literature quotes

As your interactions with others gradually cease, you stop participating in their shared reality, which means the norms and truths of that reality stop applying to you. Even the natural world, which seems to impose certain conditions on your existence, can be mostly avoided or at least mitigated through technologies that allow you to separate yourself from nature. When all of your basic needs can be met without interacting with anyone, then your isolation has become total. Your new world has a population of one, and its form is whatever you give it.

But as we cannot do this without risking enormous harm, we need to examine more closely the relationship between freedom and responsibility. If we can see that our actions must follow from our responsibility to ourselves and the people around us, then suddenly those actions are no longer mere products of contingent choice but also necessary ones.

It is precisely the feeling of absolute contingency that produces so much anxiety over our most important choices. It is because we know we could be pulled away from what is best by another option we might want more or fear less that freedom can feel like a curse instead of a blessing.