POOR AND FREE

Camus grew up genuinely poor in Algiers, raised by a nearly deaf mother and a fierce grandmother in a home without books or running water. He never romanticized poverty. But in his Notebooks he sets down a preference that cuts against almost everything the modern world assumes. Poor and free, he writes, rather than rich and enslaved. Then he adds the trap. Of course men want to be both rich and free, and that very wanting is what sometimes leaves them poor and enslaved.

Read the second sentence twice, because it is the sharp one. The danger is not wealth. The danger is the grasping for both at once, the refusal to ever choose, which quietly mortgages your freedom to the pursuit of more. You take the better-paying job that owns your evenings. You buy the larger life that now must be maintained. Each step looks reasonable, and the sum is a person with more money and less liberty, working harder every year to keep a freedom he has already spent.

Camus is not preaching poverty any more than he is preaching wealth. He is forcing a question most of us avoid. When the two genuinely conflict, when more money would cost you more of your life, which do you actually want? Most people never decide, and so the matter gets decided for them, always in the same direction.

This is the choice behind what Zagreus told the young Mersault earlier this month, that we use up our lives making money when we should use money to buy time. Here Camus puts it plainly. A smaller life that is yours beats a larger one that is not.

Today, name one thing you could have less of in order to be a little more free, and take the first real step toward having less of it.