Does freedom lead to loneliness?

Do you agree that today we have so many choices regarding our personal and professional lives yet we have lost the support structure that predetermined roles offered in the past?

The meanings of activities that fill most of our time, like working and long-term personal relationships have changed from being financial exchanges to having to offer psychological satisfaction. We don't just go to work, it has to be rewarding in other ways apart from getting a paycheck. We don't just get married to procreate, we have to find the "soulmate".

Clarissa Pinkola Estés in her treaty about the ancient female archetype, Women who Run with the Wolves, explains how women can lose their creative soul in search of security. Inhibition of her true desires for an extended period of time leads to voraciousness for the soul-satiating attributes: emotional, physical, spiritual, financial or rational. Domestication of the female instinct kills creativity and fulfilment. Eventually, a woman could end up just wanting to feel intensely, even if it's pain.

Psychotherapist and author Esther Perel states that we are now freer than we ever were about choices as to how to live but we are the loneliest we've ever been because we rely on work and our life partner to give us the support an entire village used to provide. We have to have conversations that were not needed when our gender determined our role as the manager of the family and the home.

We are now free to study like only men used to in the old times. We are expected to use our education in pursuing a career that will provide for the family as well. Many middle-aged women never found the life partner with whom to start a family. Some chose not to pursue having a family. Others just couldn't find the "soulmate".

This whole definition of psychological rewarding expectations from work or "the one" that we choose as a life partner is being questioned today. Not only are younger people having fewer children in the West, but also the suicide rates are increasing, especially amongst teens in the United States. Author and journalist David Brooks quotes a staggering 30% increase in suicide rate in the last twenty years, with the teen subpopulation showing an increase of 70%.

In his TEDTalk, "The lies our culture tells us about what matters and a better way to live", Brooks talks about the disadvantages of social freedom and the lack of commitment of the "unrooted, unremembered man" that are part of the relational valley we are living in. He states that freedom should be a "river you want to cross to root yourself in commitment on the other side".

It seems like the suffering experienced in our world today is leading to the questioning of the way the mostly needed freedom is evolving. Most thinkers of our day remind us of the balance that must exist between two opposites, like freedom and commitment.

I believe it has been the role of women since immemorial times to carefully maintain this balance inside of them so that the couple, the family and the community can thrive. Let us remind our younger women that there can be moments for freedom and moments for commitment throughout their lives. There are no absolutes and there is no fixed recipe for happiness.

Fluidity and uncertainty are always present and needed for the existence of life. Explore your freedom without sacrificing your wild instinct. Let us start listening to the cry of our forgotten self and give it the chance to live again. It is time to allow the flow between the two opposites in your life.

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Under Heat and Pressure

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