Freedom Inside the Edges: How to Build a Life That Holds You

What if freedom isn’t the absence of limits, but the presence of form?

In this episode of The Scenic Route, Jen explores the paradox of constraints – why the boundaries we resist might be the very thing that saves us. Drawing on the work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and his idea of liquid modernity, she unpacks how modern life’s obsession with flexibility and endless options has left so many of us overwhelmed, exhausted, and floating without structure.

You’ll hear:

• Why too much freedom can make us feel lost instead of liberated
• What Bauman meant by “liquid modernity”, and how it shapes our daily anxiety
• How chosen limits can create space for creativity, rest, and meaning
• Why personal boundaries matter and why collective ones matter even more

This isn’t a call to hustle smarter or embrace toxic gratitude. It’s a quiet rebellion against a system that asks you to be endlessly available and endlessly improving. Jen invites you to build a life – and a world – solid enough to hold you.

• Survival is individual. Transformation is shared.
• They drained the public pool and sold you swimming lessons. 
• The goalposts keep moving; nothing ever feels complete.
• You don’t need to fix yourself; you need structures that hold you.

If you’ve been feeling like you’re always treading water, this episode is your permission to stop swimming and start building your boat.

🎙️ The Scenic Route is a podcast for tired minds seeking depth over speed.

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Visit jenniferwalter.me – your cosy corner where recovering perfectionists, misfits, and those done pretending to be fine find space to breathe, dream, and create real change."

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome & The Paradox of Constraints
• 2:30 Liquid Modernity: Why We Feel Adrift
• 8:10 Freedom’s Cost: Risk Pushed Onto Individuals
• 13:20 Longing for Edges: Redefining “Enough”
• 17:40 Chosen Limits as Creative Containers
• 22:00 Personal Boundaries Without Blame
• 26:20 From Self-Help to Solidarity

