Being Free… But Not Too Much: A Chronicle of a Slightly Lost Humanity

We live in an extraordinary era: never have human beings had so many possibilities, so many choices, so many proclaimed freedoms. And yet, never have they felt so tired, hesitant, and lost. This is the quintessential modern paradox: we are told that everything is possible, but we have never truly been taught how to choose, nor what to do when our aspirations far exceed the real conditions that would allow them to be fulfilled.

Freedom: User Manual Not Included

For a long time, life trajectories were relatively structured. Family, work, couplehood, social roles: one could feel confined, certainly, but also contained. Today, these frameworks have loosened — an undeniable advance — without new, solid collective reference points truly taking their place.

As a result, we are expected to choose a career (and sometimes reinvent ourselves every ten years), define our relationship to partnership, sexuality, and parenthood, build an identity, an inner balance, a sense of meaning.

All of this without a manual, without a safety net, and often under economic or social constraints.

Freedom exists, theoretically. But at times it resembles an enormous buffet where one has neither appetite, nor money, nor time to eat.

Aspiring, Yes… But Under What Conditions?

Contemporary distress does not stem from excessive ambition or a lack of individual willpower. It arises from the gap between, on the one hand, encouraged aspirations — “be yourself,” “fulfill your potential,” “do what makes you happy” — and, on the other hand, the concrete conditions that hinder their realization: precarity, mental overload, contradictory norms, and performance-driven injunctions.

Individuals are asked to be free, responsible, autonomous… while being left to fend for themselves within complex systems that are sometimes incoherent and often exhausting. And when it does not work out, they are gently told that they simply lack self-confidence.

The Clinic of Ordinary Confusion

In clinical accompaniment, this reality appears quietly, yet insistently. People do not always say: “I am suffering because of an imperfect system.” They more often say:

“I can’t manage.” or “I should be able to.”

Others, on the contrary, completely disown responsibility: “I’m doing everything right — the problem is everyone else.” In Quebec, it would be said more bluntly: “It’s all done all crooked.” (Editor’s note: it’s a mess, it makes no sense.)

Doubt, hesitation, and suffering have thus become intimate states, even though they largely stem from external injunctions and are widely shared at a collective level. Frustration — even failure — is internalized, where it would sometimes be necessary to contextualize it: not to absolve responsibility, but to restore meaning.

In this vacuum of reference points, certain social or political movements promise a return to more structured, more regulated, more homogeneous lives — apparently simpler ones. They often respond skillfully to a deep need: relief from the burden of having to choose everything alone.

Not to Remove Responsibility, but to Support the Exercise of Freedom

I would deliberately fall into a subtle trap if I tried to repair the world on my own. Faced with this generalized confusion, with these frustrations experienced in isolation, some professionals — often the most sensitive and committed — risk slipping into a discreet yet heavy role: that of carrying meaning by default, where it no longer circulates sufficiently.

When the world offers too little meaning, professionals (myself included) with a broad, reflective, and integrative approach attempt to provide it. When frameworks are lacking, they rebuild them for others. With care and intelligence… and sometimes at the cost of their own exhaustion.

Yet accompanying is not repairing. It is not about making life simpler. It is about helping people think about, and inhabit, complexity — without denying it, by acknowledging it fully.

An Unaccompanied Freedom

What if contemporary suffering did not arise from an inability to be free, but from an unaccompanied freedom, exercised within systems that promise much, offer little support, and sometimes obstruct the realization of aspirations while holding individuals solely responsible?

To this already complex picture must be added the valorization of material and financial success, supposedly guaranteeing happiness, health, and power. This logic contributes to making each individual willing to trample what was once called one’s neighbor, in a climate of diffuse competition and everyday mistrust.

Perhaps feeling lost is not a sign of weakness, but a normal human reaction to a world that demands constant choices without offering sufficient reference points to make them — within a context where “every person for themselves” becomes the norm. Each person then seeks refuge, sometimes in isolation, sometimes in relationships reduced to distraction or mere security.

Perhaps the real work — clinical, social, collective — is not to teach individuals how to feel better despite everything, but to finally acknowledge that all of this is too heavy to carry alone. To recognize that it takes an entire village — caring, structuring, and emancipatory — to support and love a single person.

Being free, yes. But being free without being abandoned to complexity and frustration — that would already be progress.