How to Be Free in Life, Read Through the Mechanism That Sets How Much Freedom You Have

Late at night you send the last reply and the day ends. Next week is already filled in, and the week after that looks like it will fill in the same shape. Nothing in particular has gone wrong. Even so, there are nights when the words I want to be free get typed into a search box.

Where this phrase comes up is not settled by whether you are employed. The same words can surface again several years after going out on your own. Whether that happens is what separates the two things this phrase can mean. If it referred only to the kind of constraint that leaving dissolves, the words would not come back after you had left.

The answers that line up in the results split into two. One side recommends changing occupation: lists of work that can be done anywhere, work with fewer fixed hours. The other side recommends adjusting your outlook: stop minding what other people think, let things go, stop comparing. Searching in either language brings up the same two. Both work in situations that genuinely exist, and this article does not dispute that. What neither of them touches is what sets the amount of freedom in the first place.

The subject here is that setting. The word freedom has been used in economics with a double meaning. Everyday usage of I want to be free points at only one half of it. The other half turns on who decides whether an order arrives at all, and what gets made, at what price, by when. Most of what gets felt as a lack of freedom is happening on that second side.

The scope is narrow. What to rebuild, and in what order, sits outside this article. The whole map of that rebuilding is held by Structural autonomy, and the form that sets the ceiling on income is handled by Getting out of labour-intensive form. What is placed here is not a procedure but a way of reading where your current amount of freedom is being decided.

A public report carries a distribution that makes this reading necessary. Working hours among people who work independently sit towards the shorter end on average, while the share working extremely long hours comes out higher than among employees. Inside the single word independent, freedom of time opens at both ends. What decides which end you land on is the subject of this article.

What follows is ordered this way. It begins by separating what leaving dissolves from what leaving leaves in place. It then checks what each of the two offered answers acts on. On that basis it sets out the double use of the word freedom and separates what independence moves from what it does not. The second half defines the position called the origin of judgement, splits what the word dependence folds together, and treats what increases when the origin moves inward.

What Leaving Dissolves and What Leaving Leaves in Place Are Attached at Different Points

What the act of leaving reduces, and what it does not, are cleanly separated. That they are separated only becomes visible after leaving.

What people picture before leaving is usually a set of concrete items. Being at a desk at a fixed hour. Having the content of your work set by a manager’s instruction. Needing approval to take a day off. Leave requests, the commute, what you wear, where you sit. All of these genuinely disappear if you leave. When the same words surface again afterwards, it is not because they failed to disappear. They disappeared, and something else was left behind.

What is left has no name attached to it. The start of the working day is gone, and the hour you begin is set by when the other party replies. The manager is gone, and what you make is set by the brief you are sent. Approval for time off is gone, and which days you can take off is set from the delivery date. Item by item, everything has become free; in terms of how things get decided, hardly anything has moved.

The measure slips one level here. What you were counting before leaving was how many permissions were required. Permissions did fall. The feeling, though, is not responding to the number of permissions but to which things are decided by whose judgement. A permission is an institutional arrangement, so it disappears when you leave. Where judgement sits is not an institutional arrangement, so it stays.

These two cannot be told apart before leaving. Inside a company, permission and judgement are held by the same person. The manager approves, and the manager decides the content. Because the two sit in one place, they look like a single thing. Only after leaving does one of them disappear on its own.

So the phrase I want to be free points at different things before and after. Before, it points at release from an institution. After, it points at where judgement sits. One phrase is being used as the name of two different things. And the answers that line up in the results are written almost entirely for the first.

Read from the second position, what is offered as a remedy has already been done. Take work that can be done from anywhere. Stop commuting. Already done. When the experience of being prescribed what you have already completed accumulates, the remaining lack of freedom stays unnamed and gets processed as a problem on your own side. Not enough yet, not serious enough, push harder — that is the explanation left standing.

From here a reading appears that says leaving must have been a mistake. It does not follow. Leaving reliably reduces the institutional side of the constraint. What it reduced does not come back. Start times, approval procedures, the seat you were assigned: for someone who has left, those items no longer exist. There is no need to treat that gain as though it never happened.

What can be stated precisely is that leaving is an operation that acts on one side only. When the side that moved and the side that did not sit together, only the side that did not move stays in view. The side that moved becomes ordinary and stops being counted. That asymmetry is what produces the sense that nothing changed.