Transcript

Jennifer Walter: 0:00

You're not a feeling when you look at your calendar and there's barely breathing room between obligations. Oh, and like that gap between school drop-off and your first meeting, it just feels daunting and less like an opportunity and more like a trap. Yes, babes. Me too. Me too. So that's why welcome back to another episode of a Cindy Ground Podcast. The podcast for those of us who are too tired for quick fixes and yet too curious to stop asking why. Why are we doing the things we do? I'm your host Jen, and today we're talking about something that might sound counterintuitive. The paradox of constraints. There's a different way to think about mental health, and it starts with slowing down. Sometimes the longest way around is the shortest way home. And that's exactly where we're taking the scenic crowd. Hi, I'm Jennifer Walter, host of the Scenic Rad Podcast. Think of me as your sociologist, sister in arms, and rebel with many cultures. Together, we're blending critical thinking with compassion, mental health with a dash of rebellion, and personal healing with collective change. We're trading perfectionism for possibility and toxic positivity for messy growth. Each week, we're exploring the path to better mental health and social transformation. And yes, by the way, pretty crystals are totally optional. You ready to take the scenic route? Let's walk this path together. So, for the longest time, I thought freedom meant white open spaces, and I partially blame the chicks for that. Like that space of no deadlines, no demands, no noise, just vast expansiveness. The kind of life where I could finally do all the things I keep saying I'll do when I have the time. So I kind of I have been learning slowly and always sometimes very reluctantly, that freedom also can live inside the edges, inside that morning between school drop-off and the first meeting, inside that one hour that isn't enough to change the world, but it might be enough to change how I meet it. So now before you think we're going to go into some toxic positivity crap, um no. Yes, babes, be grateful, but stay with me. Because we're exploring today, what we're exploring isn't about pretending constraints feel good. I mean, they might, if you're into BDSMs, then fair play to you. But a lot of the times these constraints make us actually feel very shitty. So it's about understanding something that changes how we approach that. Like that this very structure we think is suffocating us. And for a lot of us, it's a structure we also build intentionally or unintentionally ourselves. It might also be a thing that helps us, that saves us. And that's the paradox of constraints. The idea that limits, the right kind of limits, are actually help us. But before we can understand how constraints could possibly help us, we first need to understand why we're drowning in the first place. So we're not keep on repeating the same, the same shit. We want to do things different here. So why does it feel this way? Why does having more options, more flexibility, more freedom just feel so fucking exhausting? Do you understand that? I always go back to one of my favorite guys, sociologist called Sigmund Bauman. And he has this um concept of liquid modernity. So here's what he saw, right? Everything solid has melted. All the solid structures that used to hold our lives, stable careers, career paths. You knew when I do this, I will get promoted, rooted communities, clear roles, right? And all those have liquid liquefied into flows. And we're told this is freedom, flexibility, options, reinvention. But Bauman understood something very crucial. When everything is liquid, some of us don't float, some of us drown. And now this is the this matters because I don't want to come any of you nostalgia peeps come in here. The story of solid modernity wasn't golden. For many, those solid structures, solid role definitions, and so on, were cages. They were stable for only some, and that's usually white strides as gender able-bodied men. For everyone else, that solidity was exclusion. And when those rigid structures cracked, for many people that wasn't a loss in the moment. It was liberation. The liquid that exhausts some has created mobility for others. It's allowed women to live beyond domesticity or can return back to that if they want to. You're welcome, trap wives, queer and trans people to exist visibly and marginalized communities to escape hierarchies that's difficult. Granted, that's not it's not everywhere the same on our beautiful planet. And we're also forces who are working very, very actively and openly on solidifying the liquidity again. That's another conversation. So here's so we're drowning as well because we're holding the tension. We hold tension, right? Liquid modernity is exhausting, and it also created possibilities for liberation that solid modernity denied. And the question is never should we go back? There is no back worth returning to. Okay, the question becomes: how do we build new structures that provide stability without reinstating oppression? Because here's what's true for us all. When every risk is privatized, when there's no collective support, eventually every one of us will drown. Just some drown first and some tread water for longer. So the answer isn't nostalgia, it's construction. Something solid enough to hold us, flexible enough to include everyone, and collective enough that we're not all drowning alone. So what does liquidified modernity feel like? Just kind of give you two examples, right? One is like you're not just man, you're not just working anymore, right? You're not just managing a job, you're managing your whole brand, right? When you like on the way, uh on your commute, you update your LinkedIn profile, your network, your personal growth, right? It all seems endless. And most and for a lot of us, your employer won't invest in training you or promise you'll have a job next year, so you kind of like have to figure it out on your own. And it's not just about raising kids anymore, right? We're curating their experiences for better or for worse, and we're optimizing outcomes. And because a lot of schools are underfunded, college is very expensive in some parts of the world, and the social safety net our parents relied on has been shredded. We're we're like really in the trenches here. We want the best for our kids, but I feel it has become endlessly more complicated than when my parents raised me. And you're you're also not just maintaining a home. You never really were, but it has gotten even more complicated, right? Just like the endless consumer choices. What hoover, which yogurt, what cleaning products? Should it be antibacterial? Because that's good, then it's at least gem-free, which is good because I don't have the time to clean anyway, so I can at least say it's gem free. Like it's germs free. Um it's and not to mention, we have a whole social media feed that's curated to tell us we're like shit at cleaning, shit at whatever. And all the while, the institutions that once absorbed uncertainty, they they outsource it to you. Companies drop job security