#freedom

There is a photograph of me from the fall of 2008, standing inside Dorton Arena in Raleigh before a Barack Obama campaign speech.

I was fourteen years old.

I am smiling.

Not the little closed-mouth expression people produce when somebody points a camera at them. Not the strained approximation of happiness that appears when the photographer says, Come on, smile.

I mean actually smiling.

My whole face appears to agree about what it is doing.

I have seen the picture enough times that it has acquired a slightly archaeological quality for me. There is evidence here of an ability I once possessed effortlessly.

Somewhere along the way, smiling became difficult.

If I deliberately try to smile now, the result is usually terrible. One side of my mouth seems to receive different instructions from the other. My eyes do something unrelated. The muscles of my face assemble themselves into an expression that looks less like happiness than an actor attempting to portray happiness after being given insufficient rehearsal time.

It looks fake because it is fake.

This is strange mainly because I do not consider myself an especially unhappy person.

There are plenty of days when I feel good.

I get interested in things. I become absorbed in projects. I enjoy music, ideas, exercise, conversations, walks, discoveries, small accomplishments. I can feel peaceful. I can feel hopeful. I can feel deeply satisfied by something without any particular urge appearing in my face to advertise the fact.

There is a peculiar feature of ordinary working life that becomes harder to ignore once you notice it. You may like your job, respect your coworkers, and work for an employer who treats you well. You may even find the daily work genuinely meaningful. Yet, if your paycheck stopped arriving for a prolonged period, the rest of your life would eventually begin coming apart. Rent or mortgage payments would still arrive, alongside grocery bills, utility notices, insurance premiums, and medical expenses. The complex machinery of daily life keeps running regardless of whether your income does.

This reality introduces an uncomfortable question: how free can work really be when refusing to work ultimately threatens your ability to live? This is not to suggest that traditional employment is inherently exploitative or that every salaried worker is secretly miserable. Plenty of people thrive within organizations, benefiting from the community, stability, purpose, and scale that are difficult to replicate on one’s own. The core issue is not employment itself, but economic dependence. If your entire livelihood relies on continuously exchanging today’s labor for today’s income, then no matter how pleasant the arrangement may be, your baseline survival remains tied to someone else’s willingness to keep paying for your time.

For centuries, people have proposed different ways of escaping that fundamental vulnerability. One approach is political: strengthening collective bargaining power to secure better working conditions. Another is philosophical: practicing frugality and deliberately reducing material needs so that less money is required to live well. A third is the modern financial-independence movement, which encourages earning a high salary, saving aggressively, and investing the surplus into market indexes until compound returns can support your lifestyle.

Why Left vs. Right Doesn’t Cover Me Anymore

I keep getting told I have to “pick a side,” but the two sides on offer are obsessed with priorities I don’t share. So instead of pretending to be a team player for a team I don’t actually like, I’ll just say it: neither the contemporary left nor the contemporary right describes what I believe. Not because I’m a bland centrist, but because both have drifted away from a civic, plural, freedom-first idea of America.

You can actually find versions of this concern in writers as different as Alexis de Tocqueville (worried about overgrown central power), Francis Fukuyama (worried that recognition politics can crowd out shared identity), and Mark Lilla (worried that the left fragmented itself). I’m basically in that family of complaints.

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Where the Left Loses Me

Let me start with the left, because there are parts of the left I agree with. I’m for equal protection. I’m for not discriminating by race. I’m for people living how they want without the state or their neighbors harassing them. That’s basic liberalism.

But a lot of modern U.S. progressivism ties those good goals to two things I don’t buy:

1. An ever-expanding welfare/administrative state. It treats “more government” as the automatic answer, even though government and large corporate actors are already deeply entangled. If the state and big business are already in the same bed, I don’t see why I should fatten the state further. Tocqueville warned about this “soft despotism” a long time ago — power that’s not brutal, but is everywhere.