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Erich Fromm's Three Escapes From Your Own Life · Philosopheasy Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Sunday.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: Nothing is scheduled.
0:04
SPEAKER_00: Nothing at all.
0:06
SPEAKER_00: For months you told yourself this was what you wanted.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: No meetings.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: No unwatching the little green dot next to your name.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: A whole day that belongs to you.
0:17
SPEAKER_00: By ten in the morning you've checked your email.
0:19
SPEAKER_00: Twice.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: Just in case, by noon you've opened the same three apps.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: Eleven times you make a list of things a person should do with a free day.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: And then you feel a little guilty because now the free day has a list.
0:35
SPEAKER_00: And at four in the afternoon,
0:36
SPEAKER_00: you look up and you realize you've spent the whole afternoon watching strangers live
0:40
SPEAKER_00: the kind of day you meant to have.
0:43
SPEAKER_00: Nothing went wrong.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: Nobody stopped you.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: That's what makes it so strange.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: This is philosophicy.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: I'm glad you're here.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: Today, a book from 1941 that reads like your screen time report.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: It's called Escape from Freedom by the psychoanalyst and philosopher Eric Fromm.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: Here's what you'll walk away with in the next half hour.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: First, a name for a feeling you've probably had, but never had a word for.
1:15
SPEAKER_00: Second, Fromm's three escapes, the three ways people hand their freedom back without noticing.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: By the end, you'll know which one is yours.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: And third, one small practice, ten minutes long, that Fromm would say is the way back.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: So, three movements today.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: The ache.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: Then the thinker and the turn.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: Then how to actually live it.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: Let's start with the ache.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: Here's the feeling we're talking about.
1:44
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have a dramatic name.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: It isn't burnout.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: Burnout is when you've given too much.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: This is different.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: It isn't sadness either.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: Sadness has a shape.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: You can usually point at what you lost.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: This is flatness.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: You got what you asked for.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it was a remote job.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it was going freelance,
2:05
SPEAKER_00: or a side project,
2:07
SPEAKER_00: or finally leaving a place that told you exactly what to do every hour of the day.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: You got the freedom to design your own life.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: And instead of feeling alive,
2:17
SPEAKER_00: you feel oddly numb, as if you're following instructions nobody gave you.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you know the weekday version, too.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: You finally have the job where nobody checks when you log in.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: You can start at 10,
2:30
SPEAKER_00: take a walk at 2, finish at midnight if you want to, and what actually happens?
2:37
SPEAKER_00: You start at 8, but you feel you should.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: You never take the walk.
2:42
SPEAKER_00: You answer messages at midnight anyway because someone might be waiting.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: Nobody asked you to.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: You did it to yourself, and you did it so smoothly you didn't notice.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe it's bigger than a job.
2:55
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you left a relationship, or a city, or a whole way of life because it felt too small.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: And in the new,
3:03
SPEAKER_00: wide-open space, you found yourself rebuilding the old walls, one habit at a time.
3:10
SPEAKER_00: I want to stay with that phrase for a second.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: Following instructions nobody gave you.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: Because that's the strange part.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: When you had a boss, the instructions were obvious.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: Be here at nine.
3:23
SPEAKER_00: Finish this by Friday.
3:25
SPEAKER_00: You could resent them, but you knew where they came from.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: Now there's no boss.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: And yet somehow the day still fills up with rules.
3:34
SPEAKER_00: Check this.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: Answer that.
3:37
SPEAKER_00: Keep up with this person.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: And that trend and that conversation everyone else seems
3:43
SPEAKER_00: to be having Who's giving those instructions?
3:47
SPEAKER_00: That's the question this whole episode is about.
3:50
SPEAKER_00: Now, when people feel this way, they usually get advice.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: And the advice usually sounds like this.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: Build a routine.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: Find your why.
4:00
SPEAKER_00: Optimize your mornings.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to be unfair to that advice.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes a routine really helps.
4:07
SPEAKER_00: But notice what each of those suggestions actually is.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: It's another script.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: Another set of instructions to follow.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: So you follow it.
4:16
SPEAKER_00: And you end up with a better organized version of the same emptiness.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: The Sunday is now scheduled beautifully.