but demand agility from their workforce. Governments cut safety nets but preach entrepreneurship and make like American dream, make it on your own. Communities are dissolved, and now connection itself requires scheduling and a lot of emotional labor. Even more emotional labor. And here's the key thing: the risk didn't disappear, it just moved. It changed sides, if you will. So, what do I mean by risk? Risk is always the question: who pays when things go wrong? When the economy crashes, who loses their job? When a company restructures, who loses their pension? When you get sick, who goes bankrupt from medical bills? When rent goes up, who has to move or go hungry? When your car breaks down, who can't get to work and loses income? That's risk. It's a cost of uncertainty, the burden of things going wrong. And in our system, in our society, in capitalism, someone always carries that burden. Back in the days, it used to be that companies kept cash reserves for downtowns so they could keep paying workers during slow periods. Governments maintained robust safety nets so people didn't become homeless when they lost a job. Employers offered stable jobs with pensions, so you've earned one layout away from poverty. The risk was kind of like spread around different institutions, shared caution, right? And then corporations and the wealthy decided, nah, we don't want to carry that risk anymore. So they redesigned the system to push it all downwards onto you. So when corporations fail, they get bailouts. Right? We saw that in 28 when banks gambled with mortgages, crashed the economy, blah, blah, blah, and walked away with taxpayers' money. The taxpayer never walks away with the profits. We saw it in 2020 when airlines spent years buying stocks instead of saving for emergencies and then got billions in rescue funds while laying off workers anyway. But executives tank companies, they get a freaking golden parachute for doing so. And like we have numerous cases around the world where we see that happening. But when you struggle, I don't know, you might be lucky to get a webinar on resilience. You get told to build an emergency fund while living paycheck to paycheck. You get advice to invest in yourself when you're already working two jobs. And you get LinkedIn influencer selling you courses and productivity and shit and whatnot. And when what you actually need is affordable health care and rent control, right? Like none of these things are bad things. Resilience is good, an emergency fund is good. Investing in yourself is solid. Right? Because here's the con. They privatized, they privatize profits and socialize the risk. So they made the risk ours to carry and the rewards for them to keep. And this whole arrangement was put was packaged and put a bow on it and labeled freedom. The freedom of flexibility was never for your benefit, really, for theirs more. When work can happen anywhere, it happens everywhere. When optimization is infinite, rest becomes really hard, almost impossible. So when you feel you're failing, you're not failing. The system is failing you. You're actually doing the impossible, you're holding together a life that used to require an entire village, a stable employer, a functional social safety net, and so on to work. So when we talk about constraints today, here it goes first. The problem isn't that you're bad at handling freedom or like that you're too immature to handle freedom. The problem is that unlimited freedom is in this system is a lie that keeps you endlessly producing, endlessly available, endlessly inadequate. And then, of course, sells you shit so you feel less of all less inadequate. And the solution isn't returning to rigid past. As I said before, that's not the solution. We have to build new forms of stability together in co-creation. Bottom up. So if we're all drowning in this liquid system, what do we do about it? Let's also start. We had one foundation, kind of like what is it? And now let's look at what we lost. We don't even have language anymore for enough. In in solid modernity, there were edges. You worked your shift, you stopped, you got it went home. You did a job adequately, that was sufficient, you got promoted. The things you did had some sort of closure. We don't need to resurrect the hierarchies of the past. We need new kinds of solidity, care, fairness, collective responsibility. What we're really longing for isn't control, it's more containment, not rigid rules, trustworthy structures instead. Stability without the suffocation part. Because right now, at least for me, hardly anything ever feels finished. Parenting, career, self-improvement, it's all open-ended. And there's a beauty in that. But also like a shadow part. The goalposts keep moving. There's no arrival, it feels just maintenance all the time. And you it feels like you're not really working towards something anymore because the goalposts always keep like moving away from you. So you're just kind of working, grinding, hustling. And we've really internalized that liquidity. Like, no one needs to monitor us. We're really fucking good at monitoring ourselves. Right? Our our bosses don't really have to watch us. Our own anxiety does the check. Um, so Bowman also has like a word or like a theme for this. It's called the privatization of ambulance. So what he means is that the contradiction of modern life, work-life balance, success versus authenticity, independence versus connection used to be negotiated collectively through shared norms and institutions. And now they live inside us. And society's conflicts have moved inside us and became our own stress, our private stress. Right? So we have to be productive but present, be independent but connected, be successful but authentic. Like that feels very much like the Barbie monologue, right? Um, so when you can't hold all that at once, you don't blame the system, you blame yourself. And again, exhaustion isn't personal failure, it's a perfectly reasonable response to a really messed up situation. So what if we look at the strange genius of limits? So, what if the answer isn't more freedom, but chosen limits, chosen constraints? Because here's the paradox limits create the conditions for creativity. Think about it, creativity doesn't often doesn't emerge in the absence of boundaries. It emerges, it thrives, it flows in response to them. Great artists, inventors, or thinkers have faced a set of constraints over and over again. Times, material, form, budget, failure. Right? A composer only has 12 notes. It's always the same fucking 12 notes. A filmmaker has, I don't know, 90 minutes, 120 minutes to tell a story. Uh the haiku, it's 17 syllables, five, seven, five. That's all you get. You have to work within these constraints. And again, here's the importance the difference between seeing it as a constraint, like a burden or a chance. It's the difference between the limit you choose and the kind that's imposed on you. Some limits refine creativity, others exploit vulnerability. The trick is learning which ones deserve your discipline, which ones deserve your defiance. When you have infinite options, nothing has