We All Say We Want Freedom

It has become one of our favourite definitions of success. But ask what freedom actually looks like, and suddenly the answer becomes much more personal.

Over the past week, I have been asking women a fairly simple question.

What does success mean to you?

And one answer has come up again and again.

Freedom.

Not money.

Not status.

Not the impressive job title.

Freedom.

Which, on the surface, sounds wonderfully clear.

It also sounds like the answer you are probably meant to give in 2026 if you want everyone to know you have evolved beyond wanting a Range Rover and a house with a butler’s pantry (though i do love a butlers pantry.)

Money? No, no.

Freedom.

Very enlightened.

Probably listened to a few podcasts.

The interesting part begins when you ask the next question.

Freedom to do what?

Because that is where the common thread starts unravelling.

For some women, freedom means having more time with her family.

For others, it means having enough money and flexibility to choose how she spends her days.

For someone else, freedom has almost nothing to do with her calendar. It means no longer making decisions according to other people’s approval.

And for someone else, it might be the ability to make choices according to her own values and accept whatever consequences come with them.

Same word.

Very different lives.

And perhaps that tells us something important.

What Do We Mean When We Say We Want Freedom?

Maybe freedom is not actually the answer.

Maybe it is the doorway into the real answer.

We talk about freedom as though it is one universal destination.

Financial freedom.

Time freedom.

Location freedom.

Freedom from a boss.

Freedom from debt.

Freedom from judgement.

Freedom from obligation.

Freedom to travel.

Freedom to stay home.

Freedom to work.

Freedom not to work.

The word gets used so often that it can almost sound self-explanatory.

But it isn’t.

One person’s freedom can look remarkably like somebody else’s nightmare.

There are people who dream of working remotely from wherever they like in the world.

There are others who would happily trade every airport lounge on earth for being home by three-thirty every afternoon.

One woman may experience freedom through independence.

Another may experience it through belonging.

Someone else might want a huge amount of financial choice.

Another simply wants enough money that she can stop thinking about money all the time.

There's no contradiction there.

There are simply different people trying to build different lives.

Which seems obvious.

Except modern culture has an annoying habit of giving even freedom an aesthetic.

We know what freedom is meant to look like now.

Laptop beside an infinity pool.

Passive income.

A weekday coffee in the sunshine.

Six weeks in Europe.

A linen set.

Possibly a very expensive carry-on suitcase.

Nobody seems to represent freedom by collecting their children from school and then making spaghetti on a Tuesday night.

It doesn’t perform quite as well, aesthetically.

And yet for someone who spent ten years missing school pick ups or that Tuesday night because she was working, that might be the entire point.

This is where I wonder whether we can reject one inherited definition of success and accidentally replace it with another.

For years, success looked fairly obvious.

The career.

The house.

The money.

The car.

The title.

The bigger version of whatever came before it (read Does a Good Life Need to Look Impressive?)

A lot of people have started questioning that.

Good.

But if we simply replace the old answer with “freedom” without ever asking what freedom means to us personally, have we actually chosen anything?

Or have we just updated the vocabulary?

That is the sneaky part.

Even an idea that sounds deeply individual can become something we borrow.

We watch someone leave corporate life and start a business.

Suddenly entrepreneurship looks like freedom (read When Did Growth Become the Default?.)

Someone moves overseas.

Maybe geographical freedom is the answer.

Someone sells everything and starts travelling full-time.

Perhaps possessions were the problem.

Someone else builds a beautiful home, slows down and spends more time with family.

Actually, maybe that is freedom.

We are back where we always seem to end up.

Looking sideways.

Trying on other people’s answers.

Some fit.

Some don’t.

Sometimes we see somebody living a life that looks great and, without really noticing, start wondering whether maybe we should want that too.

I think this is why the conversations I have been having lately have been so interesting.

On the surface, these women agree.

They want freedom.

But underneath the word are completely different needs.

Time.

Choice.

Connection.

Integrity.

Autonomy.

Security.

Self-trust.

The ability to say no.

The ability to say yes without asking anybody else first.

Perhaps we are not really chasing freedom at all.

Perhaps we are chasing the specific feeling we believe freedom will give us.

