This essay, "Living in the Absurd," by  Rodney King, PhD, explores the pervasive constraints on human freedom in the modern world, arguing that these limitations, from our unconsented arrival into existence to systemic pathologies, are often subtle and internalised.
 
King identifies several key areas of constraint:
 
The Unconsented Arrival: We are born into a world and systems we didn't choose, and childhood conditioning reinforces this lack of consent.
Education as Conditioning: The educational system functions to produce compliant workers and consumers rather than free-thinking individuals, teaching conformity and suppressing authentic development.
The Illusion of Choice: Modern society offers an abundance of trivial choices while severely restricting fundamental ones, creating a false sense of freedom in areas like career, politics, and leisure.
Artificial Boundaries: Human-imposed borders and citizenship create arbitrary divisions that dictate access to opportunity and freedom of movement, despite the planet's natural interconnectedness.
The Work Imperative: The necessity to work for survival is a pervasive constraint, transforming human beings into economic units and linking identity to productivity.
Surveillance and Control: Ubiquitous monitoring, often voluntarily embraced through technology, creates a state of perpetual visibility that encourages conformity and self-censorship.
Systemic Pathology: The Unseen Wound: Core assumptions of hyper-individualism, competition, and consumption in modern society lead to widespread psychological distress, which is often pathologized as individual failure rather than a systemic issue.
 
Despite this "darkness," King suggests that "light" emerges through conscious engagement and resistance. This light is found in:
 
Creative Defiance: Reclaiming the capacity to determine what matters independently of institutional validation and societal metrics.
Authentic Connection: Cultivating relationships based on genuine presence and vulnerability, counteracting the isolation fostered by performative social environments.
Embodied Presence: Returning to direct corporeal experience as a source of knowledge and meaning, challenging the mind-body dualism prevalent in modern institutions.
Conscious Participation: Operating within existing systems with deliberate awareness, discerning when to comply and when to resist, and contributing to gradual transformation.
Transcendent Purpose: Discovering or creating meaning that exists beyond institutional definitions of value and success, orienting life around intrinsic rather than extrinsic worth.
 
Ultimately, King argues that living in the absurd is not about escaping these constraints, but about consciously navigating them with dignity, finding meaning, and embracing small, often invisible, acts of defiance and connection. He concludes that true freedom lies not in the absence of limitation, but in a transformed relationship to it, a continuous choice to engage with constraint as a context for meaning.