Total freedom is the enemy of creativity, and constraint its companion.
David Epstein, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better
Have you ever felt like you needed more constraints in your life?
Most of us would say no—the opposite, in fact. We spend a lot of time wishing we had fewer constraints: a better budget, a more compliant body, fewer demands on our attention and energy so we could do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it. More existential freedom seems equivalent to more creativity, more fun, more health and happiness. We want to throw off the shackles of responsibilities and requirements. We dream of the day when, unfettered, we can spend our time following our deepest interests and doing whatever strikes our fancy.
The longing for fewer constraints and greater existential freedom seems to be the one thing everyone today agrees on. It seems to be so self-evidently good that we pursue it without really considering whether it lives up to the hype. But as with everything in life—and particularly everything in philosophy—we need to examine the truth of this claim. And today we have just the book for the job: journalist David Epstein’s new work, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better.
Epstein makes the seemingly controversial and counterintuitive claim that in life, love, and work, we do better work when we have constraints. He marshals example after example of notable people who worked better because they faced constraints: Dmitri Mendeleev, creator of the periodic table of elements; Virginia Woolf, ground-breaking experimental author; Ed Catmull, cofounder of Pixar studios and pioneer in digital animation; and many others. Throughout the book Epstein basically demolishes the common trope that genius is born of limitless creativity, suggesting instead that the greatest creativity and productivity come from solving problems incrementally and within limits.
The basic idea is that, when allowed complete freedom, we have no toe-holds, nothing to grip onto, and we flail without direction or guidance. Perhaps the most arresting example of this, and one Epstein references throughout the book, is the now-defunct technology company called General Magic, which was once expected to revolutionize personal technology. As Epstein tells it, they had vast amounts of money and talent and were told they could do whatever they wanted. As a result, they did almost nothing and soon went out of business, having disappointed everyone. (However, many of their talented employees went on to other tech companies, where they applied the lessons they had learned from General Magic’s failures and eventually did produce interesting things.)
Epstein attributes this to basic human psychology. The brain only exerts effort when it has to, and if it’s allowed to be lazy, it will be lazy. But when we’re required to create new things with limited resources, our brains leap into action to find a way. He cites many examples of psychology studies that find increased creativity results from increased constraints. Here’s one:
As a prominent creativity study put it, given complete freedom, our very strong urge is to follow the “path of least resistance.” Specifically, we do only what we have done before, or follow the first example that jumps to mind. Our brains enjoy convenience, and that takes less cognitive effort. A related phenomenon is known as the Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the instinct of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available. “Without constraints,” as one creativity researcher eloquently put it, “composition takes place in a cul-de-sac of the customary.” In other words, when anything is possible, it becomes nearly impossible to do anything new. Complete freedom, paradoxically, leads to conformity. (pp. 57-58)
To me, this argument makes sense and aligns with my own experience. It’s quite scary looking into the yawning void of being able to do anything, because it’s hard to tell what exactly you should do. The choice is too difficult, so we shut down and don’t do much of anything. We don’t know where to begin, we don’t know what the next step will be, and we certainly don’t know what the finish line looks like.
Constraints and limitations give us all those things. They help us get started, give us something to work with, and point us in a direction. After that, our creativity and problem-solving abilities spring into action. Epstein cites creativity researcher Keith Sawyer, who notes that “specificity limits options but enhances creativity” (p. 65). We can more easily come up with ways to solve specific problems than we can come up with something from nothing.
Constraints are so necessary to creativity, in fact, that Epstein recommends making your own. Should you ever find yourself in a situation with few constraints, figure out how to set some for yourself. He provides examples of great artists who developed their genius through self-imposed constraints, including:
Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), who created his masterpieces of children’s literature by setting a limit for himself of 200 words per book.
Picasso and other cubists who “challenged themselves to depict a subject from multiple viewpoints at once…As Picasso put it: ‘Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can’t even imagine in advance’”(p. 74).
Zen artists who created masterpieces of understatement by imposing near-impossible word limits (in haiku), spare dialogue (in Noh theatre), and minimalist expectations for paintings and gardens.
J.S. Bach, who worked within a devilish set of musical constraints to produce some of the most technically innovative, beautiful, and enduring music known to mankind. Epstein tells us that
“A half century after Bach’s death, when a collection of his work was released, a prominent German composer and critic gave this review: “Perhaps the greatest example in any art form of a master’s ability to move with freedom and assurance, even in chains.” Or perhaps, at least in part, because of chains. “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self,” according to Igor Stravinsky. He finished second to Bach in the greatest-composer-ever poll. In his Poetics of Music, Stravinsky wrote at length about “the anguish into which an unrestricted freedom plunges” him: “I have no use for a theoretic freedom. Let me have something finite, definite…. My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.” (p. 64)
In fact, the more we hear artists and creators talking about their creative work, the more existentially important boundaries and constraints become. The “chains” in Bach’s creative process don’t seem incidental but rather essential to the process and the resulting musical masterpieces. He couldn’t have created his pieces without them.