weight. The constraints become the container that shape, the shape that gives life form. So, what if choosing constraints in a world that demands endless liquid is an act of resistance? Saying this is enough becomes radical. Because capitalism needs you to be boundaryless, always producing, always consuming, always optimizing. When you build your container, you refuse to be liquid. You claim edges as sovereignty, you show agency. That bolt or that vessel you build out of constraints, that thing will keep you fucking afloat. So the time you wish you had more of, the energy that never feels enough, the smallness of your window of rest, that teeny tiny time bucket between school drop-offs and meetings. What if these aren't obstacles to your life, but the medium of it? So every artist works within material limits. The painter has a canvas edge, the sculptor has a grain of stone. The edge makes the work possible. So what if your edges, granted, some chosen, some might imposed for a period of time, are what give your life form and to really switch it to seeing the beauty of that? Maybe the narrow space between obligations isn't a trap. But it's a curated space. Maybe limited energy is what teaches you what matters. When you stop asking, what could I do if things were different? and start asking what becomes possible because things are exactly as they are. Something shifts. You shift brutal honesty shifts us back to the present mode. It removes us from the past and pulls us back from the future. So if liquid modernity is making you feel overwhelmed, the answer is to become intentionally solid again, to create boundaries, to set limits. And that can look any way you want. Maybe you stop checking emails after 7 p.m. Not because not because you've earned rest, but because the boundary that's a boundary. Maybe you pick three priorities for next year, not 17. Or one project instead of two or three, or I don't know how many people, how many projects you're doing people. Um perhaps you can stop saying, Oh, I should do it all, and start saying this is what's possible and it's enough. And really be brutally honest with yourself what is possible in this moment in time for you, and that might be way less than you would like. I don't know, your ego would like, your partner would like, whatever. Because what liquid life kind of stole from us is the right to be finished to not be constantly improving maintenance mode. The constraints is really isn't your prison in that sense. But it's more of if we're like, oh we don't have any any limits, no limits, no edges. That's more that's more becoming more of an issue for a lot of us. So if we stop here, we risk turning all this into another self-hab story, right? Fix yourself to survive a broken system. And Bauman, as all sociologists, basically would call bullshit immediately, right? Yes, you need to be well, but we also need to fix a broken system because you're not drowning because you can't swim, you're drowning because they drained a public pool and sold you swimming lessons. So, yes, like find freedom in your edges, but also rage against the constraints that shouldn't exist in the first place. And again, sociologists were never arguing for private self-management, especially that when he would rather be calling for solidarity, collective structures, institutions that hold what individuals shouldn't have to. In solid modernity, job security exists because of unions and laws. Time off existed because, again, union laws, work limits. Childcare support was provided by communities, public systems, institutions. Those were collective containers. They worked, they were relied upon. And in a lot of cases, liquid malarity melded them, and with it, the solidarity. Every problem you were facing became a personal failing. But here's what we actually need, right? We need functioning social safety nets, we need labor protections, we need housing as right, not a commodity, we need health care that doesn't bankrupt us, we need child care, doesn't cost more than rent. So, yes, choose your boundaries, but remember personal containers are survival, not a solution. The real work is building collective ones. That looks like care workers unionizing, neighbors forming childcare co-ops, tenants organizing for housing, corporatives reclaiming digital labors, whatever. It looks like showing up for the boarding meetings, the mutual aid projects, the strikes, the policy fights. It looks like showing up running for a local council running for local council, whatever. Yes, it's more work up front. But if you build containers that hold you, you can also build containers that hold everyone, and not just those those who can trade water for longer. So we need both. You need both, you and I need both. We deserve both personal practice and structural change. So do your tiny revolution, make the coffee slowly, say no, build your small boat, and also demand the public pullback. Become solid alone is survival. We want transformation, becoming solid together. And maybe this life with its with its constraints, its fatigue, its narrow edges, narrow edges is a real one. This moment is enough. You're enough. And the conditions that make it so hard, they're not. You can find beauty in your limits and fight to change them. Work with what's there, but organize for a brigger canvas. It's not and or both things coexist. And freedom isn't the absence of constraints. Freedom is the refusal to let those constraints remain invisible, unnamed, and therefore unchallengeable. And maybe the really the whole revolution isn't about getting more, it's about becoming solid enough to say this is my form, these are my edges, and within these boundaries I create what matters to me. So I feel this was a lot of me talking from my digital balcony to the people. If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who needs permission to stop hustling and grinding and swimming and start kind of like building their boat for themselves and for the collective. And I see you all next week on Cindy Grab Podcasts. Take care. And just kind of like remember, rage is also a very violent emotion. And I'd always be curious what is telling what is what is it telling me. Until next week. Love you all. Bye. And just like that, we've reached the end of another journey together on the scenic group podcast. Thank you for spending time with us. Curious for more stories or in search of the resources mentioned in today's episode? Visit us at scenegroup podcast.com for everything you need. And if you're ready to embrace your scenic group, I've got something special for you. Step off the beaten path with my scenic group affirmation card deck. It's crafted for those moments when you're seeking courage, yearning to trust your inner boy, and eager to carve out a path authentically, unmistakably yours. Your Skinic Group affirmation day. I'd let it support you. Excited about where your journey might be? I certainly am. Remember, the Smyrt is not just about the destination, but the experiences, learnings, and joy we discover along the way. Thank you for being here, and I look forward to seeing you on the city group.