Psychology
Freedom Is Wasted on the Free: Lessons in Living Fully
Losing freedom provides clarity that can help free people live more deliberately.
Posted May 15, 2025 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- It’s easy to take freedom for granted." Cheng Lei learned to appreciate freedom in a Chinese prison.
- When we’re free, we have so many options that we can suffer from decision fatigue.
- Social expectations, a focus on the material, and even unfulfilling relationships can make us feel less free.
- When people lose their freedom, they recognize the value of showing love, experiencing life, and taking risks.
It’s easy to take freedom for granted until it’s stripped away. For Australian journalist Cheng Lei, three years in a Chinese prison redefined what it means to be free.
At the 2025 TED conference, Lei shared her harrowing account of detention under China’s opaque legal system. Lei was the well-known anchor of China's government-run, English-language Global Business TV show. One morning in 2020, after arriving at work, she was called into an office for a meeting. Waiting for her were officers from the notorious Ministry of State Security. Eventually, they blindfolded her and took her away. She disappeared from television, stolen from family and friends.
For more than three years, Lei was held in prison, much of it under “Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location” (RSDL), a form of detention known for its steep psychological toll. Lei told the TED audience that RSDL is "the Chinese spelling for hell.”
What It Means to Be Free
Freedom is like winning the lottery, Lei says. “It's easy to squander and hard to get your priorities right.” It’s hard to comprehend the “vastness or the preciousness” of freedom until you lose it. “Freedom is wasted on the free.”
In detention, where every movement required permission, she yearned for simple things like running, which she hated when she was free; speaking to people, although before her detention, she had tuned people out with ear buds; and learning, opportunities she had wasted before becoming a political prisoner. When she had virtually limitless options, she hadn't taken advantage of them.
Lei began to profoundly understand the experience psychologists call decision fatigue. Having so many options can lead to the inability to make decisions and a tendency not to take advantage of things we think will always be available. When we’re free, Lei said, we can be “paralyzed by choice.”
Life as a Death Sentence
Lei’s physical confinement also made her think about self-imposed limitations. Societal expectations and a focus on material possessions can constrain us, she discovered. And “relationships can be shackles, too.” The things that prevent us from feeling free, she realized, are often prisons of our own making.
Rejecting the pressure of external motivations, on the other hand, and making choices from a place of genuine freedom can foster greater mental well-being, personal growth, and relationship satisfaction.
Lei reported that she achieved a state of inner peace after enduring extreme pain, anxiety, and despair. In her darkest moments—blindfolded, handcuffed, isolated—she found solace in imagination and inner strength. “When we lose physical freedom, it's an opportunity to find freedom within.” She calls this a “BTFI serenity” (“Beyond The 'Fuck It'.")
The Power of Kindness
For a while, Lei shared a cell with someone she describes as “a terrible bully,” someone who made her life hell. One night, the cellmate was called for a midnight interrogation. “She was so scared,” Lei said. “She asked if she could hold my hand. I hugged her and comforted her.” Despite the cellmate's treatment of her, Lei offered kindness.
She greeted her guards with courtesy, too, even though they didn’t treat her well and they encouraged inmates to betray one another. And when inmates engaged in betrayals, Lei forgave them. “If I become vengeful and petty, then they’ve taken away more from me,” she explained.
Although she lacked even the freedom to use the toilet in private, Lei knew she had the freedom to choose to be kind in response to cruelty. “Once you realize that pain is the ultimate commonality, it can also give kindness as the universal gift.”
Lei viscerally discovered what holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl also learned: “The last of the human freedoms” he wrote, is “to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
A Call to Live Fully
Nobody in prison regrets not having enough money or material possessions, Lei says. “But we were kicking ourselves over the travel we didn't do, the love we didn't show, the risks we didn't take.”
Her story challenges us to ask ourselves: Are we confined by invisible walls of our own making? Or are we truly free?
“The maximum security prison,” she says, “is our mind.”
