The difference between a shelter and a prison is who controls the lock. If you control the lock, you can protect yourself from things and people who could negatively impact your life. If someone else controls the lock, they can keep you from leaving and let anyone inside with you who could do your harm.
What is this metaphor about? Freedom and safety in your life. Everyone needs to have the freedom to live their lives in the way that they choose to feel happy and fulfilled, but people also need to be safe from harm. The difficulty is that there is a trade-off between freedom and safety: if you live free in the woods, you can get attacked by a bear. You can build a wall to make you safer from the bear, but then you are less free to roam around the forest. The optimal freedom/safety ratio that most people arrive at is to have four walls and a roof with a door that has a lock on it that they can go through. Yes, they cannot walk everywhere, but they have the freedom to leave through the door at will and are willing to exchange the freedom to walk through where the walls are plus the freedom to go far away (because the shelter risks being invaded) in exchange for the safety that it provides.
More freedom leads to more risk, while more safety leads to more constraints. We see these extremes every day as animals are free to roam but get killed by predators, and prisoners in solitary confinement are about as safe as humanly possible and yet can do nothing but lie, sit, stand, move within their rooms, think, speak to themselves, and possibly read/write/draw if they have reading or writing materials.
In your life, you have to make decisions about how free and safe you want to be. If you stay at home and never leave, you cannot build social bonds, cannot see the world or get fresh air and sun, and cannot participate in most activities in life. If you live in the woods and never take shelter, you cannot keep material possessions protected from the elements or theft and cannot be sure that an animal won’t attack you while you are asleep. The basic trade-offs that most people make are that they decide whether to rent or buy a house, whether to have a full-time, part-time, or freelance job, whether to have a committed relationship, and how many possessions and social connections to maintain. The more foundations they establish (colloquially known as “roots” because trees are locked into a spot but can grow tall and not be easily knocked over), the safer they are but the less freedom and more maintenance is involved.
Note that maximum freedom and safety actually ironically drops off at the extremes: the more completely free you are, you aren’t able to establish the foundation to have the ability to do whatever you want (because of the money, friends, family, etc. that would be available to you if you did so). On the other side, the safer you try to be, the less safe you become at a certain point because you become unable to protect yourself against risk and less able to do things to better yourself—see not being allowed to own a gun making you at risk of someone who does not follow the law using a gun against you and living in a hermetically sealed room only to die the first time a usually-mild disease comes in contact with you as examples. So while everyone wants both, there will always be trade-offs between the two but also a potential loss of both at either extreme.
Back to the metaphor and how it relates to reality: freedom is the ability to do whatever you want without something or someone preventing you from doing it, while safety is the protection from risk and harm. If a room you are in has a lock on it that you control and you choose to stay in it to avoid the harmful outside world, it is a shelter; if you are in a room with a lock that you do not control and it is preventing you from leaving, it is a prison. The only difference is whether you can allow yourself and others to come and go and stop whatever or whomever you don’t want from coming in. If you can, it’s a shelter; if someone else prevents you from leaving but can come and go as they please, it’s a prison. If you lock yourself in and then prevent yourself from leaving (e.g., by throwing away the key), you now have created your own prison.
And that is the point of today’s post: who controls your lock? Do you choose who comes and goes into your house, room, or personal space? Are you free to come and go? Most people have some control: children have a room where they or their parents can come and go but no one else without their consent; adults have homes that no one but themselves and possibly landlords can come and go as they please (and, when you’re renting, there are contractual rules for when property owners and technicians can enter). For that to be true, however, there have to be billions of other areas where you are not allowed to come and go as you please—i.e., other people’s property—to afford others the same rights. People who have violated those rights are forced into areas where they are not allowed to come and go as they please: prisons.
But there are more ways to control your “lock”. You can take drugs, which both release you from the prison of your thoughts but also restrict your ability to fully function as a person—a seemingly paradoxical freeing and imprisoning act. You can (literally) lock yourself in a room and turn off your phone to get work done. You can (figuratively) lock yourself away from negativity by staying off social media and focusing on constructive projects. You can give your “key” to someone else by, say, giving someone $500 of your money and telling them to give it away if you don’t commit to a habit, a plan, or a promise. So you can shelter yourself from harmful things in your life physically and psychologically, and you also imprison yourself with thoughts and actions that constrain you in ways that could be helpful but could also prevent you from reaching your full potential.
So your goal in life regarding optimizing your freedom and safety is to decide how much freedom you need to maximize your growth and how much safety you need to protect yourself from harm. To do so, you need to look at it from the other side: at which point can you not be responsible with your freedom and need to constrain yourself…and at which point will too much safety make you too fragile, stunted, and incapable. Additionally, you have to make sure that you are respectful of others’ freedom and safety—if you put a lock on your door, you are still enabling others’ freedom to do anything as long as it doesn’t violate your property rights, but if you put a lock on their door, you are now restricting their freedom or oppressing them.
This works for all controls you put into place: if you take someone’s money for your benefit, stop them from being able to defend their property, or make it illegal to behave in certain ways on their property without hurting anyone else. Yes, you might decide that certain behaviors are universally harmful and make them illegal or that everyone should have a certain amount of income taken to fund societal foundations, but all decisions of that nature walk the line between being able to justify them as being fair or for overall freedom and safety and being able to rationalize oppressive rules because they benefit you.
Finally, don’t forget about your own prison of belief: if you think that something is impossible for you when it is really not, then you are putting yourself in a prison that you’ll never escape. Yes, there are things that are physically impossible and so you shouldn’t jump off a cliff hoping to fly by flapping your arms, but there are safe ways to test your hypotheses and make sure that you are not unnecessarily restraining yourself when you could be doing what you really want to do in life if you would’ve just tried.
And that’s the takeaway from this post: who controls your lock? Are you living in a shelter or a prison? Are you sheltering or imprisoning others? Which areas of your life are too safe or too risky? Where are you not responsible enough to have the freedom you do? Where are you not safe enough to focus on growth? Where are you holding yourself back from success? Figure that out, and you’ll eliminate a lot of the roadblocks to a happy, fulfilling life.