[DavidDavidDavid]

coollikeme: Freedom is most definitely not doing whatever your passion is. There's a difference between liberty and lawlessness. That sounds obvious enough in the abstract, but in people's lives they confuse following their passions with true freedom. Just consider the fact that your passions change with maturity. Was someone truly "free" when as a teenager their "passion" in life was to party hearty? How about the young man whose "passion" in (that stage of his) life is to "establish himself"? Or the middle-aged man whose "passion" is to somehow "recapture his youth" before retiring, under protest, into dotage and irrelevancy? Or the old man who, after a "fulfilling life" decides he wants to "give back" and goes about using his money to emblazon his name across buildings and landmarks as one last act of will before his mortality expires like a stock option?

Yes, alternatives exist to the nine-to-five. The issue, from a self-awareness perspective, is why one option seems more appealing than another. To quote Goethe, the master reveals himself only in limitation, and the law alone can give us freedom.

Unfortunately, people often think in terms of what philosophers call "negative" freedom -- freedom *from*. But any reaction -- which is what a freedom-from is -- is no freedom at all. A reaction is a function, in the trigonometric sense, of variables or factors. You think you achieve "freedom" when you achieve freedom from something, but that's not the case at all: you were merely reacting to stimuli, no better than a highly complex Artificial Intelligence subroutine!

The typical "nine-to-five-sucks" mentality is based on "negative" freedom. It is the freedom of a child from having to do any homework, not the "positive" freedom of a Creator *to* or towards something existential, inherent, intrinsic.

I recommend Hesse's essay "Trees"..."when one has learned how to listen to trees, one no longer desires to be a tree."