2025-03-18

It's been a while since I read Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. I can't shake that immaculate title in my mind since the start of this week. I can't relate it to anything but again, to the cost of freedom.

There's always a chance that our concept of something is incomplete and oftentimes, our reality is masked by our own biases. It's not that it's something that we deliberately do. We conceive the world through our experience so the least path of resistance in thinking of the reality of the world is through our experiences, so it then follows that our thoughts are part of that experience.

At this point, I am inclined to think that thoughts are consequences of experiencing the world. It may be through this understanding that we ascribe our thoughts to significantly hold a value of truth because of our own perception. Since I can see, touch, and hear something, it must exist externally, and therefore to be true.

But at the same time, our inferences are often mistaken to be truth itself. This is when I turn to how I conceive of freedom. If the dictionary definition of freedom is "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action," then it must follow that I can do everything. Free will means acting in accordance to my own agency. I have my own authority. I have the power to change things with just a single thought. I can do everything.

Then, we arrive at a problem. How can something so liberating and powerful be executed in such a simple thing as following the definition of the world? Why then, if it's so easy, it is also practically difficult to implement?

It is possible that this definition of the word freedom is true but then our immediate interpretation of it stems from the desire of being free from everything that holds us back from living the life we truly want. Free from worries, anxieties, and bonds from other people. Free from responsibilities and just arrive to a perpetual state of lightness of being. In another sense, this could only mean death. This paradox becomes self-evident. It is not freedom that we want but only an aspect of it. We do not want the weight that is inherent to living that particular desirable concept.