The Freedom Of Accepting That Not Everything Is Free

Victims of inertia or agents of change? Do we have a choice?

an impressionist painting of a young woman steering an old ship towards the sky, headed for the stars — by DALL·E

Free Junk

There are few more alluring prospects in life than something free of charge. The power of something given to us at no cost is such that we may end up hoarding mountains of junk we would have never considered purchasing. This marketing mechanism is so irresistible that we react to the mechanism more than we do to the product behind it. We don’t care what we get as long as we get it for free.

Air For Sale

Naturally, there are exceptions to this. If something is supposed to be free, advertising it as such won’t make a difference: indeed, it is hard — albeit seemingly not impossible — to sell air, dreams or music. Here we must note that something doesn’t need to be essential to be free: music is certainly not as necessary as air, while a somewhere to live would be as elemental as clean water, and we tend to pay for both. There is nothing congenital or immutable about these constructs of our society. It is how we have haphazardly organised ourselves after evolving culturally for thousands of years. The artificial or fictional nature of the construct does not make it any less real. Changing it is possible but something that requires much time and effort.