freedom or community?

Don has chosen freedom, and continues to do so with abandon. This is why he objects so vehemently to signing a contract with Sterling Cooper, even after Conrad Hilton makes it a condition of further business dealings. If Don keeps his future open, he can always re-create himself again. Freedom from the past is Don's blessing as well as well as his curse.

One view is that our pasts and our identities including our cultures, traditions, religion and relationships are what make our choices significant and meaningful to us. They give us the measuring stick to determine the value of each particular choice we make. They determine whether our accomplishments are genuine or not. Without this connection to the past, Don is on his path toward nihilism. Successful in our eyes, but without his own internal measuring stick, Don doesn't know whether his life is valuable or not. In a crucial point in Don't story, when he chooses not to travel with the wealthy, cosmopolitan "nomads" he meets in California and instead he returns to his first wife, Anna, he is reestablishing himself through his past. Don doesn't want more freedom. He wants integration, meaning. He needs the validation that only his past can give him. Only by bringing his past and present together into some new whole can Don begin to approach happiness.

The central question here is: are we going through life, creating values as we choose and act, making meaning for ourselves, or are our values primarily as a product of a history, background, culture, and community?