Freedom learned from Zorba: a life of making choices rather than finding answers

Zorba is a free man. In Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel *Zorba the Greek*, the narrator, “I,” admires Zorba and hires him to manage a lignite mine.

At first, Zorba seemed like someone who simply lived as he pleased. In the early part of the novel, he even came across as a man who claimed, “I am free,” despite lacking any real ability. That made me wonder whether freedom can truly be called freedom only when the source of one’s choices comes from within, rather than from deprivation or external motives.

As I continued reading, however, I realized that the moment when I truly felt Zorba was free was a different one. It was the scene in which Zorba squanders the large sum of money that the narrator had entrusted to him for the cable car project, yet does not hide or run away. Instead, he sends a letter and eventually returns.

Zorba lives as he pleases, but he does not run away from the work entrusted to him. He uses every means available to him to make the project succeed, and he takes responsibility for the outcome. He has the ability to lead the workers at the lignite mine, and he ultimately proves to his employer, the narrator, that he is someone the narrator needs. He is a person who possesses ability, responsibility, and trustworthiness alongside his freedom.

By contrast, the narrator in the novel is someone who has followed a conventional educational path and learned most of the world through books. Watching him led me to ask myself a number of questions as well.

Am I truly free?

Are the choices I am making now really choices I have made for myself?

Or am I being driven by fear?

Did I make these choices because of some sense of lack?

Did I make them because I was afraid of other people’s opinions or external pressure?

In the end, my answer was that life has no predetermined right answer. I felt that life is not so much about finding the correct answer as it is about turning the choices I make into the right answers.

I, too, have admired freedom and have tried, whenever possible, to make autonomous choices about my life. I have even sought out environments in which I could choose freely. But when I think about it, the compulsion that “I must be free” may itself have become a framework that restricted my freedom.

Freedom also comes with a corresponding responsibility. As I read the book, I felt that becoming truly free requires more than simply refusing to listen to other people. It means being able to accept the consequences of my choices and having the courage not to run away from myself because of failure or guilt.

This led me to even larger questions. Who created the things I learned at school and came to regard as self-evident? Who created the life paths that people generally describe as the “right answers”? Could education and mass media be systems designed to efficiently produce the kinds of people society needs? Could the paths to success and the values I have taken for granted all this time simply be “correct answers” within an order created by someone else?

At the same time, I had once thought that a certain degree of power was necessary in order to be free. But the power I mean here is not simply money or fame. It is closer to the power to create an environment in which I can laugh and joke freely, and the power to define my own answers rather than merely follow the answers created by others.

Yet Zorba is somewhat different from this as well. He is not someone who first creates a system that works in his favor and then becomes free. Even within a society filled with external pressure, he refuses to submit and simply lives as he wishes. What makes this possible seems to be courage: the courage to be honest with himself and not run away from his choices or mistakes.

One of the things I liked most about the book was that Zorba was not someone who set out from the beginning to search for “what he truly loved.” He simply took on different kinds of work, went to different places, met people, failed, and moved on to something else. Through that process, he seemed to have gradually built a life of his own and discovered what he loved.

I think I had always believed that I first had to find the thing I would love perfectly. But perhaps it is through going to unfamiliar places at random, entering uncomfortable territory, and trying things I never expected to do that I come to understand what kind of person I am.

Dreams and the things we love do not exist somewhere in a finished form waiting to be discovered. They seem more like traces that emerge as we live.

The things we ultimately need along that journey, I think, are ability, the confidence that we can choose, a sense of responsibility, and freedom.