How to Live and Breathe Underwater

Technologies of Freedom: Fight, Flight, Light

“And they also said it’s impossible for man to live and breathe underwater forever” – Jimi Hendrix, 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)

How Do We Live?

I’ve been thinking recently about how to get beyond critique. To open one’s eyes, to recognize the true nature of a thing, is just a beginning. It leaves us with something like the bodhisattva’s dilemma: if life is suffering, how do we live?

If you’ve read any of my more philosophical posts — and I admit there have been quite a few lately — you know that the French philosopher Michel Foucault is one of my touchstones. Foucault spent much of his life cataloguing the ways modern institutions — armies, prisons, schools, asylums, hospitals — inscribed power onto their subjects. This was a project of critique: showing how power inscribed itself on the body and the soul. Yet in the early 1980s, facing AIDS and mortality, Foucault turned from critique to practice: if power is everywhere, how do we live within it and still find freedom? He began to explore a different set of disciplines “technologies of the self”: practices of self-care and self-cultivation — exercises of reflection, discipline, and relationship — by which one transforms how one lives. They could not abolish power, but they carved out fragile spaces of freedom within it.

What are these technologies of the self, and how do we practice them under a system of power that shapes not only action but knowledge and thought? I propose a simple triad: fight, flight, and light. We resist, we evade, we create. These are not escapes from power but responses formed within it — adaptations through which freedom survives. These are the practices I want to explore in this post.

The Bargain

Capitalism is an efficient machine — efficient not at sustaining life, but at capturing value and turning it into currency. Land, labor, time, attention are drawn into its circuits, commodified and sold. We sell off freedom and purchase it back at a premium — as leisure, mobility, choice — available only at a price. The logic of the bargain is clear: accept power-over in exchange for power-to.

The system works as intended. Never before has humanity experienced such material abundance and, arguably, such freedom. But forgive us for not being satisfied with a bargain that trades freedoms at the surface for devastation at the root. The abundance it celebrates brings ecological catastrophe; its efficiencies drive inequality; its freedoms collapse into loneliness and precarity.

To name this plainly is necessary, but critique alone is not enough. If all we do is react, we remain yoked to the logic we oppose. To imagine an alternative, we must cultivate practices that adapt within the system while pointing beyond it. We must, in the words of Jimi Hendrix, learn to live and breathe underwater.

The form our socioeconomic system takes does not simply govern; it conditions us, teaching us what to value. Under neoliberal capitalism, productivity, efficiency, and measurability rise as supreme goods. The market is moralized even as morality is marketized. As Wendy Brown observes, every sphere of life is reframed through economic reason: education becomes “human capital,” health “personal responsibility,” even friendship a “network of exchange.” Efficiency, growth, and profit are elevated as virtues, while care, solidarity, and restraint are dismissed as weakness. Success is treated as virtue; failure as fault. In Byung-Chul Han’s words, the neoliberal subject “exploits itself” under the guise of freedom, mistaking compulsion for choice.

The invisible hand is a sleight of hand. The market does not simply measure value; it makes it — smuggling in its own morality while sweeping aside the rest.

A Revaluation of Values

To see through this sleight of hand is not enough. As Nietzsche urged, what is needed is a revaluation of values. Here freedom becomes central — not as an ultimate end, but as an instrument. Freedom is the condition for revaluation, the practice through which values are reimagined and renewed.

But freedom, like yin and yang, exists only in relation to power. It is both freedom from — domination, capture, coercion, abuse — and freedom to — create, care, imagine, live. Freedom is never a static possession but a dynamic practice in relation to power: fragile, contingent, never guaranteed.

Even in a hegemonic system of market values, life-affirming practices endure. People fall in love, care for children, cook, make art, walk in nature — even when commodified, something exceeds the market’s grasp: a surplus of meaning, joy, and connection that resists commodification.

That surplus keeps freedom alive. It endures not as possession but as practice — solidarity, care, imagination. These values persist not because the system sustains them, but because they are woven into human life. Life insists. From this ground, freedom can be cultivated and renewed.

Learning to Live and Breathe Underwater

We live within a field of power that surrounds us like water. It is not always visible, yet it shapes the conditions of survival. We must learn to live and breathe underwater: to adapt to pressure, guard against predators, and find ways to flourish.

To make the metaphor more personal: living under an oppressive system can feel like a child growing up in an unhappy home. The caregiver may provide food, clothing, and shelter — you depend on them for survival — but in return they demand obedience. Beyond necessities, the child depends on the caregiver for approval, affection, and acknowledgment to sustain self-worth. Yet in a domineering, volatile, or precarious home, that dependence yields disempowerment, neglect, even abuse. Approval is conditional, moods unpredictable, and the child craves the security and nourishment that are denied and cannot be found alone.