4:24
SPEAKER_00: And you still don't feel like you were in it.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: Here's something that might help.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: This feeling is not new.
4:30
SPEAKER_00: It's not a product of phones or remote work or anything specific to your life right now.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: Those things make it louder.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: But the feeling itself was described very precisely more than 80 years ago.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: By a man who had watched something much darker than a wasted Sunday.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: Here's who saw this coming and why.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt in Germany in 1900.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: He trained as a psychoanalyst in the same tradition as Freud,
5:01
SPEAKER_00: but he was never only interested in what happens inside one person's head.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: He wanted to know what happens between a person and the society they live in.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: In the 1930s, he watched something terrifying happen in his own country.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: He fled the Nazis and ended up in the United States.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: And in 1941, in the middle of the war, he published Escape from Freedom.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: But Fromm didn't start his story in the 1930s.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: He started it centuries earlier.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: In the middle chapters of the book he looks at the end of the medieval world and
5:34
SPEAKER_00: the age of the Reformation.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: His argument goes roughly like this.
5:39
SPEAKER_00: In the medieval world a person had very little freedom but a very clear place.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: You were born a peasant or a craftsman or a noble and that told you who you were.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: It was narrow but it was also a kind of home.
5:54
SPEAKER_00: As that world broke apart, people gained enormous new freedoms.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Freedom to trade, to move, to believe for themselves.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: And at the same time, Fromm argues they lost the place that had held them.
6:07
SPEAKER_00: The individual became freer and lonelier and more anxious all at once.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: That's the pattern he sees repeating right up to his own century.
6:18
SPEAKER_00: Every time we gain more freedom from, we also inherit more of that loneliness.
6:23
SPEAKER_00: And unless we learn what to do with it, we look for somewhere to hide.
6:27
SPEAKER_00: The book tries to answer a question that still haunts us.
6:31
SPEAKER_00: Why would millions of people who had fought for their freedom rush to give it away?
6:36
SPEAKER_00: Now, you might be thinking, that's a book about fascism.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: What does it have to do with my Sunday?
6:43
SPEAKER_00: And this is what makes Fromm so worth reading.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: His answer wasn't only political, it was psychological.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: He was describing what freedom does to an ordinary person on an ordinary afternoon.
6:56
SPEAKER_00: The politics were the extreme version.
6:59
SPEAKER_00: The Sunday is the everyday version.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: Here's the key move.
7:03
SPEAKER_00: From splits.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: Freedom in two.
7:07
SPEAKER_00: The first kind he calls freedom from.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: That's what happens when the old ties fall away.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: The village where everyone knew your business.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: The church that told you what was right.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: The job for life.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: The boss who told you what to do at 9 o'clock every morning.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: When those go, you are free from them.
7:26
SPEAKER_00: The second kind is freedom to actually live as yourself.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: To think your own thoughts.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: To feel your own feelings.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: To want your own wants.
7:37
SPEAKER_00: We are very good at the first kind.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: Modern life has been giving us more and more freedom from for a few hundred years.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: We are much worse at the second.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: And here's the catch.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: The thing Fromm saw that most people miss.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: Freedom from leaves you alone.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: The old ties were limiting, yes.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: But they also held you.
7:58
SPEAKER_00: They told you who you were.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: When they're gone, you are standing on your own, and nobody is telling you what any of it means.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: And alone, Fromm says, we get scared.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: So let me say the core idea as simply as I can.
8:13
SPEAKER_00: This is the first time you'll hear it three times today.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: The flatness you feel isn't a failure to use your freedom.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: It's you escaping it, not losing it, escaping it.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: Handing it back quietly, because holding it alone is frightening.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: Fromm says there are three main ways we do this.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: Three escape routes.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: Let's walk through them.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: As we go, keep a quiet score in your head.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: Which one sounds most like you?
8:43
SPEAKER_00: Escape one submission?
8:45
SPEAKER_00: Or finding a new boss?
8:48
SPEAKER_00: When an old authority disappears,
8:49
SPEAKER_00: it leaves a gap, and many of us fill that gap, fast, with a new authority.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: In Fromm's time, that was often a strong leader.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: Someone who promised to take the weight of choosing off your shoulders.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: Today it's usually quieter than that.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: It's a system.
