For centuries, humanity has always searched for freedom outside itself, in vast lands where we could set foot, beyond borders or in the breaking of chains. Yet we have often overlooked the fact that the most secure prisons are built not from bricks, but from thoughts. A person who can physically travel to the farthest corners of the world, who faces no legal restrictions whatsoever, may still live like a complete prisoner under the shadow of fears created by their own mind, the desire for social approval and the burdens of the past. Yet those who, despite all the noise and limitations of the outside world, have managed to create a sanctuary within themselves that no one can touch are the ones who have tasted true liberty. For true freedom is the courage to recognize the invisible boundaries our minds impose upon themselves and overcome them one by one.
We always associate freedom with a feeling of lightness, of breaking free from chains and rising into the sky. Yet every choice leaves something behind that we must give up. That slight dizziness we feel when standing at a crossroads is precisely the condemnation Sartre speaks of. We choose a direction, and from that moment on, every stone and every pothole along that road becomes our responsibility. When human beings realize that they must write both the tragedy and the triumph of their own lives with their own hands, they understand that freedom is the heaviest and most honest burden they must carry.
The freedom of choice that Sartre described as an existential anguish in the mid-20th century has today turned into notifications and swipes that we tap dozens of times a second on the smart screens we carry in our pockets. The digital age has offered modern humanity a pool of possibilities unlike anything seen before in history: thousands of films to watch, endless career paths to follow, countless templates of ideal lives to imitate...
Yet this illusory freedom has not lightened the heavy condemnation Sartre spoke of; instead, it has transformed it into an invisible paralysis. Modern individuals who spend hours scrolling in front of a screen without watching a single video to the end, or who constantly reconstruct their profiles according to the approval of others, are actually trying to escape the responsibility that comes with freedom. Surrendering to the recommendations of an algorithm that knows us better than we know ourselves, getting lost along the artificial paths offered by the Explore page, is precisely the comfortable mechanism of bad faith that Sartre pointed to. For instead of choosing our own authentic actions and bearing the existential weight of those choices, living the life an algorithm has chosen on our behalf is the easiest way to place the blame for any possible unhappiness on the system. This is exactly where the modern tragedy of the digital age begins: While drowning in a sea of options, we remain so captive that we cannot even reach the shores of our own free will.
Merve Tosun
Yücel Cultural Foundation
Volunteer Writer