By Duncan Autrey
The world is scary. The problems we face are complex, our future is uncertain, and we are bound up with many people we don’t necessarily trust or understand. On top of that, our brains are wired to crave simplicity — a story that makes sense, a side to pick, a good guy and a bad guy.
Politicians and media feed that craving. They sell us simple answers to complex problems and profit by stoking fear. But the real work of freedom demands the opposite: that we face ambiguity and complexity honestly, and take responsibility for what we do next.
That means choosing to act not from habit, fear, or ideology, but from a recognition of our interdependence. We are not just isolated individuals or opposing camps. We’re one entangled system. In the U.S., even our founding motto, E Pluribus Unum, gestures at this truth: “Out of many, one.”
But how do we live that? How do we hold complexity without giving up, falling into despair, or grabbing for control?
Ambiguity and Responsibility
Simone de Beauvoir, the French philosopher and feminist, wrote about this in The Ethics of Ambiguity. In response to Sartre’s famous line — “Man is condemned to be free” — she laid out a path for navigating the tension between our limitations and our agency.
She wasn’t offering a fixed path or a new ideology. She was naming something many of us already feel: that freedom isn’t clean or individual. It’s messy, relational, and full of contradiction.
We are born into systems we didn’t choose, shaped by histories we didn’t write. And yet, we are still responsible for how we show up, how we act, and what we create. There’s no ultimate playbook. No perfect values. No fixed meaning handed down from above.
This is the ambiguity at the heart of freedom: we are both subject and object, insignificant and significant, bound and free. Each choice we make defines what we become. And because we live in relationship with others, our freedom only matters when it includes theirs too.
A Map of Habits of Freedom
Beauvoir offers a kind of existential cartography — a map of how people tend to respond to the burden of freedom. These aren’t levels to conquer. They’re roles we shift in and out of, ways we survive, resist, or make sense of chaos. Most of us carry more than one at once.
The Child
Children don’t choose their values. They accept what adults tell them is good or evil. Everything feels absolute. The child is free, but it is a freedom rooted in ignorance of our interdependence. As adults, we can carry this mindset forward, clinging to inherited truths as if they are eternal.
The Sub-Man
This is the person who tries not to engage at all. They reject responsibility, withdraw from the world, and try to live without choosing. But not choosing is still a choice — one that denies freedom while continuing to exist within systems that shape others’ lives.
The Serious Man
The Serious Man finds relief in certainty. In the face of overwhelming chaos, they grab hold of a system — a cause, a mission, an ideology — and pour everything into it. It gives structure. Meaning. Discipline. And for a while, it works.
Most of us have been here. Many of us are here now. In activist spaces, it’s easy to mistake dedication for liberation — to swap one kind of authority (state, church, market) for another (movement, theory, dogma). We call it freedom, but often it’s just obedience with better branding.
There’s no shame in this. The Serious Man is trying to survive, to make sense of the mess by holding something still. But the danger is this: when we believe our cause is absolutely right, we stop asking questions. We stop listening. We start policing ourselves and others.
The hardest truth is this: even our best ideas might be temporary. Even our most righteous projects might not be the final answer.
The way out isn’t apathy. It’s deeper freedom — the kind that doesn’t cling, but commits without illusion.
What if the cause isn’t the destination, but the conversation?
What Comes Next?
When we realize those systems are flawed — that there’s no perfect ideology, no universal truth — we can fall into nihilism. If nothing is ultimately true, then maybe nothing matters.
But that’s not the end of the road. It’s a passage.
The Nihilist
The nihilist sees through the Serious Man’s illusions, but gets stuck. They recognize that external systems are flawed, that there may be no universal truth, no perfect ideology. But instead of moving forward, they collapse inward.
From here, it’s easy to fall into disengagement, irony, or fatalism. If nothing is true, maybe nothing matters. If everything is complex, maybe nothing can change. This mindset can wear radical clothing — “burn it all down” — but underneath, it’s still despair.
Nihilism masquerades as insight, but it’s really just fear in a new form. The risk isn’t just personal disconnection — it’s collective paralysis.
The Adventurer
The adventurer has moved beyond despair. They embrace their freedom and live by their own rules. They create, explore, build, play. They don’t ask for permission, and that’s powerful. But it’s also incomplete.
This is the realm of creative freelancers, lifestyle anarchists, personal growth junkies, and edge-runners of all stripes. And while it can be liberating, it can also be escapist. They create their own values, but remain disconnected from others. If joy depends on looking away from harm, it’s not transformation.
The adventurer hasn’t yet realized that freedom isn’t just about breaking chains. It’s about choosing to be bound in care.
The Passionate One
A level up is the passionate person — someone who commits their freedom to a passion project or cause. It could be family, music, writing, organizing. They want to create change, leave a mark, do something that matters. They freely choose something, and their dedication is powerful. But their passion can become rigid. They may not realize that no cause, no matter how noble, can resolve the permanent ambiguity of life.
Without reflection, passion can become ideology all over again.
Genuine Freedom
The highest form of freedom is one that includes others. This is genuine freedom — the recognition that your liberation is bound up with everyone else’s. That meaning is co-created, and that responsibility is not just personal but mutual.
Genuine freedom asks us to act in ways that expand freedom for others. To see that every moment is a choice, and that our relationships, communities, and collective futures are shaped by how we show up.
This is not freedom as escape. It’s freedom as interdependence. This freedom is generative and self-reinforcing. Genuine freedom isn’t an answer. It’s a way of staying in the question.
It’s never finished. It has to be re-chosen, re-built, and re-lived — especially with others.
The Tyrant
De Beauvoir includes one more category: the tyrant. Someone who claims their own freedom, but uses it to dominate, suppress, or dehumanize others. They exploit ambiguity not to explore it, but to manipulate and control.
The tyrant may believe they are free, but they deny others that same possibility. They replace one system of control with another.
Where We Are Now
Look around. This map mirrors the state of U.S. culture today.
We’ve moved from childlike dependence on empire and religion to serious devotion to causes. We’ve seen waves of nihilism, cynicism, and escapism. We’ve seen adventurers building freedom without responsibility. We’ve seen passionate leaders driven by ideals, sometimes toward transformation, sometimes toward control. And we’ve seen tyrants rise, capitalizing on fear and uncertainty.
The choice in front of us now is whether we will move toward genuine freedom together.
Freedom as Practice
If we want liberation, it can’t be theoretical. It has to be lived.
We must learn to live in ambiguity. We can learn to face complexity without clinging to certainty. We can build communities where people don’t have to choose between autonomy and belonging. To be free, we need to create systems that reflect the truth that freedom is relational, not individual. Our freedom is bound up with one another’s.
This kind of freedom doesn’t come from purity or isolation. It grows through relationship — through shared work, shared care, shared risk. It’s how we resist despair, and how we keep our movements alive.
There are no final answers. But there are better questions. There are deeper commitments. There are freer ways to live.
Freedom isn’t something we win once. It’s something we practice together.