area of Influence?

And now I do everything I can to expand my area of influence. I learn some general data analysis so that I can join as many projects of my choice as possible. Also, I found an additional source of income so that I have more choice of what to do with my time.

I am doing my best to keep in touch with as many people as possible in my field. Moreover, I am starting to think about setting up a company.

And, of course, I am becoming more and more proactive with figuring out projects. And the more I dive into the sea of options, the better I feel. According to Schwartz et al. (2002), this works for ‘satisficers’; people who try to maximise every choice end up less happy.

Admittedly, it is a bit counterintuitive as, I believe, evolution wired the human brain to be afraid of making choices. Every time you choose, you might make a wrong choice and regret it.

It is, in principle, a wry and detrimental type of loss aversion. According to Kahneman and Tversky (1979), people typically feel a loss about twice as intensely as an equivalent gain. This is why avoiding a wrong decision can end up mattering more than any potential upside.

I try to prune it completely from my mind.