Browsing Steemit today, I came across this contest question by 
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I don't have personal freedom.
To clarify, I don't have personal freedom in a sense of the world how I understand it. Moreover, I believe that most people in the world don't have it either. Upon reading this many will disagree or say that my personal opinion has nothing to do with their reality. I don't mind. I am not trying to discredit anyone; this is definitely my own view on things.
Why is my view so "gloomy", then? Well, it's not exactly gloomy. To me, it's just how things are, and each of us has a choice to leave it as it is, or to work on changing it.
To explain a little, I will ask some questions.
- Are you free if your life is subjected to patterns and schedules which you haven't consciously developed for yourself, but which have been created for you by your parents, your school system, your job, your social surroundings, your religion, or even your own body with its physical limitations, cravings for foods and sex, and need for sleep?
- Are you free if most of your thought processes, opinions, and beliefs are formed or influenced by the way you were raised, by the books you've read, by the films you've seen, by the people you trust, and by a million other aspects of social life that had been there before you were born and will remain there for years and years after you die?
- Are you free if your feelings of happiness, pain, sorrow, pleasure, or anger heavily depend on the hormones your body produces and on other processes in your biological organism that you cannot control with your own willpower and mind?
- Are you free if your habits and addictions, no matter how small they are, affect your mood?
- Are you free if you want to climb that mountain, for example, but your body isn't strong enough and just won't be able to complete the task?
- Are you free if you need a house to feel happy and safe when you sleep at night?
- Are you free if you have no control over your dreams when you sleep?
- Are you free if you can't survive more than two days in the wild if you happen to end up there with no warm clothes, no electronic gadgets, no food, no weapons, and no hope to be found?
This list can go on forever, but I'll stop here.
My answer to these questions is NO.
I am yet to find my PERSONAL FREEDOM.
I believe that true freedom is not something we all possess just because of the fact that we exist in this world. I think that it is something to be earned by hard work (and I don't mean work we do for money). It's more complex and difficult that just forming your own opinions about the world. It's deeper than being emotionally free from other people affecting your mood. It's more challenging than quitting alcohol and cigarettes (or at least cravings for them that are out of control)...
To me, personal freedom of a human being is something that most of us don't understand yet. It involves all aspects of human being - physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, etc., and it's not as simple as just "enjoying life". In fact, most well-known ideas and concepts about "freedom" that exist in our world are formed by a variety of influences on our thinking processes. Do we really know where they come from?