I spent a lot of time trying to find a sense of freedom in my twenties. I have already written about being broke but feeling free by virtue of being able to choose how I spent my time. For me, freedom wasn't about being able to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, but the freedom to maintain my commitments, which at the time were to books, to writing, and to my friends.

The constraints put upon my choices by my financial situation—I was earning about 12,000 euros per year working nine months of the year in France—did not feel like a curtailment of my freedom. I did not aspire to enjoy Michelin star restaurants or luxury holidays or an ever-updated wardrobe. Even then, I did not equate consumption with freedom. To me, the qualities of freedom were always that which could not be bought, and as I have gotten older it has become clearer that "that which cannot be bought" is merely a simple formulation of "that which exists outside of capitalism". My friends and I romanticised Paris in the 20s, or the 50s; or the Beat generation travelling across a broken down America: horizons of possibility which stretched to accommodate the wildest imaginations. We yearned for that place and that time, but felt surrounded—enclosed—by the financial dictates of an increasingly expensive world. We did not kid ourselves that we could opt out forever, but our resistance, if futile, felt important. 12,000 euros to carve out a meaningful choice to maintain a sense of dignity and autonomy in a shrinking world. I was not constrained. I was liberated, if only temporarily.

I remember thinking deeply on this around midnight on July 21, 2018, after returning early from Gay Pride celebrations in Montpellier. My friend had made the most remarkable drag costume for the parade, so remarkable that he ended up in every local and regional paper. Thanks to marching and dancing with the veritable star of the show, I had open invitations with him to every party imaginable. But I had to go home because I had a cat at the time, a cat who was used to his evenings roaming the village streets with me by his side and falling asleep on my chest. He would have been fine, of course, if I had left him a little longer. But deciding to keep him three years prior when he was just a vagabond street kitten who tumbled into my life had warranted the kind of commitment which means nothing if it is temporary. I had decided to fold around him as much as he folded into my life, and that meant committing to making decisions differently for as long as he was with me (which was not long, in the grand scheme of things, because of a congenital heart defect he still managed to outrun for far longer than the prognosis). Lying that night with him on my chest I thought about how this creature could be perceived as a constraint on my freedom, and yet I did not feel that way at all. Life with him was not curtailed; in many ways, it was bigger. I had never before been responsible for something other than myself. My options were perhaps limited in some respect but my decisions had expanded to include him. I understood our ongoing relationship as an expression of the freedom I had exercised to commit myself to this little creature. By adopting him, I had adopted a posture of care, then love—two things capitalism struggles to enclose to this day. That posture, and the constraints it required, was my freedom: the freedom to choose, and to keep choosing.

In comparison, the American Dream, sold as the ultimate vision of freedom, promises the freedom of choice. Freedom becomes limited to the infinity of pre-determined options, all powered by cheap, available energy. That this "freedom" hinges on the unlimited exploitation of fossil fuels—and the wider exploitation of capitalism—makes it a posture geared towards irresponsibility, towards cultivating the opportunity to do whatever one wants, whenever one wants, and not feel constrained in any way by biological or geophysical limits, let alone the limits of the wider community. It is peculiar and interesting that contingent to capitalism is the very limit of capital itself: resources must be distributed unequally so that some dream while others toil. It is unacceptable to capital that anything be unsurpassable—apart from access to capital. It inserts itself as an absolute mediator between us and the world; between us and freedom. And we buy it.

We buy it so much that this kind of thinking even inflicts the socialist left. I just finished reading Alyssa Battistoni's phenomenal book, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, at the recommendation of a subscriber. Her last chapter on freedom was a particularly stand-out example of impeccable scholarship and erudite argumentation. She shows how even seemingly radical leftists hinge their vision of an emancipated world on material abundance, equating freedom, she argues, with the ability to overcome natural limits, including the need to work. A particularly relevant example is the Aaron Bastiani's theory of "fully automated luxury communism" which asserts that global liberation is just around the corner as long as we deploy machines to do everything we need, freeing our time up to do whatever we want. Where does Bastiani envision getting the resources for this next industrial revolution? Earth, of course. Or asteroids. This is a simultaneously violent yet passive outlook, submitting Earth to the primary benefit of humans above all else whilst also implying that we cannot be free until we need nothing more from one another.

