The Uplift Podcast

Everybody wants to be free. Freedom and liberty are central to happiness. But can we have too much freedom? Dr. Craig Hassed is one of Australia’s leading mindfulness experts and the author of The Freedom Trap. He says that contemporary definitions of freedom will not lead to happiness but are instead harming us and our planet. Our modern notions of freedom are just removing more and more limitations, or barriers, to a person’s individual will and desire. Whatever we want to do, we should be able to do it as much as we want to. Stay up as late as we want to, eat what we want to...So we’ve got... more opportunity for indulgence than probably any other time in history. All this, he says, is counter to notions of freedom expressed by the world’s great wisdom traditions. Freedom wasn’t just a matter of satisfying every desire you’ve got. Freedom was a matter of transcending desire, being non-attached to desire, not driven by desire. He says that constant desire and wanting only brings dissatisfaction and agitatio