Freedom is most often imagined as the multiplication of choices: the ability to say yes here, no there. To refuse the bad, select the good, chart one’s own course.
In much of the digital nomad discourse, the most desirable form of freedom is often portrayed as total location independence, financial independence, the suggestion of being beholden to no one (although in practice most digital nomads remain tethered to geographies, employers or clients, platforms, or even relationships, among other things).
But what if this version of freedom is itself a trap—a neoliberal reflex masquerading as liberation?
What if freedom is not about multiplying choices at all, but about reframing our relation to dependence itself?
The illusion of choice
Under late capitalism, choice is fetishized. Markets, apps, and platforms offer the appearance of boundless autonomy: you can book a flight to anywhere, choose your subscription tier, “vote with your wallet.” But the scope of these choices is always already constrained by systems—passports, payment infrastructures, the fluctuating price of jet fuel, the bandwidth of undersea cables. Nomadism intensifies this illusion: the curated abundance of “anywhere” is still tethered to the deep architectures of states, markets, and infrastructures that make such movement possible. Freedom-as-choice doesn’t escape dependence; it only hides who we depend on.
This is why digital nomad discourse is saturated with strategies of insulation: FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), the gospel of entrepreneurship, the cult of the side hustle, the dream of passive income. Books like The 4-Hour Work Week or endless threads on solopreneurship rehearse the same refrain: minimize reliance on unreliable institutions, sever ties with broken systems, and live life beholden to no one. These are understandable desires. Who doesn’t want freedom from exploitative employers, unstable economies, or failing governments? But what’s striking is how rarely the conversation shifts from eliminating dependency to constructing new forms of dependable interdependence.
Beyond reducing dependency
What if freedom lies not in eliminating dependency, but in choosing who and what to depend on? Freedom in this sense becomes less about self-sufficiency, and more about entrustment: placing confidence in communities, collectives, or alternative institutions that hold us differently than the state or the market. The act of entrustment shifts the axis from suspicion and isolation toward confidence and interdependence. It reimagines freedom as a conscious yielding, a willingness to be held.
This is not to suggest a singular system that could or should hold everyone well. Quite the opposite. The radical potential lies in cultivating a plurality of systems, each partial, provisional, situated. Some may be small and intimate—a circle of friends, an intentional community, a cooperative. Others may be infrastructural—a collectively governed network, a local food ecology, a seasonal rhythm. None need to scale universally. They need only to work for those who compose them. Freedom is not insulation from institutions, but participation in building ones worth inhabiting.
Many frames of entrustment
Entrustment can take social and cultural forms. It might mean entrusting decision-making to a cooperative assembly rather than a platform’s algorithm. It might mean yielding to ancestral rhythms, seasonal calendars, or indigenous cosmologies. It might mean experimenting with new models of governance or shared ownership that circulate power horizontally rather than vertically. What unites these approaches is their difference from the exploitative systems that demand surrender but strip agency—platforms, states, and markets that profit from our compliance.
Entrustment, then, is not passive. It is not a blind surrender to whatever system is most powerful. It is an active, deliberate choice to participate in structures of care and reciprocity, and to allow them to guide you.
The discourse of insulation
It is easy to see why much of the digital nomad discourse leans toward financial independence, early retirement, or entrepreneurship. These are strategies to avoid dependency on broken systems. They allow one to feel a sense of control, to insulate oneself from failing states, extractive corporations, precarious job markets. These moves are not wrong. They are survival strategies in an age where institutions routinely betray trust.
But there is a misstep in framing freedom solely as the elimination of dependency. To be free is not to hover alone above broken systems. It is to help build, and then live inside, systems that hold us well. The part of the conversation that seems to be missing—and which feels most urgent—is how we might create systems we can actually depend on. The deeper radicalism lies not in insulation but in co-creation: seeking, designing, and inhabiting alternative institutions that can be entrusted with our lives. Freedom is not “I don’t need anyone.” Freedom is “I have chosen who and what I belong to.”
Prefigurative freedom
Intentional communities, coliving projects, and worker-owned cooperatives offer glimpses of this prefigurative freedom. They are not perfect, but they are laboratories of entrustment. An intentional community that experiments with shared ownership. A coliving house where meals, resources, and responsibilities are shared, reducing individual burden while amplifying collective capacity. A worker-owned cooperative where labor is not extracted but circulated back into the hands of those who create value.
Real-world examples abound: the global network of cohousing communities experimenting with collective governance; Mondragon in Spain, one of the largest worker-owned cooperatives in the world; digital co-ops like platform cooperatives that reimagine software and marketplaces as commons-owned infrastructure. These are not utopias—they are lived microcosms of a different possible order.
Their power lies in their refusal to wait for large-scale systemic change. They embody, however provisionally, the possibility of systems that can hold us differently. They remind us that entrustment need not be total or permanent to be real. It can begin small: a lending circle among friends, a community-supported agriculture project, a cooperative internet service. The scale matters less than the practice of reconfiguring dependency.
The paradox of dependence
Capitalist modernity teaches us to treat dependence as failure. To depend on wages is to live at the mercy of an employer’s whim, your livelihood contingent on the next paycheck. To depend on a landlord is to live without security of home, always vulnerable to the threat of eviction or rising rents. To depend on platforms is to surrender your visibility, your income, even your social connections to an opaque algorithm. To depend on the state is to gamble with institutions that can just as easily abandon you as protect you.
In this framing, independence is idealized as sovereignty—own your own house, generate your own income, be accountable to no one but yourself. But taken to its extreme, independence means having no relations at all: no infrastructures, no communities, no partners, no one to share a life with. A life without dependence is not free. It is barren.
And in truth, none of us are independent. Every day we rely on a web of relations, most of which we hardly notice. We depend on the engineers who maintain the bridges we cross, the flight crews who carry us safely across oceans, the farmers who coax sustenance from soil, the factory workers who stitch our clothing, the teachers who once taught us how to read. We depend on clean water flowing invisibly through pipes, on electricity we did not generate, on undersea cables we will never see but through which our words and affections move.
Even solitude is held by unseen dependencies—the book in your hand was bound by others, the silence you savor is preserved by laws, forests, or simply the labor of those who keep the world running while you rest. The fantasy of self-sufficiency survives only by concealing this everyday architecture of reliance.
The deeper question is not around the extent to which we depend, but on what we depend, with whom, and why.
Nowhere is this clearer than in intimacy. To have a family is to depend on the constancy of care across time. To have friends is to depend on their recognition of us beyond roles and accomplishments. To have a partner is to depend on their care, their listening, their willingness to hold us when we falter. To fall in love is perhaps the most radical dependence of all—a yielding of one’s solitude, a placing of one’s vulnerability in another’s hands. And yet it is precisely these dependencies that give life its richness, its texture. They are the conditions under which joy and meaning take root. Without them, what would we have?
And they are also the conditions of grief. We grieve because we depended—because we allowed ourselves to lean, to trust, to entwine our life with another’s. Loss hurts not in spite of dependence, but because of it. To sever a tie that mattered is to be torn from the very fabric that once gave us strength. Yet even here, dependence shows its worth. For to live without the possibility of grief would be to live without the possibility of love, of kinship, of belonging.
Toward a different horizon
Freedom, then, is not the multiplication of options. It is not the refusal of all dependence. It is the clarity to entrust oneself to systems of care and accountability, human and more-than-human. To be free is not to isolate, but to depend differently. To step into the paradox that the most radical autonomy may be found not in maximizing control, but in surrendering it—carefully and consciously, to systems that can hold us well.
