We are slaves of the circumstances.
Not at times, but all the time – I mean: always. Even when we choose the good consciousness (i.e.: a moral way of life).
The sentence of the so-called «existentialists» (the philosophies of the existence) is gratuitously silly: no one is free in her or his assumptions and decisions.
Only when living in Nature, as an eremite, one can say that is RELATIVELY free... .
But can he/she survive like that?