2025-03-17

In my head, two things are revolving into a seeming paradoxical unity: free things and their costs. In the current age, the internet's mode of free exchange is through the user's data. If the digital service is free, you're paying it with your data, which is used by these apps to sell to their potential clients. Data at this point is quite synonymous with one's personhood. It represents one's desires, current status, anxieties, dreams, political stance, relationships, and almost every single thing that makes up our online persona. But as time progressed, we all know that the online world and the real world is blurring a pixel per day.

This made me reflect on this implications with how we approach free things in the real world and I realized how much of free things reveals our true self. Class status, psychological state, therefore we can infer desire, potential character profile, therefore desires, dreams, anxieties, who knows how deep this goes?

And then I extended this thought to freedom itself. What must we pay for freedom? And when can we say that we are truly free?

Salvation is free, but discipleship will cost you your life.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I have been ruminating this thought ever since it was mentioned by Pastor Jared during the 9am service last Sunday. I know this to be true because this does not only apply to spirituality. A whole lot of things that are free in this world comes with a cost because that's how the world works: in perfect balance. There's the cost of knowledge: the pain of knowing. There's the cost of relationships: vulnerability. There is the cost of love: sacrifice. And all of these things are free. Monetary offerings are irrelevant. We pay through what we contain in our own self, something in exchange to make these bonds possible. In a sense, we conjure these bonds as if we are entering a social contract with other people, and ultimately with ourselves. Capitalism has made the mode of exchange blatantly concrete. I pay you with money, and you give me what I want. The commoditization of everything has blinded us of the true value that we have developed as a society. For every bond to be conjured, a monetary transaction must be made.

Then we are blind to the cost of freedom even if everyone desires it. We want freedom but are unwilling to pay the price of denying our self. Therefore, we get only the image of freedom: incomplete, treacherous, and false. We pay our way through it using money to simulate the idea of being free while we remain shackled by the same things that we use to buy false freedom in travelling, retail therapy, and even in human trafficking. This is also one of the reasons why these things are profitable. People know that there is a market because our desire to be free exposes the things that we want.

So I always come back to Sartre's famous existentialist quote: Man is condemned to be free. This paradox can be reconciled by the unknowing of what freedom truly means. We all search for avenues where we think we can attain freedom: through vices and other methods of escapism. In desiring to be free, we fail to recognize the real act of freedom. What is the real act? Perhaps, it is still living a life led by reason and virtue. Self-mastery and discipline will cost you a lot. But I still believe that in pursuing these things, it means a life that is in constant uncertainty. It will be a daily struggle between knowing and doing what is right at the moment against choosing to do what feels good to free you from the weight of dopamine imprisonment. You must always deny yourself of your own pleasures because you recognize that to do good, it must not always fall into your favor.