9:09
SPEAKER_00: It's the productivity guru whose morning routine you copy to the minute.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: It's the app that tells you when to drink water and when to breathe.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: It's the commentator whose opinions you adopt as a complete package.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: So you never have to work out what you think.
9:26
SPEAKER_00: Picture someone who finally goes freelance.
9:28
SPEAKER_00: The first week is wonderful.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: By the third week, the empty calendar feels frightening.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: So they sign up for a program that promises a system for everything,
9:38
SPEAKER_00: when to wake, what to post, how many clients to call before lunch.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: The relief is enormous, and slowly they realize they've hired a new boss, one they pay for.
9:51
SPEAKER_00: Fromm also noticed the mirror image of submission,
9:54
SPEAKER_00: the urge to dominate controlling someone else's plans,
9:58
SPEAKER_00: micromanaging every detail of a project.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: It looks like the opposite of submission, but Fromm saw them as two sides of the same coin.
10:08
SPEAKER_00: Both are ways of escaping the harder thing,
10:11
SPEAKER_00: which is meeting another person as an equal, both of you free.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: The sign of this escape, you feel relief when someone tells you what to do.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: Escape two, Destructiveness, or Shrinking the World.
10:26
SPEAKER_00: The second root is darker and more common than we like to admit.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: When the world feels too big to meet, too open, too uncertain, one way out is to attack it.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: If you can't face something, you can at least tear it down.
10:41
SPEAKER_00: Fromm saw Destructiveness as another escape from the powerlessness of being alone.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: In 2026 it looks like this,
10:49
SPEAKER_00: the doom scroll that turns into dunking on strangers, cynicism as a personality.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: Quitting things before they have a chance to disappoint you,
10:58
SPEAKER_00: deleting your own work at two in the morning because it isn't good enough.
11:03
SPEAKER_00: Picture someone who has a free evening and a half-finished project they care about.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: They open it.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: It isn't as good as they hoped.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: So instead of working on it,
11:13
SPEAKER_00: they spend two hours reading what's wrong with everyone else's work.
11:17
SPEAKER_00: By the end of the night they feel sharp and superior and completely empty.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: The project is still half-finished.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: It's safer that way.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: Nothing unfinished can fail.
11:29
SPEAKER_00: It feels like strength.
11:31
SPEAKER_00: It feels like seeing through things.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: But very often it's a way of making sure nothing can reach you.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: The sign of this escape, contempt feels safer than hope.
11:45
SPEAKER_00: Escape 3, Automaton Conformity, or Becoming Who Everyone Expects.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: This is the one Fromm thought was the most common in free societies.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: The one from that Sunday.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: Here, you don't obey a boss.
12:00
SPEAKER_00: You obey an atmosphere.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: You become without ever deciding to the kind of person everyone around you seems to expect.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: Picture someone scrolling on a Sunday.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: They're not unhappy.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: They're watching other people's weekends, and without really noticing, they're taking notes.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: What to wear?
12:21
SPEAKER_00: What to think about the news?
12:24
SPEAKER_00: What a good life is supposed to look like this year?
12:27
SPEAKER_00: By Monday, they've quietly updated themselves.
12:29
SPEAKER_00: Nobody told them to.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: That's the point.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: Fromm puts it like this, quote, The individual ceases to be himself.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: He adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: End quote.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: That's from Chapter 5 of Escape from Freedom.
12:49
SPEAKER_00: And a little further on he describes, quote,
12:52
SPEAKER_00: the person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton,
12:56
SPEAKER_00: identical with millions of other automatons around him.
13:00
SPEAKER_00: End quote.
13:01
SPEAKER_00: Here's what's so clever and so sad about this escape.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: It works.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: The automaton no longer feels alone.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: When you think what everyone thinks want what everyone wants and spend your Sunday
13:14
SPEAKER_00: the way everyone spends theirs, the loneliness goes quiet.
13:19
SPEAKER_00: The price is the self,
13:21
SPEAKER_00: and what's left very often is exactly that flatness we started with,
13:25
SPEAKER_00: the sign of this escape, numbness.
