What does “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” mean? I’ve never been able to parse this statement. Has anyone else had trouble figuring it out?
I always understood it to mean that the only time you’re really free to do whatever you want is when you have nothing to lose–there can’t really be consequences if there is nothing to lose.
Or maybe I’m way off base…
I thought she meant that she is free of the relationship. but there is nothing left in her life.
Maybe you are free to make choices in your life, but you could make some decisions that really bite.
In other words, from a grammatical standpoint it should read, “Freedom’s just another word for having nothing left to lose.”
This has always struck me as one of the stupidest statements in all of pop culture, second only to “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
Actually, I think it’s a pretty insightful statement. When you’ve got nothing to lose, you can do whatever you damned well please. When I was young, single, and had no career to speak of, I could pack up and move to another city, or go backpacking on a whim, or really whatever I wanted.
Now I have a mortgage, a kid, a career, and I’m not free at all. I get up every morning, go to work, do what the boss says, pick the kid up from school, etc. And if I decide to chuck the job, I’d lose the house, maybe the marriage, family… So I’m trapped.
Not that I’d trade it away, but the fact is we give up a lot of freedom when we take on the responsibility of a middle class life. We become slaves to our commitments and to the cost of losing what we’ve taken years to build up.
I have a friend who says man is a slave to his posessions. If you have nothing left to lose, you’re not tied down to anything and you’re free. You can wander around anywhere, just pick up and go like the two hobos in the song.
I alway’s liked that line. I can really identify with it. I remember hitch hiking around Mexico with less than a hundred dollars in my pocket and a hammock in my pack to sleep in. I could do what I wanted, sleep on the beach, hang around the Zocalo, it was great. Nowdays I have a mortgage, health insurance to pay, a job to go to, etc. Being wealthy is better, but not necessarily “free-er”.
This is pretty much the way I take it too.
What Sam said.
“I’ve got nothing to lose. I can do anything.”
Sure, having nothing to lose is a type of freedom. But it’s a temporary type; freedom is certainly not synonymous with having nothing to lose. And if you really, no-shit have nothing at all to lose, you’re not even remotely free; you’re closer to slavery than freedom, since you’d better get cracking to find yourself something to eat within the next 24 hours or so.
Real freedom, it seems to me, lies in having enough “influence” (power, money, whatever) that you don’t have to do what others tell you. Granted, possessions always bring responsibilities, but carefully chosen possessions can provide more freedom than they take away.
I’ve always thought a better statement is “Freedom means never having to say, ‘I’m sorry, asshole.’”
The original lyric by Kris Kristofferson, is
from this lyric site
Other versions change *this line to: “nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’, but it’s free”
I don’t know if that helps or confuses the issue even more. 
From the Janis Joplin version. (My two cents only)
I always thought that the person telling the story, thought that Bobby and she were free because they were roaming around the countryside and exploring and loving each other, and she thought, having a good time.
But then Bobby slips away and she says
And she realised that they weren’t free at all - that Bobby had always been looking for something and it was something that she as much as she wanted couldn’t provide. And now she’s trapped. Because she knows what she wants but she can’t have it.
So in essense, she is free, but she has nothing.
Ahh unrequited love, the saddest love of all …
Since this is about a song lyric, I think you’ll see more responses in our Cafe Society. I’ll free this thread over there for you.
I had a high school English teacher who was so enamored of the lyric in question that she spent a whole class period discussing its meaning, and even made us memorize the lyrics for the entire song and take a test on them!
FWIW, her interpretation was the same as the majority of the posters in this thread.
Kristofferson said:
I think when I wrote that, I was trying to show that freedom is a double-edged sword and that you may be free, but it can be painful to be that free. But maybe at the very end, when you leave, you will be free when you’ve nothing else to lose, you know, when you’re gone.
when interviewed on Enough Rope With Andrew Denton last year. A transcript is here
It’s a great lyric. You can’t be truly free unless you aren’t beholden to anyone or anything – no obligations, no responsibilities. She and Bobby were living the free hobo life but they still had each other. Now he’s gone and she’s totally free but she’s not happy because she misses him. Very bittersweet.
I always hated that line. Nobody who ever actually lived in tyranny - in Germany under Hitler, Russia under Stalin, Iraq under Saddam Hussein - would ever say anything so fatuous.
Well, then it’s a good thing that Mr Kristofferson never did. It’s a pop song, telling a love story. What do you want? Goethe?
I’m not so sure about that. I once read a piece about North Korea, where a refugee mentioned that the only people he ever heard curse Kim Il Sung were being led to execution. It seems to me that having nothing left to lose, they were finally free.
I contend that “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world” is actually the stupidest statement in all of pop culture.