And that matters, because if we do not know what that feeling is, we can spend years building the wrong kind of freedom.

You can create financial freedom and still have no time.

You can create time freedom and still feel controlled by other people’s opinions.

You can become completely independent and realise that independence was never the same thing as belonging.

You can remove every obvious restriction from your life and somehow still feel strangely trapped inside expectations you have carried around for years.

External freedom is not always internal freedom.

Which is really irritating, quite frankly.

It would be much easier if the problem really was just the job.

But there’s another side to freedom that I don’t think we talk about enough.

Real freedom is not always comfortable.

Sometimes choosing your own life means disappointing people... the people you actually care about.

It might mean earning less.

Changing direction.

Leaving something that looked good from the outside.

Saying no to an opportunity that looks good on paper and other people think you would be mad to refuse.

Choosing a relationship, career, family structure or way of living that someone else would never choose for themselves.

Freedom doesn't mean avoiding consequences.

More often than not, it means deciding which consequences you are willing to live with.

There is always a cost that not everyone will see or understand.

That feels different from the Instagram version.

There's no infinity pool involved.

Sometimes freedom is simply being able to say:

I know this choice will cost me something, and I still know why I am making it.

That, to me, feels much closer to self-determination.

Not doing whatever we want.

Rather, knowing why we chose it.

And perhaps this is where getting older changes things.

Not because we suddenly become immune to other people’s opinions.

Personally, I'm still waiting for that particular software update.

But maybe the audience gets smaller.

We become more particular about whose judgement deserves weight.

A parent.

A partner.

A friend who knows us well enough to pull us in line and tell us when we're being ridiculous.

People whose lives or values contain something we genuinely respect.

The rest begins to matter a little less.

And when that happens, freedom starts becoming less performative.

It becomes less about proving that we can do whatever we want and more about having enough self-trust to choose what actually suits us.

Sometimes that will look ambitious.

Sometimes quiet.

Sometimes expensive.

Sometimes incredibly simple.

Maybe freedom is being able to build a big, full life.

Maybe it's being able to stop building one.

Maybe it's earning enough to take six months off.

Maybe it's having work you love enough that you do not particularly want six months off.

This is why replacing society’s definition of success with a more universal definition never quite works.

There is no single correct life hiding underneath all of this.

That would make The Standard considerably easier to write, but unfortunately it would also defeat the point.

What interests me much more is the moment we stop automatically accepting the answer.

The moment someone says:

Success is freedom...

Instead of nodding and moving on, we ask:

What does freedom actually look like for you?

What are you trying to have more of?

What are you trying to have less of?

What do you want to be able to choose?

What currently has too much control over your decisions?

Money?

Time?

Fear?

Approval?

Responsibility?

Expectations?

An identity you have outgrown?

Because once we get specific, “freedom” stops being an attractive concept and starts becoming a real life.

And real lives involve trade-offs.

Someone who wants a lot of financial freedom may choose periods of intense work.

Someone who values time above everything may choose to earn less.

Someone who wants independence may give up some security.

Someone who values family might happily accept limitations another person would experience as suffocating.

That's not failure to achieve freedom.

That's freedom becoming specific.

Maybe this is what success starts looking like once we stop trying to find a universal definition for it.

Not a particular income.

Not a particular lifestyle.

Not even freedom in the abstract.

Just enough awareness to know what we are choosing and why.

That sounds almost disappointingly simple.

There's no 'five-step' framework.

No morning routine.

No expensive retreat in Tulum.

Just the slightly uncomfortable work of separating what we genuinely want from what we have been taught to want.

And perhaps that's the part most of us never really get taught.

We learn how to achieve things but we learn even less about deciding which things deserve the effort.

So we chase.

We arrive.

We reassess.

And sometimes, somewhere along the way, we realise we were using somebody else’s map.

Maybe freedom isn’t about getting to a point where nothing can get in our way.

I’m not even sure that version of life exists.

Maybe it’s knowing what we’re willing to give up for the things that matter more to us.

And then being willing to own the choice.

No performance.

No perfect answer.

Just a life that feels unmistakably like ours.

The Question

When you say you want freedom, what are you actually asking to be free from and what do you want that freedom to make possible?

Decide well.