13:29
SPEAKER_00: You are doing everything right and feeling almost nothing.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: So the core idea, a second time, in different words, we don't just lose our freedom.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: We hand it back.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: Because being ourselves alone is frightening, and being who everyone expects is quiet.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: Before we go on, I want to say something important.
13:52
SPEAKER_00: None of this is a character flaw.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: If you recognized yourself in one of these escapes,
13:58
SPEAKER_00: or in all three, that doesn't make you weak, or shallow, or lazy.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: Ram was very clear that these are normal human responses to a real problem.
14:09
SPEAKER_00: The problem is that freedom, by itself, is frightening.
14:15
SPEAKER_00: We weren't taught what to do with it.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: Most of the world around us is designed to make the escapes easier, not harder.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: The feed never ends.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: The next system is always one click away,
14:27
SPEAKER_00: and there is always someone ready to tell you who to be.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: So if you've been escaping, you've been doing what almost everyone does.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: The difference now is that you can see it.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: And what you can see, you can start to choose.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: Here's the part that stings, and then the way out.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: Fromm goes one step further, and this is the part I find hardest to hear.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: We assume our thoughts are ours, our feelings are ours, our wishes are ours.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: Fromm says often their borrowed quote,
14:58
SPEAKER_00: This substitution of pseudo-acts for original acts of thinking,
15:02
SPEAKER_00: feeling,
15:03
SPEAKER_00: and willing leads eventually to the replacement of the original self by
15:07
SPEAKER_00: a pseudo-self.
15:09
SPEAKER_00: End quote.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: Pseudo-acts, a pseudo-self.
15:13
SPEAKER_00: Let's make that concrete.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: Think of a career goal that sounds impressive at dinner parties.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: Think of a holiday you chose, partly because it would look good in photos.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: Think of an opinion you arrived at about five minutes after everyone else
15:28
SPEAKER_00: in your feed arrived at it.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: None of those is wrong to want.
15:32
SPEAKER_00: That's not the point.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: The point is.
15:36
SPEAKER_00: The question from keeps asking underneath.
15:39
SPEAKER_00: Where did the wanting come from?
15:41
SPEAKER_00: Did it grow out of you?
15:44
SPEAKER_00: Or did you pick it up, the way you pick up an accent?
15:47
SPEAKER_00: So let's find out which escape is yours.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: Three questions.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: You can pause the episode if you want to answer them properly.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: Question one.
15:57
SPEAKER_00: When you suddenly have a free hour, what do you reach for first?
16:02
SPEAKER_00: A rule to follow, that's submission.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: Something to criticize, that's destructiveness.
16:09
SPEAKER_00: Or the feed, the thing everyone else is looking at.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: That's the automaton, question two.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: When you make a choice, even a small one, whose voice do you hear in your head?
16:21
SPEAKER_00: A parent.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: A boss you left years ago, an influencer, or yours, question three.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: And this is the real one.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: When did you last do something with no audience,
16:33
SPEAKER_00: no metric, and no reason except that you wanted to?
16:38
SPEAKER_00: If that third question was hard to answer, don't be alarmed.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: It's hard for most of us, but you've just found the problem, and that means you can work on it.
16:50
SPEAKER_00: Let's try something right now together.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: Wherever you are, just for a moment, notice what your hands want to do.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: Maybe they want to reach for your phone.
17:00
SPEAKER_00: Maybe they want to check something.
17:02
SPEAKER_00: Just notice it.
17:03
SPEAKER_00: Now notice something else.
17:06
SPEAKER_00: Is there anything,
17:07
SPEAKER_00: anything at all,
17:08
SPEAKER_00: that you would genuinely like to do in the next hour, just because you want to?
17:13
SPEAKER_00: Not because it's useful.
17:15
SPEAKER_00: Not because anyone will see it.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: Just because.
17:19
SPEAKER_00: If something comes up,
17:21
SPEAKER_00: even something small,
17:22
SPEAKER_00: like a walk, or a song, or calling one particular friend, hold on to it.
17:28
SPEAKER_00: That's a thread back to yourself.
17:30
SPEAKER_00: We'll come back to it in the practice at the end.
17:33
SPEAKER_00: So what does Fromm offer instead?
17:36
SPEAKER_00: It isn't do whatever you like.
