Fear of freedom?

In Toad Philip Larkin writes:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison –
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion. . .

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:

Economics may be the basis of life, but all too often it seems to become the stuff of life itself, the stuffing even, particularly for the average middle-class Indian. Lives today are dominated by home loans and car loans and pension schemes and children’s school fees and saving for the future.

Who, nowadays, renounces everything to follow his heart?

Why is it that so few individuals today can be like Paul Gauguin, for example? Gauguin was a successful stockbroker and then one fine day he simply dumped his old life, children and wife included, and took off for Tahiti in order to paint.A young French girl I know has gone off to live in a tent in Australia. I observe the foreigners who live here and often think how free they seem compared to us Indians, with what ease and joy they embrace their freedom.

It would be all right if individuals preferred security to the perils of freedom. It would be all right even if one were happier living the consumerist existence. That is a choice. The sadness is when they postpone the dictates of their heart to an indefinite future. One day, they say.

And the days pass, and the years.

And then one day they are confronted with this (Larkin again):

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Oh solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the field.