Freedom Day this year will bring home how much of it you have given up

Freedom is a slippery swine to catch hold of. We've been thinking about it since the Egyptians started writing in ancient emojis.

A few millennia later, George Orwell gave the whole musing-on-freedom thing a stab and declared that "freedom is slavery" in his book 1984. It was a reference to the notion propagated as part of the official slogan of the Party that the man who is independent is doomed to fail.

That quote is easy to take out of context. It sent a world only recently dewormed of fascism into paroxysms of self-satisfied intellectualism and faux deepness. Even today, our relative levels of freedom are still a favourite topic of conspiracy theorists who enjoy spouting off about how governments are using TikTok dances to hack our brains and turn us into mindless drones.

For those of us whose recent ancestry is a little more tinted, the idea of freedom is less philosophical and more a part of our tangible reality. Depending on which part of the world you were in, being darker skinned meant that your legal freedom of movement was, in some cases, delivered only a few years before the original Aladdin movie was released.

As a result, writers like Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko and Malcolm X had more militant musings on freedom than someone like Orwell.

Whichever way you slice it, though, this year Freedom Day will come and go with most of us not experiencing the kind of freedom we're accustomed to. The reasons are different from what Orwell pondered or Biko wrote about, but in practice, only a select few of us will be allowed the basics of what we call freedom.

Sure, we have freedom of thought, expression and religion still intact, but our freedom of movement, of association and of peaceful assembly, all universally recognised human rights are, at this moment seriously being curtailed.

I'd like to insert a clever quote from some highfalutin thinker here. Something about how your freedom to swing a fist is curtailed by the beginning of someone else's nose. Or better yet, something about structural inequality and how there are different levels of freedom available to greater and lesser status levels in society, but we all understand by now that most people think freedom means being able to do whatever you want. Therein lies the first contradiction in what it means to be yokeless: freedom doesn't really exist.

In its broadest sense freedom is as real as an entertaining slam poet or a rapping unicorn. We always have and always will live under certain constraints.

Capitalism, parents, racism, sexism, living on a round planet, living on a flat Earth, religion. everything in our lives is designed to work against our complete freedom.

But that's a good thing. On the surface of it, the ideas of Russian revolutionary, anarchist and founder of collectivist anarchism Mikhail Bakunin sound wonderfully liberating.

He said that real freedom was possible only when economic and social equality existed: "No man can achieve his own emancipation without at the same time working for the emancipation of all men around him. My freedom is the freedom of all since I am not truly free in thought and in fact, except when my freedom and my rights are confirmed and approved in the freedom and rights of all men who are my equals."

But then you remember that, as a group, people are insane.

Imagine we could all self-determine and that your neighbours decided that the best way to do that would be to host daily sacrifices to Vlad the Impaler. The noise alone would be horrendous.

Nope, too much freedom - like too much money - is not good for anyone. In fact the modern relationship between money and independence is the perfect vehicle for some moralising on the evils of both. We're all acutely aware of how rich people can be awful humans.

They have the luxury of money that makes it possible to do just about anything they want because, unshackled from an existence where the price of petrol means anything , the world becomes a giant brothel where your whims are only a transaction away.

No-one should be free or rich enough to indulge all their whims because then you get creepy sex islands and Jeffrey Epstein has to "commit suicide". Having enough money to have to save up for some whims (not the pervy ones) is something everyone should be able to access. Anything more than that is greed.

So then what does freedom mean, especially during lockdown? To me it means whatever you want it to mean.

Freedom is like a clever quote someone tells you when they're trying to get into your pants. Its meaning changes depending on how you're feeling, how the quote is delivered and whether or not you can afford the cocktails needed to seal the deal.

Whether liberty exists is a question for philosophy students and marketers. The rest of us need to make sure that no one group has more of it than others because that leads to the Nazis or Hendrik Verwoerd & Co, and no-one wants to see that again.