Breaking the fourth wall.
I’m taking on two new coaching clients. I work with people looking to make sense of themselves, their lives and their work, and make extraordinary changes. If that’s you, get in touch, I’d love to chat.
“And he said, “Ah, New York, yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes.” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” And I gave him different banal theories. And he said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison - and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have - having been lobotomized - the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” And he put it in my hand. And he said, “Escape before it’s too late.””
— Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, ‘My Dinner With Andre’
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau
On my first day with a big consulting firm, I was given a laptop and a BlackBerry. On that bright day back in spring 2006, I signed a form for these items as if I were receiving gold bars from a bank vault.
In the American corporation I had just left, only senior managers had laptops and mobile devices. Even though it was standard practice for all employees at the consulting firm, my ego inflated by a few square feet.
One of the best ways to engender arrogance in a young man is to give him a false sense of status and power. These shiny devices and the flashing red light for new emails undoubtedly gave me a sense of self-importance, which cloaked a tyranny I could not see.
Seven years later, I was burned out by consulting and the relentless demands on my time and energy. I had realised that mobile technology, rather than offering freedom and flexibility, actually meant I was always working or potentially working.
Wherever I was - at home, out with friends, travelling, watching the football - I was constantly checking in with my emails and notifications. Work was ever-present.
After a sabbatical, I quit my last role as a permanent employee and became a freelancer. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect the relief I felt on my last day as I unburdened myself of my company devices was even greater than the egoic highs of having first received them.
It’s said that the trajectory of humans was fundamentally altered when we began farming crops. Whereas once we had lived a nomadic existence of foraging and hunting, now we were permanently anchored to one place, subject to the whims of the weather, pests and anything else that might impact our yield.
To have a smallholding with crops and maybe livestock was considered independence, particularly in the colonisation of the American West. It offered security around food and income, allowing one to provide for a family. At the same time, it created a series of endless obligations.
Ask any farmer. Seasons are as controllable to us as the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Animals need to be fed regardless of how you feel each morning. Weather is a hovering threat of how puny we are in the face of nature. The fences around a plot of land keep things in as much as they keep things out.
“When we say that we are free, and it’s true that we can be, this means that how we behave is determined by what happens within us, within the brain, and not by external factors. To be free doesn’t mean that our behaviour is not determined by the laws of nature. It means that it is determined by the laws of nature acting in our brains.”
— Carlo Rovelli
The most effective prisons are the ones we build for ourselves. They are always near-perfect in their design because we don’t conceive of them as objects of confinement but rather manifestations of our deepest desires.
Around the time I was beginning to consider quitting permanent consulting, I was also a few years into being a homeowner, a modest and heavily mortgaged flat in south London.
I liked my flat, but I was longing for a garden or some outdoor space, and found myself considering buying a bigger property, a larger flat or a house. This was, and is, the classical path of home ownership in the UK: buy your first place, build some equity, sell and buy a larger place, and so on.
Fortunately, although I looked at some properties and was tempted, I had just enough wisdom to realise that committing to a larger mortgage was a terrible idea for me. I knew that I was in the process of taking some risks with my career, which would be significantly harder if I had to service debt that was twice the size each month. I was also single and had no kids, so the extra space, as desirable as it was, was completely unnecessary.
Fifteen years later, not buying a bigger home is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I view it now as a near miss, a sliding doors moment where my life could have taken a radically different path, one that was much more dry, fearful and captive.
“You are in prison. If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realise that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can’t escape.”
— G.I. Gurdjieff
This process of self-entrapment is so pernicious that we barely notice it. Technology, especially social media, captures our attention without us noticing. Products are bought that aren’t needed, and instead need constant maintenance, storage and replacement. Choices, seemingly happy ones, are made about a lifestyle that then needs to be sustained or improved every year - holidays, properties, clothing, subscriptions.
These elaborate self-made prisons are like Foucault’s panopticon, perpetually shaping our behaviour and choices without us being conscious of it. But unlike the panopticon, it’s not just the possibility we’re being observed; in consumerist cultures, where our identity must be explicitly established, we want to be observed.
Every purchase choice is a signal to everyone else about who we are. Most people would be loath to admit that they’re keeping up with the Joneses, but that’s the game they’re in, in one form or another.
I have a sense that more and more people are waking up from this illusion. It has been noticeable in my coaching practice over the last couple of years, particularly with clients who would rank amongst the most well-paid people in their countries.
The refrains I increasingly hear from clients are realisations that having money can also bring with it a feeling of enslavement, of obligation, of limited choices.
This might seem perverse to people for whom income is insecure and money is limited, but money is not the real issue here; it is the beliefs and choices that surround it.
Wealth can bring freedom, but it can also imprison, and it would be foolish for any of us to think we’re immune to this paradox.
No one likes to think they’re part of the masses, following along with the charging mammalian herd. And yet this is where most people are, hurtling towards possible oblivion, all whilst thinking they are free.
It is hard work to break away from this, to escape the gravitational pull of the desires that tempt and ensnare us, in a world all too willing to fulfil them - for a price.
Beneath the material reality, what most of us truly long for, along with love, connection and safety, is freedom. In a Rousseauian sense, this freedom is available to us but only once we unshackle ourselves and break the fourth wall of our elaborate prison cells.
Money, technology and products can imprison, or they can aid our liberation, but only if we can be certain that we are the wardens and not the inmates.
Increasingly, this is not just a matter of individual liberty but societal and planetary. We are flirting with self-destruction as a species, and averting this catastrophe requires choices - political, social, economic, relational - that can only arise from a greater sense of what real freedom is.
I write because I love it and I’d like to do more of it. If you enjoy reading my Substack, please consider supporting my writing with a low-cost subscription. It’s the price of one coffee a month, and sometimes just as refreshing.
Your support means I can spend more time researching and writing this each week, going to more esoteric and interesting places. Thank you.
“We talk of freedom and democracy, yet an increasing number of people are afraid of the responsibility of freedom, and prefer the slavery of the well-fed robot; they have no faith in democracy and are happy to leave it to the political experts to make the decisions.”
— Erich Fromm
About me.
I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.
Contact me to:
Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.
Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.
Have a real conversation.
At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.
You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.
[main image ‘Breaking Away From The Hard’ by Thomas Kopera]