The Cage We Love
I “read” Brave New World in 2011.
Truth is, I skimmed SparkNotes the night before the test, bullshit my way to a passing grade, and walked into class sounding smart enough that nobody asked questions. I was 17. I drove a car I didn’t pay for to a school full of other kids whose parents had also paid for their cars. I’d smoke weed before class, between class, and after class to numb whatever small amount of unease existed in my life at the time.
In retrospect, I was the exact kind of person Huxley wrote the book about.
I actually read it later, in my thirties, after life had handed me a few reasons to want to understand what he was warning us about.
The book is set in the year 2540, in a society called the World State. Citizens consume soma, a state-distributed pleasure drug. No hangover. No side effects. Blissful detachment on demand. The chemical foundation of social control. The protagonist, Bernard Marx, brings back a young man named John from a Savage Reservation. John was born naturally and raised on Shakespeare. They parade him around London as a curiosity. He watches his mother die in a soma-induced haze. He has a public meltdown about the system. He has a calm conversation with the World Controller, who explains why beauty and truth had to be traded for stability. He retreats to a lighthouse. He kills himself when sightseers turn his suffering into a spectacle.
Most people read this book and walk away thinking it’s a warning about technology.
I don’t think that’s the warning.
I think the warning is about the mindset that has to exist before the technology can take root. The idea that suffering is an engineering problem.
I’m writing this on a smartphone. I make my living building AI tools that automate things people don’t want to do. I’m aware of the irony.
The smartphone is the soma. So is the free pornography. So is the legal weed. So is the infinite scroll, and the dating apps that have commoditized intimacy in a way Huxley imagined ninety years ago, just decentralized and ad-supported instead of state-distributed. In the United States, we didn’t end up in Orwell’s world of fear. We ended up in Huxley’s world of comfort. Numbed into a state of obedience we voluntarily renew every morning.
The leading causes of death in this country tell you the rest. Heart disease. Obesity. Diabetes. Loneliness, which is now considered a measurable mortality factor. We cured most of the things people used to fear: childhood mortality, infectious disease, food scarcity. The calculus shifted. Now we have to go and find the discomfort that used to be handed to us by default.
I’m on a 45-minute walk while I’m writing this. First thing in the morning. Trying to hit a step count, trying to get sunlight in my eyes before I log into a computer and stay there for the next ten hours so I can pay my bills. I’m not complaining. The fact that I get to choose when and where I suffer feels like one of the absurd luxuries of being alive right now. 24/7 gyms. Saunas. Cold plunges. Ultra marathons. People in Colorado pay premium price for self-imposed misery.
Suffering you sign up for is different from suffering that’s handed to you. It has a different weight.
I’ve come to believe you don’t grow without suffering. I don’t think you become the version of yourself you were supposed to be without it. The first time I “read” this book, I was under the spell that a life without suffering was the goal. That was the air I was breathing. Get the grade. Get the diploma. Get the job. Get the next thing. Smoke through any unease that surfaces along the way. I was the exact person Huxley wrote the book about, and I’d substituted the actual book with a summary that was easier to consume.
There’s a metaphor in there I don’t need to spell out.
Now we’re poised to make the final push against the last frontier of suffering: thought itself.
Every prompt is a small concession. Every “rewrite this for me” is an opt-out from a kind of friction that used to be load-bearing. I work in this industry. I build on top of these tools. I don’t have all the information about where this lands. I do have a feeling about it.
We love to talk about freedom in this country. The justice system. The medical system. The fact that we’re not living under fear of invasion. Most of the work the United States has done has been to free us from the cage we feared. That’s a real accomplishment. I’m not minimizing it.
The cage we love is harder to see.
It’s harder to leave.
Are we really free if we’re being shaped at the level of taste, desire, and thought? Are we free if we believe a life without suffering is the goal? Are we free if the tools we use to think are also the tools harvesting our attention back to the people who built them?
It’s much harder to free yourself from the cage you love than the cage you fear.
I think that’s the actual warning.