What’s emerging here isn’t just an admission of failure; rather, it’s the problem of getting exactly what you want. In the reframing of his experiences, Augustine comes to a radically different way of thinking about freedom. When you’ve been eaten up by your own freedom, and realize the loss of guardrails only meant ending up in the ditch, you start to wonder whether freedom is all it’s cracked up to be—or whether freedom might be something other than the absence of constraint and the multiplication of options.
