perhaps they are implicitly saying that we are all prisoners to ourselves, that our previous commitments and our self-perceptualized responsibilities to both make and keep those commitments keeps us in a death grip that prevents us from ever being truly free to do as we please. Perhaps the vague phrasing was not merely a grammatical oversight, but rather a deep look into the inner psyche and how by it's very nature it controls us more then we control it, that we are controlled more by ourselves then by external forces. On the flipside one could argue that such self control is preconditioned through external forces as we mature, which is a valid argument as well.
On the other hand, perhaps the implication was a simple query whose internal grammatical structure was not intended to be discombobulated for the purpose of finding choke points for minorly humourous anecdotes.
