What does freedom mean to you?

I think freedom is, in many ways, the perception of your choices. How free you feel often depends on how much you believe you are able to make the decisions you truly want for yourself.

To me, freedom is ultimately a deeply subjective experience.

I remember that years ago, I used to assume that every Muslim woman must feel oppressed, for example. Then I married a Muslim man and visited his family in their home country. What surprised me was that most of the women in his family did not desire a European lifestyle at all. They wanted what they understood and valued as a traditional female role, and many of them viewed the revealing clothing often normalised in Europe as inappropriate or even distasteful. And if someone does not long for something, they are unlikely to experience the absence of it as a restriction on their freedom.

In some ways, the opposite example is the Western ideal at the top of the social hierarchy: the wealthy, healthy, middle-aged white man who appears, at first glance, to have the greatest freedom of all. Yet there is no guarantee he experiences his life that way. He may feel immense pressure from family expectations, politics, religion, morality, or psychological burdens. Perhaps he dreamed of a creative life, but countless pressures keep him trapped in the corporate world, which he experiences as its own form of prison.

Of course, there are situations where very few people are able to experience any real sense of freedom at all. In dictatorships, prisons, or environments of constant danger and severely limited choices, freedom becomes far more difficult to access, even internally. But even then, I think there is still some subjective variation in how people experience those realities.

I remember listening to an interview with a well-known psychiatrist who said that, ideally, those are the only situations in which he would truly want to prescribe antidepressants. His reasoning was that when a person has the power to change aspects of their own situation, that path is often safer and more effective than medication alone in overcoming depression. Whether that perspective is entirely realistic, I honestly do not know — I am not a doctor. But I do think it highlights something important: how critical the perception of freedom is to the human experience.