Battistoni then engages with the eco-feminist persuasion that freedom is found within necessity, and that all we need to do is re-valorise work that produces life—reproductive labour—on the basis that it is natural. Battistoni points out that, once again, our freedom is inherently contingent on natural limits, not by overcoming them but this time by accepting them. While ordinarily I agree with theologies that promote an acceptance of our natural limits, Battistoni convinced me that building a philosophy which fundamentally accepts constraint as validating—that there is nothing worth having or doing beyond the borders of our existing limitations—creates the conditions for no thinking it necessary to imagine how the world might be. This is the crucial human element missing in this eco-feminist perspective: our collective imaginary power for organising the world to achieve better outcomes, together. We should not seek to overcome the limits of what is given, but we should always seek to expand the horizons of our relationships, our social technologies, and our knowledge. There is nothing less natural about being human than there is about being a tree. But the work we do to bring the future into being politically, scientifically, artistically is what distinguishes us as human.

For all my philosophising in my twenties about freedom as choice, I was convinced having children would ultimately curtail my freedoms, and that I would be neither wise nor mature enough to take accountability for that decision. The things I held dear—books, writing, friends, family—were how I mediated my relationship with the world. They held my equanimity and my identity, an identity which fluctuated with the years. In truth, I felt I had overcome some of the limits of capitalism through having the freedom to make strange choices, like move country regularly, earn little money, accept accommodation as payment, and apply for—and land—jobs I was desperately under-qualified for. Even smoking in my twenties felt like an act of freedom, although I recognise this is nothing more than an intellectual rationalisation for my recklessness. Perhaps all my philosophising was just that—intellectual leaps in logic which had me feeling like the wind was beneath my wings and maybe, just maybe, I could do anything. The idea of having children felt like a collision with a reality I had tried to escape, like flying into a brick wall. It was not the idea of hard work, nor commitment, nor even the threatened loss of identity which frightened me. It was the idea of meal times, and bed times, and nap times and schedules and routines and school hours and set holidays—it was the natural limits of what a child's life demands, limits I failed to see any other way as directly hobbling my own freedom.

I was not expecting the book I am writing about the connection between violence against women and violence against Earth to have any bearing on my pre-parental anxieties. Yet, not two weeks after finishing the first draft, in which I developed the idea of a reproductive economy which surpasses the confines of gender and domestic labour (an idea I've been hinting at in this newsletter recently), and gestures toward a horizon in which the way we work reorganises our relationship with Earth and one another, I woke up unafraid. It is not that I was suddenly unafraid of these limits that had dogged every conversation about parenting over the previous decade, but rather that the concept of my personal freedom had grown into a sprawling web of interdependency, and I realised the radically expanded horizon I had sketched out in the book for society as a whole could apply to my own little life. These natural limits are, I suddenly understood, an opportunity to collaborate completely differently with my community. Together, there were things we could overcome. Together, there were things we could meet with dignity. Pushing at them, daring them to expand, was something I could only do as part of a greater whole; here, then, lay a greater freedom than what I could envision for myself alone.

Battistoni's own formulation of freedom offers a similar outlook. She invokes Simon de Beauvoir's theory of ambiguity—the unfixed nature of being—to argue that it is only through the relationship and interdependence of the material world and the social world, only through the dynamics of limits and expansiveness, individuals and community, that a kind of freedom can be forged as that which is not fixed or attained, but is the very act of becoming: of being able to choose to be other than what we are.

And so responding to the eco-crisis is a radical act of freedom, even as so many of our freedoms are curtailed. Daring to organise and imagine and resist and defend even as the horizon of possibility seems to dim and shorten and warp is giving the very best of ourselves to the world. It is doing the work to bring the future into being. It is being human. It is embodying the impulse, the very spark, which pushes grass through cracks in concrete to reach towards the sun. This is not the work of necessity—it is Life itself.

Marx, Bastiani, even the eco-feminists all orient themselves around "necessary work", either escaping it or embracing it. But life-giving work is not necessary, even if it is fundamental. Rather, it is the Life-drive, will, power even—the ability to make and maintain and weave and grown and remember. We do not need to do any of these things. But at one point we split from our Great Ape cousins and began to do the things which make us human, not because they were necessary to our survival but because we are compelled towards freedom. Language, art, music, dance, gardening, harvesting, story-telling, weaving, prayer, belief, wonder, love—in every single corner of the world, this is what our species chose to do. Our freedom is embedded in the complexity and history and interdependency of these acts, acts which liberated our imaginations and politics and practices. This is not necessary work. It is liberating work, work which embodies the very spark of Life itself to become more than what it is; work which sees future horizons to which we must reach. Our freedoms are located at the nexus of what is, what has been, and what could be. They require radical commitment and uncompromising imagination. They require us to act. Our freedoms are ours—but only if we choose them.