17:38
SPEAKER_00: That's usually just another script, the one advertisers write for us.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: And it isn't rebellion either.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: Rebellion is very often conformity to a different crowd.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: You swap one set of expectations for another, and it feels like freedom for a while.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: Frum's answer is quieter and harder.
17:58
SPEAKER_00: He calls it positive freedom,
18:00
SPEAKER_00: and he defines it like this,
18:03
SPEAKER_00: positive freedom consists in the spontaneous activity of
18:06
SPEAKER_00: the total integrated personality.
18:10
SPEAKER_00: That's from Chapter 7 of Escape from Freedom.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: Now, spontaneous doesn't mean random.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean impulsive.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: It means the action comes from you.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: Think of a child completely lost in play or a craftsperson who looks up
18:25
SPEAKER_00: and realizes three hours have gone by.
18:28
SPEAKER_00: Nobody told them to do it.
18:31
SPEAKER_00: Nobody is watching.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: They're simply in it.
18:34
SPEAKER_00: And here's why this matters so much for Fromm.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: Remember, we escape freedom because being alone is frightening.
18:41
SPEAKER_00: Spontaneity is his answer to that fear in his words.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: Spontaneous activity is the one way in which man can overcome the terror
18:49
SPEAKER_00: of aloneness without sacrificing the integrity of his self.
18:55
SPEAKER_00: The escapes cure the loneliness by giving up the self.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: Spontaneity cures the loneliness by connecting you to the world as yourself.
19:04
SPEAKER_00: From names to places where it lives, Love and Work.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: Not love as possessing someone and not work as performing for someone.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: Love and work as things you are actually present in.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: In love, spontaneity looks like actually meeting another person, not managing them.
19:23
SPEAKER_00: Not performing for them.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: Listening to what they say instead of waiting for your turn.
19:29
SPEAKER_00: Being surprised by them.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: Letting yourself be surprised.
19:34
SPEAKER_00: In work it looks like the moments when you're absorbed in the task itself.
19:39
SPEAKER_00: Not in how it will look or what it will earn or who will praise it.
19:43
SPEAKER_00: The carpenter who loves the grain of the wood.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: The teacher who forgets the lesson plan because a student asked a real question.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: The writer who stops checking the stats and just writes the next sentence.
19:55
SPEAKER_00: Most of us have had moments like that.
19:58
SPEAKER_00: The question Fromm asks is, how do we have more of them?
20:03
SPEAKER_00: And how do we stop running away from them into the escapes?
20:07
SPEAKER_00: Let's argue with Fromm for a moment because he can take it.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: The first objection goes like this.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: This is a luxury.
20:16
SPEAKER_00: Most people don't have free Sundays.
20:18
SPEAKER_00: They have rent.
20:19
SPEAKER_00: They have children.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: They have 12-hour shifts.
20:23
SPEAKER_00: That's fair.
20:24
SPEAKER_00: But I think Fromm's spontaneity isn't about free time.
20:28
SPEAKER_00: It's about ownership of the moments you do have.
20:32
SPEAKER_00: A nurse at the end of a long shift who chooses how to speak to
20:35
SPEAKER_00: a frightened patient is freer in Fromm's sense than someone with an empty weekend
20:39
SPEAKER_00: who spends it on autopilot.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: So the question isn't how many hours are yours.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: It's whether you are in them.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: The second objection is more philosophical.
20:50
SPEAKER_00: Every want is learned from someone.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: There's no pure, untouched self underneath all the influences.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: So what are we even trying to find?
21:00
SPEAKER_00: And I think Fromm would agree that nothing starts from zero.
21:03
SPEAKER_00: His test isn't purity, it's relationship.
21:07
SPEAKER_00: He writes, quote, Ours is only that to which we are genuinely related by our creative activity.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: A borrowed idea becomes yours when you work with it,
21:19
SPEAKER_00: when you argue with it, test it, make something from it.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: The accent you picked up becomes your voice when you start saying new things with it.
21:27
SPEAKER_00: And there's a third objection, one I hear often.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: Isn't spontaneity just another thing to optimize, another self-help goal?
21:36
SPEAKER_00: Be more spontaneous by Tuesday.
