What do you have more in your life? Responsibility or freedom? What is currently closest to your reality?
Are you a person who gets up at 6, leaves home at 7, rushes to get a coffee, drives to work, works from 9 to 5, gets home, neglects to spend a lot of time with family, does some errands? Do you watch some television? , then he goes to bed at 12…?
Or is it more of a person who wakes up past noon, forgets to eat breakfast, turns on the TV, then calls a few friends on the phone, then goes online, eats something for dinner as the main food supply for the whole day? watch more TV and use the Internet before falling asleep at 3 AM?
The first person has too much responsibility on his hands, while the other has too much freedom on his hands. One has to worry about always staying alert, competitive, and ahead of their business, while the other worries about what to do in the next hour. The key is that these things go hand in hand. The more responsibility one has, the less freedom one will have. The more freedom you have, the less responsibility you will have. And you know what? Both lead miserable lives.
If you have too much responsibility, you won’t have the freedom to enjoy the pleasures of life. Everything you do will be work, work and more work causing unhealthy stress; all while time will pass unknowingly.
If you have too much freedom, you will become lazy and boring. You won’t know what to do next and you won’t have goals in life to motivate you, which will also cause you stress and wasted time.
If you want more freedom, you must take responsibility for your life. You can’t just complain that you don’t have enough freedom because you’re somehow cooped up in the same house as your parents, who never stop nagging you because you don’t have a job. You can’t complain if you have a teacher who doesn’t speak English well and blame him for your bad test scores. You can’t complain if you’re single, depressed, lonely, and wishing someone would come to your door and snap you out of your feelings. If you want more freedom, you must take responsibility for your own life!
If you find that the more balanced your responsibility is with your freedom, it is a sign of a person taking charge of your life and earning your freedom.
Absolute freedom, however, does not account for a happy life either. Some people who are rich in the world still don’t spend their money wisely because they let their freedom take over their life, while they forget about responsibility. They are back in debt or even find themselves bankrupt. Many famous celebrities have gone down this unfortunate route.
A personal example of this is in high school, I got up at 7 every day and had class at 8, had lunch at the same time, and classes lasted until 2:30. Then, being on team sports like basketball, tennis, and cross country, I often didn’t get home before 4 or 5 in the afternoon. When I got home, I watched about an hour of TV, had dinner, did my homework, went to bed at 11, and woke up the next day at 7. This was the typical monotonous but disciplined lifestyle of a high school student. . .
The summer before college, I was scared and anxious as it was my first time leaving my parents’ house, experiencing what it would be like to have true “freedom.” During the first year, I had random classes, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, classes were every other day and never lasted more than 4 hours total per day, I ate what I wanted and usually went to sleep step step step midnight chatting with my hallmates or staying at the computer. I was absolute freedom I finally thought! But my GPA sank to an all time low!
Although I had much more freedom in college, I didn’t balance it with the responsibility required, so my grades suffered dramatically and it was a while before I had to maintain better work habits in order to climb back up. However, I enjoyed college much more as high school always put you in your place and really limited you from experiencing life which, for the first time, really tested your ability to be responsible.
Whether your setting is academic, social, work, or a life where you lie around doing nothing, it’s important to balance freedom and responsibility. To gain more freedom, you need to be responsible for your actions instead of complaining, worrying, or blaming others. Everything depends on you. If you have too much freedom, be it time freedom or money freedom, be responsible with it too, as you may find yourself losing some or all of it in the near future or in the blink of an eye.