The Answers on Offer Split Between Changing Occupation and Adjusting Outlook

The answers that come up form two families, and each has a range where it works. They only look ineffective outside that range.

The first is the occupational side: the list set out above. What this remedy moves is physical constraint. Commuting, location, the hour you start. These genuinely move. Someone who shifts into the work on those lists has certainly increased that portion of freedom.

The second is the outlook side. Stop minding what people think, stop meeting expectations, own fewer things, stop comparing. What this remedy moves is where evaluation is referred. Whose measure you use when reading your own state — that position changes. This also genuinely moves. Having the reference outside is expensive, and bringing it inward lightens the load.

The two remedies act in different places. Set side by side, though, they look as if the two of them cover everything. In fact a portion remains after both have been carried out, and that portion falls within neither range.

What remains is the condition under which income occurs. Who decides that an order is placed. Who decides what gets made. Who sets the price and the deadline. Changing occupation moves this condition to a different party, and adjusting outlook does not move it at all. Move into work you can do anywhere, and the decision to commission still sits with the other party. Stop minding what people think, and whether payment arrives is still decided by their judgement.

The outlook remedy carries one side effect here. Moving the reference for evaluation inward has a shape close to cutting off information from outside. Stopping the reference makes things lighter, and at the same time the fact that conditions are set on the other side becomes harder to see. However much lighter minding less makes things, that much less reason remains to look at the structure.

The occupational side carries a side effect of the same shape. Moving into work on the list changes who sets the conditions; it does not change where the conditions are set. What the move swaps is which party it is, not which side decides. Because the move itself is felt to work, the next time a lack of freedom appears, moving gets selected again as the remedy.

For someone still in an employed position, these two are close to sufficient. While physical constraint occupies most of a day, an operation that reduces it produces a large effect. Trying to handle where conditions sit at the same time pushes back the remedy that actually works right now.

Read as an order, the two remedies sit in the earlier stage. Once constraint has fallen, where conditions sit comes into view. Had it been visible earlier, the two remedies would have looked insufficient from the start. They do not look insufficient because, at that point, they are in fact sufficient. So a reading that files these two under wrong advice is not accurate. They are working at a different stage, and each functions at its own.

The Word Freedom Has Been Used in Economics With a Double Meaning

Everyday usage takes freedom in one sense, while the concept that explains this state has carried two senses from the start.

Marx set out the concept of “dual freedom” in Capital, and Kozo Uno, in his principles of political economy, treated it as a premise for labour power becoming a commodity. Dual means that the person who sells their labour power is free in two senses at once.

The first is freedom from bonds of status. Released from a form of life defined by belonging to someone, you can enter contracts by your own will. This is a freedom that was won, and it is a large one.

The second is the side everyday usage does not reach. It is freedom in the sense of not holding the means of production. Tools, equipment, routes to reach people, relationships with customers. The state of not holding those is what the concept calls free. Holding none of them, you are bound by nothing. Holding none of them, you also have no route to income other than selling your labour power.

The direction of the word reverses here. The first freedom means released from; the second means not in possession of. One word points at both a gain and an absence. And the two hold at the same time. Being free of status and not holding the means of production are the front and back of the same position.

Everyday use of I want to be free mostly points at the first. Not wanting to be tied down, instructed, decided for. And the act of leaving a company increases the first still further. By itself it does not touch the second.

Why the same words can surface again after leaving takes shape here. The first freedom increased. The second side is as it was. If anything, with the backing removed, not holding those things acts on you more directly. Inside a company, equipment, routes to reach people and customer relationships were all held by the company, and you worked on top of them. After leaving, you stand in the same market without holding them.

An objection follows: is this not a description of nineteenth-century factories. On the side of tools, it genuinely does not apply. Work that starts with one computer exists, and initial cost has fallen beyond comparison. Situations where lacking equipment is decisive have certainly become fewer.

The remaining two turn on the form of ownership rather than on price. The means of reaching people has, if anything, opened up. Anyone can publish, and the cost of doing so is near zero. That reach, though, mostly sits on top of somebody else’s premises. If the policy of the premises changes, how far you reach moves independently of anything you do. Customer relationships work the same way: whether you hold the contact details on your own side, or only through another company’s screen, changes their nature. What became cheap, in other words, is the use of the route, not the ownership of it.