21:38
SPEAKER_00: And that's a good catch.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: If you turn spontaneity into a performance, you've turned it into another escape.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly why the practice I'm about to give you has no goal, no audience, and no score.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: The point isn't to become a spontaneous person.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: The point is to notice, a little more often, when you are one.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: So, the core idea one last time, freedom isn't something you have.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: It's something you do.
22:07
SPEAKER_00: The one from the test.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: Three.
22:34
SPEAKER_00: For the rest of the time, do whatever genuinely pulls you.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: No goal.
22:39
SPEAKER_00: No output.
22:40
SPEAKER_00: No audience.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: Walk.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: Sketch.
22:44
SPEAKER_00: Cook something without a recipe.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: Sit.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: Read something nobody recommended to you.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: 4.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: Afterwards, write one line.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: What did I do that nobody asked me to?
22:57
SPEAKER_00: A word of warning, because this matters.
23:00
SPEAKER_00: The first time you try this, it might feel uncomfortable.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: You might feel restless or bored or even a little anxious.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: That's not a sign you're doing it wrong.
23:11
SPEAKER_00: That's the feeling Fromm was describing.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: That's what freedom feels like before the escapes kick in.
23:18
SPEAKER_00: If that happens, don't fight it and don't run from it.
23:22
SPEAKER_00: Just notice it.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: Stay with it for one more minute than feels comfortable.
23:28
SPEAKER_00: Very often on the other side of that restlessness, something quieter appears.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: A small wish.
23:34
SPEAKER_00: A real one.
23:36
SPEAKER_00: Follow that.
23:38
SPEAKER_00: And remember the thread from earlier.
23:40
SPEAKER_00: The thing you'd genuinely like to do in the next hour.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: Just because.
23:46
SPEAKER_00: That's a good place to start.
23:48
SPEAKER_00: Do it three times this week by the third time.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: Notice whether the pull toward your old exits has changed.
23:56
SPEAKER_00: Let's go back for a moment to that Sunday we started with.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: The same empty day.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: The same free hours.
24:05
SPEAKER_00: But imagine it going a little differently.
24:08
SPEAKER_00: You wake up and you notice the pull to check your email.
24:12
SPEAKER_00: You notice it and you don't follow it.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: Not heroically, just curiously.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: You wonder what you'd actually like to do and something small comes up.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's making coffee slowly and drinking it by the window.
24:27
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's the walk you keep promising yourself.
24:31
SPEAKER_00: By the afternoon you haven't done anything impressive.
24:34
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing to post.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: But you were there.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: You were in your own day, and for the first time in a long time, the freedom doesn't feel heavy.
24:44
SPEAKER_00: It feels like yours.
24:46
SPEAKER_00: That's all Fromm is asking for.
24:49
SPEAKER_00: Not a new life.
24:50
SPEAKER_00: Not a perfect routine.
24:52
SPEAKER_00: Just more moments that genuinely come from you.
24:56
SPEAKER_00: Let's bring it together.
24:58
SPEAKER_00: Eric Fromm saw that freedom from leaves us alone.
25:01
SPEAKER_00: And that we often escape the fear of that by handing our freedom back to a new boss
25:05
SPEAKER_00: to contempt or to becoming who everyone expects.
25:10
SPEAKER_00: Three escapes the new boss who takes away the weight of choosing.
25:14
SPEAKER_00: The contempt that keeps the world at a safe distance.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: And the automaton who becomes whoever everyone expects and stops feeling alone
25:23
SPEAKER_00: and stops feeling much at all.
25:26
SPEAKER_00: The flatness many of us feel isn't laziness or ingratitude.
25:30
SPEAKER_00: It's the sound of that escape.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: And the way back is spontaneity, small, real actions that come from you in love and in work.
25:40
SPEAKER_00: This week, try the unscripted hour three times.
25:45
SPEAKER_00: And then tell me in the comments, which escape is yours?
25:50
SPEAKER_00: The new boss, the contempt, or the automaton?
25:54
SPEAKER_00: And what did you do in your unscripted hour?
25:57
SPEAKER_00: We'll work through your answers together, Liv, at this month's Masterclass.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: This has been Philosophasy.
26:04
SPEAKER_00: Go and do something nobody asked you to.