If you never get around to making a decision, someone else will decide for you. Circumstances will change whether you like it or not. People will come and go whether you invite them in or ask them to leave. If you fail to take responsibility for your life, then you can neither take credit for your successes nor blame yourself for your failures. That condition isn’t the same thing as freedom. It more closely resembles bondage because the little freedom it offers comes at such a great cost.

Many things offer the illusion of freedom at the cost of bondage. How else can a consumer society encourage people to go into debt to buy things they hope will transform their lives for the better? I remember when the teenage son of a friend of mine got his driver’s license. He had saved up some money working during the summer, and bought a used car he couldn’t afford. Then he sunk a bunch of more money into an expensive sound system for the car. When the summer job ended, he found he could not pay the car loan, so they confiscated his car. He found that losing the car did not mean that he was now out of debt. Quit the opposite, he now owed the entirety of the high interest loan he had taken out, and lost the sound system he had recently purchased. The longer he could not pay for the loan on a car he no longer owned, the more he owed. Bondage, pure and simple.