So dual freedom reads as a description of form rather than of a period. Whether or not you hold a route to income other than selling labour power. That division survives changes in the price of tools. And on that division, the act of going independent does not move your position. A state in which labour power once sold to one company is now sold to several sits, from the second side, in the same place.

Independence Increases One Side and Can Leave the Other Untouched

The single word independent does not settle freedom of time. A measured distribution shows this.

A report from the Cabinet Office carries the following distribution, presented as findings from a survey by a private association. Among people working independently, the share with short working hours is high on average. At the same time, the share working 250 hours or more per month comes out higher than among employees. Satisfaction runs comparatively high, and the spread of both income and hours is wide. The underlying survey is self-reported, with roughly a thousand respondents (Cabinet Office, Director-General for Economic and Fiscal Analysis, “Policy Analysis Series 17: On Freelancers in Japan“, 2019).

Limits apply to the reading. The respondents are not matched on trade or on years in business, and the distribution shows no causation. What it shows is only that the single word independent does not move freedom of time in one direction.

The shape is still worth reading. If leaving were an operation that increased freedom of time, the distribution would gather at the short end and stop there. In fact it opens at both. People whose hours fell and people whose hours exceeded those of employees sit inside the same group.

Where the same operation produces results at both ends, the variable at work is not the operation alone. Something other than whether you left is deciding how time is used. And the comparatively high satisfaction suggests that this variable does not line up with the amount of hardship either. Those working long hours are not necessarily dissatisfied.

This reading neither recommends independence nor argues against it. It is a description: independence reliably increases the first freedom and guarantees nothing about freedom of time. Expecting a guarantee where none was given places the cause on your own side when the increase fails to arrive.

A distribution that opens at both ends carries one more consequence. Advice built on the average alone misses on both sides. Because the average sits towards shorter hours, the claim that going independent frees up time appears to hold. Because the same group contains people working longer than employees, the claim that independence is not worth it also appears to hold. The two claims contradict each other and are drawn from the same distribution.

Where people sit at both ends, the average represents few people’s positions. The advice this distribution supports therefore lies not on the side of whether to go independent but on the side of what variable decides which end you reach. Argue the merits of independence without touching that variable, and personal accounts simply line up facing opposite directions. In the results for this phrase, stories that went well and stories that did not appear side by side.

The Origin of Judgement Is the Position From Which the Conditions of Income Are Decided

The variable that opens the distribution can now be given a name. The origin of judgement is the position that answers whose judgement decides the conditions under which income occurs.

Those conditions become concrete when divided into four. Whether an order occurs at all. What gets made. What it is sold for. When it is delivered. When all four sit on the other party’s side, the origin is outside. When some of the four sit on yours, the origin has moved that much inward.

In the period when I was trying to live on music, I was in a position with all four outside. I had decided to make composing my work and held no other job. The only income was the occasional production commission. Whether such a commission arrived that month was not settled on my side. What to make was written into the brief that came with it. Fee and deadline were a choice between accepting the terms offered and declining them. The rest of my time went into writing tracks to send to competitions where being selected was never in prospect.

At the time, what explained this state was a story about ability. The tracks were weak. The volume was not there. The trends were not being read. Because the explanation sat on my own side, the countermeasures could only be built there too. Move the sound closer to what is asked for, fit the length, rebuild the opening for how it will be heard. As work, all of it points towards raising precision.

Reset now, those four conditions did not move once in that period. Moving closer and fitting the length are adjustments carried out inside conditions the other party had set. Precision of adjustment and who sets the conditions are settled separately. And what decided whether income occurred was the second of the two.

The academic side has a concept that treats this position. Self-determination theory, as systematised by Ryan and Deci, places motivation not as a choice between given from outside and arising from within but as a continuous width, and names three conditions that hold that width up: autonomy, competence and relatedness (Ryan & Deci, 2000, American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78). Autonomy among them refers to the sense that the origin of an action lies on your own side. The concept of autonomy is not a coinage of that theory: the text of the same paper attributes it to deCharms (1968) and Deci (1975).

Having more options produces real effects. You become able to decline the worse counterparties, and the daily load falls accordingly. What does not move is where the four conditions sit. Able to choose which jobs to take, you are still choosing among what the other party put forward. Able to negotiate a rate, you still need them to agree to it. The breadth of choice and the position where conditions are set move separately.

