Freedom to vs. freedom from
An exploration of the difference, and how reclaiming agency can transform your creative life.
Hi,
Recently, I read On Freedom by Timothy Snyder. It’s the companion piece to his On Tyranny book everyone talks about, rooted in politics and philosophy, and not the kind of thing you’d expect to offer a profound insight about running a creative business.
Still, I can’t stop thinking about the the difference he draws between freedom from and freedom to.
After all, freedom is the holy grail, right? At the end of the day, doesn’t everyone tell us what we want is freedom?
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a speech, at least not a political one, that didn’t talk about some type of freedom, but most of the time what they tell us to chase is freedom from something, whether it’s freedom from jobs, from rules, or from gatekeepers.
But when we finally get that freedom we’re chasing? We don’t know what to do with it, and that’s because freedom from whatever we’re escaping is only half the battle.
Freedom from is a powerful drug. When we are shackled, that is the kind of freedom we yearn to have in our lives, and we’re all pretty much shackled to something these days; work, kids, marriage, debt, addiction, or something else. Pick your poison, but there’s not a lot of “freedom” in the “land of the free”.
In that kind of world, freedom from is the easy sell. It’s the clean break that starts you on the hero’s journey.
You pass into your new reality, and that sounds great because your current reality suuuuuucks…
…but that’s only the end of the first act. Even if you find and slay the big, bad monster at the end of the story, that’s still probably only the first book.
What do you do for the rest of the trilogy? If you’re the hero of your own story, you learn to stop running from something you fear, and start running toward something you want instead.
Freedom to is the long game. It’s proactive, constructive, and grounded in values, not just reactivity.
Freedom to means:
Freedom to build systems that support your work.
Freedom to define success on your own terms.
Freedom to focus, to say yes with intention, not just no out of fear.
Freedom to create weird, vulnerable, unmarketable stuff, and maybe marketable stuff too.
Freedom to take up space without apology.
Each one of those requires a commitment you have to choose proactively after accepting that no one’s coming to save you. We can’t even save ourselves. So, you have to save yourself.
Freedom isn’t the absence of structure. It’s the ability to choose the structure that serves you best.
There’s no boss. No teacher. No editor with a magic wand…
…and no villain, either. Not anymore.
You slayed that dragon. Now, you’re just standing in an empty field with a sword, trying to remember what you were fighting for in the end. That’s when you have to make the shift from what you don’t want to what you do.
If you’re going to build a life around your business, you can’t just be anti. You need to be for something. After all, if you stand for nothing, then what will you fall for, right? They say that in Hamilton, so you know it’s true.
It’s so much easier to be oppressed. It’s so much simpler when you have a villain, when you can blame the market or the publisher or the platform or the audience. It’s even easier to blame yourself than it is to take the reins.
But you can’t have real freedom without responsibility.
That means:
Owning your schedule.
Owning your failures.
Owning your choices.
It’s about owning your success, however you define it. Nobody’s going to do this work for you.
Which, yes, is terrifying.
But also? That’s the power. When you claim your freedom to, you’re no longer at the mercy of anyone’s permission. Ultimately, this isn’t just about doing more, or building better habits, or optimizing your time. It’s about becoming someone new.
That’s the deepest promise of freedom to. Not just to ship or build, but to step into a version of yourself that you used to only imagine.
The creative life, at its best, isn’t just a rebellion against the old. It’s a declaration of the new. It’s crafting a vision for the future and them walking toward it, even if nobody else can see it.
And that’s terrifying because becoming something new is a risk. It means letting go of the safety of your old identity and replacing it with one you build from scratch. One that might fail, and is certainly not guarantee to work.
But that’s also the most profound use of freedom.
So, if you’re standing in that empty field right now, sword in hand, wondering what you fought for, this is it.
Not safety, or avoidance, or perfection, but the subtle art of becoming. You get to decide. That’s the gift and the burden of this path.
But make no mistake, choosing not to choose is still a choice.
The longer you stay in the purgatory of freedom from, the more your dream decays into regret.
So, I’m not going to end this by telling you to quit your job or start a SaaS company. I’m just going to ask this one question.
What are you building with your freedom, and is it enough?
Think about it. Who you? Who are you? Who are you? And whatchu gonna do? Let us know in the comments, and yes, that’s another Hamilton quote.
Can you can find the 1998 metal lyrics hidden above, though? Bonus points for the first person who takes a stab at it. Slightly Darker Days for anyone else.
I love Russell's view of On Freedom as applied to writing and a creative business, particularly the image of what do you quest toward after the end of the first book in a trilogy. Russell is encouraging creatives to be the "free people" Snyder and Havel describe: What do you want to do with the weapons, now that you have captured them? That struggle is freedom.