The child anticipates the parent’s moods, measures herself by their standards, repeats their patterns. Their power is no longer external; it has been internalized. This is how domination reproduces itself: not only through rules and punishments, but through the quiet shaping of desires and anxieties.

Living within a system of power is much the same. The state, the market, the workplace provide survival — food, jobs, health care, infrastructure — and also recognition: status, achievement, belonging. But recognition is conditional, always tied to the system’s values. Work is rewarded when profitable; speech when marketable; worth when efficient or visible. Over time we reproduce the system’s logic, measuring ourselves by standards we did not choose — because imagining otherwise would mean confronting what we have become.

And yet even in such households and such systems, the self does not wholly disappear. Adaptive strategies emerge to preserve integrity and open space for growth. Some fight, refusing the parent’s terms, contesting rules, demanding dignity. Some flee, seeking refuge — a secret garden, a circle of friends, a room of one’s own. Some bring light, insisting on joy and creativity that exceed the parent’s grasp — laughter at the table, songs sung in secret, the stubborn joy of play.

Fight, Flight, Light

These strategies do not abolish dependence, but they loosen its grip. They keep alive a self not exhausted by recognition, a freedom not entirely bound to survival. In this space, autonomy, solidarity, and self-actualization can take root. Against and within a system that disciplines by binding, we develop ways to move, resist, and endure. They can be named simply: fight, flight, and light.

These are not instincts but disciplines — what Foucault called “technologies of the self,” the daily practices by which we shape how we live. Yet not all such practices are liberating; many reproduce the very logics of efficiency and control they appear to resist. Fight, flight, and light matter because they are technologies of freedom — carving out spaces where domination loosens and other values can endure.

Fight

Fight resists domination head-on. It refuses the terms by which the system defines value. A strike, a march, a lawsuit for rights — all are acts of fight. They confront not only injustice but the cheapening of life and labor itself. Marx saw how labor was reduced to wage; fight insists that labor carries dignity beyond price. Fight organizes, interrupts, insists. It refuses, protects, speaks up. Its strength is courage and clarity: naming exploitation and demanding recognition of what the market denies — care, solidarity, dignity. These are warrior strategies, rebel strategies: they insist that other values be seen and heard.

Flight

Flight slips away. It refuses to be priced, cultivating opacity instead of exposure. A self-reliant community, a monk’s silence, a family garden — these are practices of flight. It is meditation, joy in nature, a pause from the frenzy of productivity. Romance without transaction, friendship without networking, mutual aid without exchange — all reduce dependence on the system and grow other desires. These are fugitive strategies. Flight preserves spaces where other values can endure.

Light

Light radiates abundance. It creates value too diffuse to be captured. A neighborhood festival, a song in prison, a meal shared in scarcity — these are practices of light. Songs, rituals, laughter, love: they generate meaning and solidarity beyond economic measure. These are strategies of joy, exuberance, overflow. Light does not refuse; it creates — the exuberant invention of new values.

Each strategy is partial, never exclusive. Together they form a core set of adaptive practices within the ecology of power and freedom. Fight confronts power. Flight evades it. Light exceeds it. In their interplay they are not only responses to domination but practices of revaluation — ways new values are disclosed and freedom kept alive.

The Miracle of Birth

These technologies of the self are ways of adapting to a system that seeks to contain us. Evolution shows that adaptation happens at the edges — in places of acute threat, where survival demands new strategies, and in islands of safety, where freedom allows wild experimentation. So too with freedom. Fight, flight, and light sharpen under pressure at the margins and flourish where predation is light. It is at these edges that the future of freedom is forged.

Like life itself, freedom is irrepressible. Even in the darkest hours it carries a spark. When the future is closed, imagination slips free of feasibility’s confines. If nothing can be achieved, then anything can be imagined. In impossibility lies the seed of the miraculous. This is how freedom renews itself and takes root.

These strategies are the technologies of freedom. Like technological innovation, the practices of fight, flight, and light are adaptive responses to a system that seeks capture. They arise at the margins — sheltered by protective environments or sharpened by threat. But unlike most technologies, their purpose is not to be take up by markets or scaled for profit. They resist capture; in this way they are emancipatory practices. If we marvel at technology’s ingenuity, we should marvel just as much at freedom’s: the song sung on the chain gang, the humor in the trenches, the community garden growing amidst a concrete jungle. These are the inventions by which life insists, freedom endures, and we learn — against all odds — to live and breathe underwater.