I can’t help but see parallels between the demands of artistic production and the demanding process of personal development. Our lives unfold within a series of limitations—physical, relational, psychological—that confine us but also enable us to become who we are. We grow up in a particular environment, with a particular body, in a particular era, and with particular opportunities open or closed to us. Our constraints are legion. Therefore our task is to creatively develop ourselves within the framework of life’s constraints—to perfect the art of living. Everyone must do this, whether they want to or not. Doing it well requires recognizing the constraints and learning to flourish within them.
One of my favorite thinkers, the neuroscientist Kevin J. Mitchell, argues that “selfhood entails constraints: they are what selves are made of” (p. 246). Mitchell’s work hits hard against the view that complete personal freedom is necessary for free will. In his incredibly insightful book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (which I have previously written about here), he suggests not only that constraints make us who we are, but that our personhood would not even be possible without constraints:
To be free of such constraints would be to act randomly, pointlessly, on a whim, for no reason. You would, in fact, cease to be yourself; indeed, you would cease to be a self at all. Selfhood is defined by continuity through time—by maintaining a certain dynamic pattern of processes in the face of the thermodynamic pressure to take on any of the other, almost infinite sets of disordered arrangements those processes could adopt. Selfhood thus entails constraint. It is only constraint. The freedom to be you involves constraining the elements that make you up from becoming not you. (Mitchell, p. 278)
To critics who claim that free will doesn’t exist because all our actions depend on prior causes, Mitchell responds that we retain our agency—our ability to dynamically choose—despite the constraints imposed on us from without. Our constraints scaffold our choices but do not determine them. And this scaffolding is crucial for life:
A person with the kind of free will envisaged by some—completely free of the influence of any prior causes—could do whatever, but not whatever they want because they wouldn’t have any wants. They would have no reason to do anything in particular or anything at all, in fact. They would have no continuity as a person through time and would not really exist as a self at all. (Mitchell, p. 246)
David Epstein doesn’t approach the free will debate, but I think his insights in Inside the Box are still helpful in thinking about the practical realities of moral constraints. In the book’s final chapter Epstein dips a toe into these waters by noting that people seem to flourish when they have moral responsibilities and constraints, and that in recent decades the proliferation of choice and the removal of social constraints (e.g., unbreakable social obligations) has resulted in mass depression and unhappiness. We seem to long for greater freedom, more choice, and fewer obligations—and yet obligations are the very things that tie us to each other and to a sense of personal meaning in a confusing and chaotic world. A life devoid of social ties is a life untethered. Instead of experiencing a delightful sense of freedom, we experience meaninglessness and lack of purpose. We have nothing to give us a firm footing in the world.
The famous Harvard longevity study, which Epstein cites, found that men with the strongest social ties lived the happiest and longest lives. In interpreting this study, we often think in terms of the benefits of mutual support; people live longer when they have supportive relationships and communities. But Epstein switches focus from the support received by these men to the support given by them—in other words, to their social obligations. Having people who depend on you mitigates suicide risk in adults, as Emile Durkheim found over a century ago, and produces more well-adjusted and dependable kids.
Ultimately, we just have to accept constraints as part of the human condition. We don’t like them, yet we need them to flourish. Just like the gravity holding us to earth—which also shapes our bodies, strengthens our bones, and generally provides the physical context of our existence—constraints provides the necessary psychological context for our existence. That’s not to say we must retain every constraint, or that we can’t dynamically choose which ones to prioritize, or that we shouldn’t try to improve the nature of our constraints. We can improve them without rejecting them altogether.
The art of living, then, entails learning to see constraints not as chains but as scaffolding—not holding us back but propping us up and allowing us to work at a higher level. As Marcus Aurelius says, “A blazing fire appropriates in an instant all that is heaped on to it, and devours it, making use of that very material to leap even higher” (Meditations, 4.1).
Our physical and social constraints are the material that helps us leap even higher—not always in the arena of worldly accomplishment, but certainly in being a good person and leading a good life. As Epstein notes throughout Inside the Box, constraints are often a catalyst for better performance. In the realm of artistic or scientific performance, constraints produce a better product; in the realm of personal wellbeing and fulfillment, constraints produce a more richly-lived life. If this were a frictionless and constraint-free world, we wouldn’t have anything to work toward, and our lives would risk becoming dull and meaningless.
Instead of chafing at constraints, then, a true artist will figure out how to use them as a springboard toward something more interesting, more innovative, more textured than what came before. Perhaps some constraints can and should be removed, but not all of them. Some can’t be eliminated and some shouldn’t be. For those that remain, our goal is to live in agreement with our nature, constraints and all.
Book Reviewed:
Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein, Riverhead Books, 2026.
Photo credit: Ryan Franco via Unsplash
Freedom is not what it is thought to be, indeed
Just finished this book today. I've always felt I did my best design work when I had some sort of hard constraint I had to design around. The worst design brief you can possibly get is: "do whatever you want!" There's nothing to grasp onto.
That hint of role ethics and virtue toward the end of the book caught my eye too. The total freedom afforded by enormous wealth tends not to produce better humans.