“A Life That Does Not Depend on a Company” Folds Two Things Into One Word

The phrase about not depending on a company is in fact calling two separate things by one name. Because they are folded together, the disappearance of one looks like the disappearance of both.

The first is dependence on the contract of employment. A single channel of payment called salary, along with status, social insurance and place of work. Leaving dissolves it. In that sense the aim is achieved at the moment of going independent.

The second is dependence on another party’s judgement. The state in which whether an order occurs, what is in it, the price and the deadline are all settled on their side. Leaving does not dissolve it. If anything the number of parties rises, so one dependency becomes several.

Becoming several genuinely works. When one client stops, not everything stops. What diversification changes, though, is the number of dependencies, not their direction. The shape in which four conditions sit on the other side simply lines up five times when there are five parties.

So the achievement of not depending on a company does not reach the second. That it has not reached is hard to notice, because the first is a genuinely large release. Immediately after leaving, the effect of what disappeared is real. Because the effect is real, what remains on the second side stays out of view for a while.

It often becomes visible some years in. At first the freedom that increased gets used; then the conditions begin to bite; and before long, weeks of the same shape as the original ones are lined up again. What is in hand at that point is the fact of not depending on a company, together with the sense that how things get decided has not changed. The two do not contradict each other. A folded word was pointing at two separate things.

None of this makes diversification pointless. There are situations where the number matters. Whether everything stops when one client stops is decisive at the level of household finances. Moving from one client to three changes how far ahead next month can be read. That effect is not small.

Stated precisely, what does not change is only how the conditions get decided. With three clients, three parties decide whether to commission. Briefs arrive in three versions. Prices are proposed three times. If anything, because the same shape is now tripled, the coordination work alone increases. The sense of having diversified without becoming any lighter comes from here. What got lighter (the risk of everything stopping) and what got heavier (coordination work) occur in different places at the same time.

Say “diversifying made no difference” without separating those two, and the side that genuinely worked is discarded along with it. Diversification acts on the stability of a household and does not act on where conditions sit. Trying to cover both with one operation leaves the evaluation of each unclear.

If the word dependence is kept, the second is more accurately called direction. It is not something to eliminate but something whose facing changes. As long as there are transactions, there is a counterparty. The question is not whether they exist but which side all four conditions sit on.

The Handle That Moves the Origin Is Not in the List of Occupations

The origin is a variable independent of occupation. Within one occupation, a form with the origin outside and a form with it inside sit side by side.

In work that involves writing, there is a form where you take a brief and deliver, and a form where you price something you have already made and hand it over. The occupation field carries the same name in both, and the placement of the four conditions is opposite. In the first, order, content, price and deadline all sit on the other side. In the second, all four sit on yours.

Searching for “work that makes you free” by occupational name therefore has hold of the wrong variable. What the lists set out is location and fixed hours, not where conditions sit. Among work that can be done anywhere, forms with all four outside are entirely ordinary.

So what moves the origin. It turns on whether what you hand over exists beforehand. If something is already made, price, deadline and content can be set by the side handing it over. In a form where you make it after being commissioned, all four come down in order from the other party. The difference is not ability but sequence.

One more reading: anyone can simply make something first. On the making side, that is exactly right. Making something in advance requires neither permission nor capital. What is genuinely difficult here is not the making but whether you already hold someone to hand it to. Make something first with nobody to hand it to, and all that increases is stock. The commissioned form keeps being chosen not out of idleness but because the recipient is fixed at the same moment as the order.

The operation that changes the sequence therefore comes down in practice to whether a relationship can be held before the order. If the relationship is already there, you can set all four conditions on your side and still have somewhere to hand the work. In a form where the relationship comes into being only with the order, setting the conditions on your side removes the transaction along with them. The same act of making something first works in one case and not in the other, and this is the difference.

The concrete forms that change the sequence are taken on by another article. What you have to hold for the form to change, and how the transition happens, is handled squarely by Getting out of labour-intensive form. The mechanism that produces a ceiling in the form of selling time is handled by The ceiling on earning alone, and the order in which the seven areas are rebuilt is held by Structural autonomy.

One point is worth leaving here. The origin is a continuous quantity, not a binary. One of the four conditions moving to your side already changes the state. There is no need to move all of them at once, and all of them never do move. As long as transactions exist, a proportion of the other party’s judgement always remains.

