How Free Are You?

[00:00:01][music] >> I think as humans, we love our freedom.

[00:00:16]But I think that might be especially true for runners. Cuz I think as runners, we intuitively know that anyone can start running. Anyone can pick up their shoes, walk out their door, and go for a mile run. Anyone can start running. Anyone can sign up for a marathon.

[00:00:30]Anyone can get up, get out, and push themselves.

[00:00:34]And so I think it resonates when philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre say, "A man is nothing but what he makes of himself."

[00:00:43]The idea that we can do anything that we put our mind to. It's exciting and empowering. And then actually doing it, signing up for that race, going out, running the race, and walking away from that race satisfied, is an incredible experience. had that experience a couple times where I walked away from a race completely satisfied with my performance.

[00:01:07]But I recently ran the the Boston Marathon, and I came in 5,208th place.

[00:01:13]How could I be satisfied if I didn't win the race? If we truly are limitless, if we have complete freedom, how could anyone be satisfied with anything but first place?

[00:01:31]And that might sound like a dumb question, but that's because we intuitively know that we all have limitations.

[00:01:38]After I finished the Boston Marathon, I was talking to my dad about how I was talking to my dad about how I missed a few key workouts, that there were a couple speed days that I wasn't able to get out there, and then I wasn't able to get the really long runs that I wanted to get in.

[00:01:56]And it's because I was balancing having a fairly new baby and a new job and a couple other factors and I was talking to him how, you know, even if I were to have hit those workouts and got those long days in and hit the the speed work that I wanted to, I maybe could have shaved off three or four, maybe five, six minutes.

[00:02:17]That's it. I wasn't going to win the race.

[00:02:21]I knew my limitations. I knew what it was going to be like to be training for a marathon with a new baby, with a new job, and everything else that was going on in my life. I understood that. I accepted that and I ran my race. And I walked away incredibly satisfied even though I didn't win the race.

[00:02:39]And the the crowds at Boston intuitively knew the same thing. It's not like everyone went home after the first place runner went by. No, all the the crowds, all of the people there cheering, they stayed. They stayed to cheer on the tens of thousands of runners that would run by that day. They were running with their own limitations, with their own responsibilities.

[00:03:09]My 2:58 finish, that was a great time for me. It would have been an absolutely catastrophically horrible race for a professional runner.

[00:03:18]And so it just goes to show that we instinctively and intuitively account for other people's limitations and circumstances.

[00:03:27]But you see that brings up an interesting and an uncomfortable question. If circumstances and limitations matter that much, how free are we actually?

[00:03:39]And if we aren't fully free, how responsible are we for what we accomplish?

[00:03:46]As a reminder, this video is explicitly about running, but But not about running. Running is just the platter used to serve philosophy, so apply it to your life however you want.

[00:03:59]Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher that I quoted at the beginning in this video, he's constantly cited for his radical views on freedom.

[00:04:06]He is the one that said that as humans we are condemned to be free. And what he meant by that was that the responsibility of our choices land squarely on our shoulders, and that is the condemnation of freedom. Is that we cannot escape that responsibility. But even Sartre, as radical as he was, he accepted and admitted that we have limitations on our freedom.

[00:04:30]And he came up with a concept. He called those limitations facticities.

[00:04:35]And facticities are essentially anything that you did not choose.

[00:04:40]For example, you did not choose your body. You didn't choose your parents.

[00:04:43]You didn't choose the geographical location of your birth. You didn't choose the time period that you were born into. You didn't choose your biology or really anything that happened to you in your early childhood.

[00:04:55]But Sartre only lets these facticities influence you to a certain point. He still believes deeply that you are unavoidably responsible for your choices.

[00:05:07]Now enter the scene Simone de Beauvoir.

[00:05:10]I hope that pronunciation was as good as it sounded. Beauvoir uh was actually uh Sartre's romantic partner. They had a romantic relationship through the vast majority of their adult years, and together they're considered the founders of existential philosophy. Now Now Beauvoir brought in a unique perspective.

[00:05:32]>> [music] >> And it was because she was a woman.

[00:05:35]She wrote a book called The Second Sex, and in that book she talks about how women have fundamentally the same freedom as men, but their opportunities to exercise that freedom have historically been restricted by social structures.

[00:05:50]A woman cannot simply choose her way out of every limitation. Her situation matters.

[00:06:00]Beauvoir's take did not eliminate freedom by any means.

[00:06:04]But, what it did was introduce complexity to Sartre's philosophy. And a lot of people thought that complexity was missing.

[00:06:12]And even some people even think that Beauvoir influenced Sartre to the point where he softened a bit later in life on his philosophy on responsibility and freedom.

[00:06:21]Later in life, he's quoted by saying that freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

[00:06:29]This is kind of summed up by the author Victor Frankl, who lived in the same time period. Victor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor. And in his book, he explained that everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

[00:06:49]To choose one's own way.

[00:06:55]I don't think Frankl would have ever condemned any of his fellow Jews who did not survive the Holocaust. But, his statement stands in stark contrast to any other statement from anyone >> [music] >> that would use their circumstances as a scapegoat.

[00:07:10]And so, all of this talk of freedom and circumstances and limitations is all boiling down to a couple important questions.

[00:07:19]Like, when do our circumstances become reasons for grace or compassion for ourselves or for other people?

[00:07:30]And when do they become just excuses?

[00:07:43]For whatever reason, I found myself deeply attracted to Sartre's philosophy on freedom and the responsibility that we each must take for the actions that we take in this world.

[00:07:55]But to look at the enormous range of circumstances that someone can be born into and the inherent limitations that we each do not choose, but to look at all of that >> [music] >> and ignore it would be incredibly irresponsible.

[00:08:18]A philosophy that sees only limitations risks turning every failure into fate.

[00:08:23]But a philosophy that sees only freedom risks turning every struggle into personal weakness.

[00:08:29]In my opinion, we need both perspectives. [music] We need that radical embrace of freedom that brings the unavoidable responsibility for our actions.

[00:08:40]And we also need the humility when we recognize the fact that none of us are running the same race.

[00:08:49]At least that's how I see this and I'm not an expert in this. This is just something that I've thought a lot about, the balance between responsibility and freedom and grace and limitations.

[00:09:02]And so, at the end of the day, I hope this was just interesting and thought-provoking for you. And if it was, I hope you'll stick around and I'll catch you in the next video.

[00:09:12]>> [music]