Do you think success is economical, professional, intellectual...? Is it a static goal or is it a journey? That changes how it influences your freedom. In essence, the definition and meaning that you give to your own life will change very much I free do you feel.
In my writing I err on the side of using simple words in the hopes that the charitable reader interprets it in whatever way it makes the most sense. Here I think I define “success” as “psychological success” = whatever makes you currently feel successful.
I don’t think that success itself is the reason of constrained freedom, I believe that “identity” is.
I definitely agree that strong attachment to identity is one of the big factors that constrain freedom, however I disagree with reducing this entire phenomenon to one mechanism. In my personal experience whenever I break what seems to me to be the biggest barrier, e.g. “identity”, to my freedom, I usually make progress for a period of time only to find another, entirely different barrier, in my way. To use a video game analogy, this is a final boss with multiple stages and “identity” is probably the first stage that most people get stuck on.
It seems like the shape of reality is itself bent in such a way to constrain our freedom, independent of whatever psychological attachments we have internally that only make matters worse.
In my writing I err on the side of using simple words in the hopes that the charitable reader interprets it in whatever way it makes the most sense. Here I think I define “success” as “psychological success” = whatever makes you currently feel successful.
I definitely agree that strong attachment to identity is one of the big factors that constrain freedom, however I disagree with reducing this entire phenomenon to one mechanism. In my personal experience whenever I break what seems to me to be the biggest barrier, e.g. “identity”, to my freedom, I usually make progress for a period of time only to find another, entirely different barrier, in my way. To use a video game analogy, this is a final boss with multiple stages and “identity” is probably the first stage that most people get stuck on.
It seems like the shape of reality is itself bent in such a way to constrain our freedom, independent of whatever psychological attachments we have internally that only make matters worse.