Freedom and a Soft Chair

The romantic image of freedom demands throwing over stability for the open road; everyday common sense demands holding on to comfort at any cost. In reality comfort can both widen your options and hold you in place.

A warm home, a convenient job, a good income and familiar services stop registering as separate pleasures. Their absence is felt far more than their presence.

That makes comfort valuable, not pointless. Civilisation largely consists of things people have got used to so thoroughly that they take them for natural.

But comfort can create dependence.

A person does not leave a bad job because he is used to the income. Does not move because there is too much stuff. Does not voice disagreement because he is afraid of losing access, position or invitations.

Freedom has a price too: uncertainty, a smaller income, having to decide for yourself, no ready-made infrastructure and the risk of error.

So the formula “always choose freedom” is too simple. Sometimes a person needs stability, treatment, housing or a few calm years. Comfort can become the base for future freedom if it lets you recover and build a reserve.

More useful questions:

Does this comfort widen my options or hold me here?

Can I refuse?

What obligations does it create?

How fast would I recover my independence after losing it?

What stays mine if the conditions change?

Good comfort removes pointless difficulty and frees up strength.

Bad comfort demands ever more submission in exchange for the right not to be inconvenienced.

Freedom does not necessarily look like a backpack and an open road. Sometimes it is a financial reserve, a profession of your own, a separate room or the ability to close a door. A soft chair is not the enemy. It is only advisable to be able to get out of it.

Sources and further reading

Kahneman, D., & Deaton, A. (2010). High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(38), 16489–16493. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1011492107

Killingsworth, M. A., Kahneman, D., & Mellers, B. (2023). Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(10), e2208661120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208661120

Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J. L., & Thaler, R. H. (1990). Experimental tests of the endowment effect and the Coase theorem. Journal of Political Economy, 98(6), 1325–1348. https://doi.org/10.1086/261737

Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917–927. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.36.8.917

Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995–1006. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.995

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

Part IX

All of this is measured by a single number: how many months a person can live if the income stops tomorrow. Someone with six such months talks to an employer differently from someone with none — at the same job title and the same salary. The second agrees to overtime not because his character is weaker, but because the sentence “then we part ways” means different things to them. The difference here is not courage, it is the structure of expenses.

Hence an unromantic conclusion: freedom grows more often by cutting obligations than by loud decisions. Every new monthly payment shortens a little the list of sentences a person can afford to say out loud.