This question, posed by Serbian poet Branko Miljković, captures the paradox of freedom: it is longed for, sung about, and idealized, yet when finally achieved, it often proves difficult, heavy, and even disappointing. Freedom has been one of the most passionately pursued concepts in human history, yet its realization reveals how deeply unprepared we are, perhaps still in the infantile phase of our civilization’s development. We remain cruel, selfish, and fearful, marked by the ever-present helplessness of humankind.

Freud described this helplessness in three spheres: helplessness against nature (its forces, its catastrophes, its pandemics, and its climate shifts), helplessness in the face of inevitable death (the inescapable fate of every individual), and helplessness in regulating our relationships with others (the unruly domain of society). These conditions weigh on us and shape the burden of freedom. How can we speak of freedom if so much of existence is determined by forces we neither chose nor control? We are not even free to decide whether we want to exist at all. This primal fact is the seed of our fear and therefore the seed of our unfreedom. Contrary to Sartre’s claim that freedom is the basic condition of human existence, I would argue the opposite. Nausea does not lie in being free but in the struggle to become free while surpassing the basic angst of human helplessness. Without this struggle, freedom becomes a mere discourse, a bedtime story told to comfort ourselves.

Yet there is another way of approaching freedom—not materialistically but idealistically. From this perspective, freedom becomes possible through a radical reorientation of our relationship to the world. Freedom is not given; it must be prepared for. Schopenhauer reminds us that our unfreedom is rooted in the will—the unconscious, archaic drive to live, to strive, to consume, and to persist at all costs, regardless of suffering. Far from granting freedom, the will is its opposite: an endless compulsion that keeps us chained to desire. Reason does not liberate us but serves as the will’s clever instrument, justifying its dictates. True freedom, then, does not lie in exercising the will, “doing what we want,” but in freedom from wanting itself. Freedom is the suspension of the will, a temporary transcendence of the blind natural forces that otherwise push us forward.

For Schopenhauer, this transcendence is possible through asceticism, altruism, and art. In each of these, we momentarily overcome the tyranny of the will: in asceticism, we deny our blind drives; in altruism, we turn outward to the needs of others; in art, we step beyond ourselves into pure contemplation. In these moments, freedom appears—not as a permanent condition, but as a possibility.

This is the first condition of freedom: to become free for us. Collective ideals of freedom are hollow if individuals are unprepared for them. Imposed freedom, delivered top-down, leads paradoxically to unfreedom—extremism, dogmatism, tyranny. A free society requires free individuals, each of whom has confronted and surpassed their own basic fears and drives.

In today’s world, the word “freedom” fills mouths across the political spectrum. Freedom fighters proclaim their causes, yet many who speak loudest of freedom have never achieved it for themselves. Their discourse of freedom becomes a weapon of oppression. Instead of preaching and paternalizing freedom, we must look inward. The true work begins with us. By becoming “freer,” we realize that our task is not to impose freedom on others but to support its unfolding wherever it may appear. We move away from narcissistic drives for importance and towards freedom for its own sake.

Even in an age saturated with misinformation, polarization, wars, and hate, we possess technologies that can support new forms of freedom. Not because of contemporary development, but despite it, despite all odds, we can approach freedom of will. We now have more time and more opportunities than ever, yet paradoxically less motivation. To recognize that the will to be free itself keeps us from being free is the first step.

This recognition requires that we move beyond the polarized concepts of freedom and the “good life” that dominate discourse. Each of us must discover our own path to freedom (through asceticism, art, and altruism), and in doing so, accept that others will find different paths. To accept this plurality is already a step to be free.

If such a process unfolds, societal change will follow from individual transformations, not the other way around. Otherwise, we remain trapped in discursive freedom, always speaking of liberation yet never achieving it. Only then, perhaps, will freedom sing. Not with the desperate voice of the oppressed, but with the quiet dignity of those who have overcome their own will.

In the end, the paradox of freedom is not resolved by declaring victory over our constraints but by continuously engaging with them. Freedom is not a possession, nor a final state, but a practice of becoming: fragile, reversible, and always incomplete. Its meaning emerges not in proclamations or constitutions but in the lived experience of individuals who, against their own helplessness, cultivate spaces of transcendence. If we learn to see freedom in this way—not as a promise guaranteed by history or politics, but as a task that each generation must take up anew—then we may begin to approach freedom itself, no longer as an illusion of discourse, but as a possibility that dignifies existence.