As the Origin Moves Inward, the Volume of Decisions and the Uncertainty Both Rise

The operation that moves the origin has side effects, and setting them out first is more accurate. The further it moves, the more there is that has to be decided.

While conditions sit on the other side, the other side is carrying the decisions. What to make is instructed, the price is proposed, the deadline is set. Having the load of judgement outside means having the labour of judgement outside too. The work on your side can concentrate on raising precision.

When the four move inward, that labour comes back. What to make, who it is for, what it costs, when it goes out. You gather the material yourself, and the results of being wrong return to you. Whether you were wrong is not clear for some time. An order not arriving and an order not having arrived yet have the same shape.

The nature of the uncertainty also changes. Uncertainty while awaiting someone’s decision has a clear object. Uncertainty in a form where you set the conditions has no clear object. What worked and what did not has to be separated out by you.

Something else rises quietly. The state of making judgements alone, continuously. Even with someone available to consult, the fact that you are the one deciding does not move. That portion does not fall with the amount of contact, and it sits at one of the centres of what independent workers report as loneliness. It is handled in Loneliness in freelance work.

No prescription that the origin ought to be moved inward is placed here. What increases is real, so where to place it differs by person. A form that stops after two of the four have moved is a valid arrangement. Choosing to leave the load of judgement outside is a design decision as well.

The load that increases has two kinds mixed into it. One falls as the number of decisions accumulates. How to set a price, how to decline: the first few times each is thought through from nothing, and by the twentieth a pattern of judgement often exists. The other does not fall with repetition. The part where results return to you hardly lightens with familiarity. That one is a cost attached to the form.

Separating the two keeps the weight of the early period from being read as evidence about ability. Much of the initial weight is the first kind, and it falls with experience. Only the second remains. Misread the first as the second, and load from a stage where no pattern has formed yet becomes grounds for “this is not for me.”

What can be stated precisely is only the terms of the exchange. Place the origin outside, and the volume of decisions falls while how things get decided is also placed outside. Move it inward, and the volume rises while how things get decided comes to your side. Which is better cannot be written here. What can be written is that the two do not hold at once.

Where the Origin Currently Sits Shows in the Composition of Last Month’s Payments

Where your own origin sits can be read from records rather than from a feeling. Sorting last month’s incoming payments by the condition under which they occurred is enough.

In the first column, put what occurred because the other party decided to commission. In the second, what occurred because they selected something you had already put out. In the third, what continues on terms you set, where no particular decision arose last month. What matters is not the size of the amounts but which column is empty.

A state where only the first column is filled indicates that all four conditions sit outside. Income exists in this state, and the amount can be large. Being large and having the origin inside are separate. A higher rate does not change who decides that an order occurs.

If the second column is filled, content and price sit on your side. If the third is filled, the deadline side has moved inward too. The empty column is the place that can be moved next.

The records show one further thing. Whether there was work you declined last month. Being able to decline is evidence that at least one of the four conditions sits on your side. Where you cannot decline, look before the question of will at whether the form is one where declining removes the payment. That form is handled separately in What being unable to say no contains.

If the words I want to be free surface again after going independent, that is no evidence that the decision to leave was off. Leaving increases the first freedom, and by itself does not touch the second. One phrase is serving as the name of two different things. And the second still has no widely shared name.

The remedy of changing occupation and the remedy of adjusting outlook both take a position inside this reading. Moving occupation reduces physical constraint, and moving the reference inward reduces expenditure of attention. What changes is how each of them acts once the four conditions have moved. With conditions outside, the expenditure returns after a move. Once they have moved inward, the same remedies carry a different meaning. The two are remedies that sit in the earlier stage of the order.

Sorting last month’s payments into three columns produces your current position. Which column to fill, or whether to continue in the present form without filling any, is decided by whoever reads the record. The material for the judgement sits not on the side of the feeling but inside those three columns.

The whole map of rebuilding, and the order it runs in, is held in map form by Structural autonomy. The form that sets the ceiling on income is handled by Getting out of labour-intensive form, and the separate question of the order between wanting and perceiving by Reading unable to change through cognitive science.

Symptoms in the same band, treated from other sides, appear in three articles. Being unable to commit to independence is handled in Being unable to move towards independence, the discomfort with employment itself in Reading the wish not to be employed, and reading a life through amount, continuity and who decides in How to live when you do not want to work.