In the annals of dystopian literature, two names stand as towering sentinels of warning: George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Their visions, often treated as opposing prophecies, together form a composite map of the modern condition—a condition marked not by overt chains, but by invisible leashes of desire.
In 1932, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, a novel that did not simply warn of a dark future, but diagnosed an emerging pathology in its infancy. Huxley foresaw enslavement not by tyrants, but by temptations. The totalitarianism he envisioned was not enforced through fear, but through pleasure, with people pacified by entertainment, comfort and pharmacological bliss. The citizens of his world were engineered to be happy—distracted by the omnipresent drug soma, entertained by “feelies” (films that stimulate all the senses) and conditioned from birth to accept their roles without complaint.
There was no Big Brother and no Ministry of Truth—no need. In Huxley’s world, people didn’t rise up because they had no reason to. They were too content, too numb, too distracted to notice the slow erosion of their freedom. Tyranny was internalised, dressed in the warm glow of comfort and artificial happiness.
George Orwell, writing nearly two decades later in 1984, offered an antithetical vision. His dystopia was ruled through surveillance, censorship and violent coercion. The populace was crushed under the weight of an omnipotent state that controlled ‘truth’ through the manipulation of language and history. In Orwell’s world, freedom was destroyed by force. In Huxley’s, it withered away through neglect.
As media theorist Neil Postman once noted, the more prescient of the two was Huxley. “Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.” Now, nearly a century later, Huxley’s world is not on the horizon—it is our daily reality.
We inhabit an age where the pursuit of pleasure is no longer incidental but institutional. From the processed euphoria of junk-food to the compulsive twitch of the thumb across a smart-phone screen, modernity has re-engineered the human condition. The apparatus is not tyrannical in the traditional sense; it does not compel, it seduces.
The architecture of this system is neuro-chemical. Our devices do not merely inform—they stimulate. Social media platforms, short-form videos, algorithmic notifications are not neutral tools. They are precision-engineered to hijack our brain’s reward circuitry, flooding it with dopamine—the addictive neurotransmitter of pleasure. As Dr Anna Lembke, psychiatrist at Stanford University and author of Dopamine Nation, argues: “We are not addicted to our phones—we are addicted to dopamine.” This addiction is not accidental; it is engineered.
Lembke’s thesis is profoundly unsettling. In a world saturated with gratification, even mild discomfort feels intolerable. We become allergic to boredom, unable to sit still without stimulation, incapable of engaging with the depth and complexity of real life. The result? Not happiness, but emotional numbness, spiritual depletion and a creeping anxiety that permeates every idle moment.
This is not simply a psychological crisis—it is a civilisational one.
Thinkers like Byung-Chul Han describe our era as the “burnout society” —a civilization of over-stimulated, atomised individuals, exhausted not from physical labour but from constant connectivity. We are not over-worked, we are over-notified. Likewise, Tristan Harris, a former Google ethicist, describes the tech industry as being locked in a “race to the bottom of the brain-stem,” fighting to capture ever more of our attention by any means necessary—often at the cost of our well-being, sanity and sovereignty.
Our ancestors, who had no access to the luxuries we now take for granted, developed techniques of the self that are now resurfacing with new urgency. Fasting, prayer, solitude, silence—these were not acts of denial, but of liberation.
Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, exposes how our most intimate behaviours—clicks, scrolls, hesitations—are harvested and sold as data to shape and predict our future actions. This is a new form of power, exercised not through state apparatus but through the market, designed not to serve, but to manipulate.
In this system, we are no longer citizens, capable of reflection and dissent. We are consumers—of content, of products, of dopamine. Silence is treated as a malfunction; discomfort is medicalised; solitude is avoided. What once constituted leisure has become labour; and what masquerades as freedom is a curated feed of pacification.
We are scrolling ourselves into submission.
The consequences are civilisational, not individual. What we are witnessing is not just the slow corrosion of personal willpower, but the unravelling of the very qualities that sustain a free and thinking society. In our unthinking pursuit of comfort—of frictionless interfaces, instant answers and algorithmic convenience—we have abdicated both individual and communal autonomy. The human spirit, once forged in hardship and contradiction, is now flattened into passivity, addicted to novelty and allergic to effort. The result is a population increasingly unable to sit with complexity or ambiguity—qualities essential to both personal maturity and democratic discourse.
We no longer feel deeply; we swipe. The joys of creation, the grief of loss, the sacredness of stillness are all flattened beneath a constant barrage of curated stimuli. Our attention, once a site of moral and spiritual agency, has become the most contested commodity of the digital age. In this attention economy, depth is a liability, distraction a currency.
We do not confront the absurdity of existence; we binge it away. Instead of wrestling with the existential questions that have haunted and inspired thinkers for centuries—Why am I here? What is worth suffering for? What lies beyond pleasure?—we drown them in entertainment. In place of wonder, we have trivia. In place of communion, we have comment sections. The screen has become both altar and opiate—offering us everything, demanding nothing and leaving us emptier than before.
The implications go even further. A society of emotionally anaesthetised individuals cannot build solidarity. Empathy withers when feeling becomes inconvenient. Political engagement declines when civic responsibility competes with constant distraction. Tyranny thrives not only on fear—but also on apathy. As public imagination contracts, so too does the possibility of collective resistance. We cease to dream of a better world when our waking hours are consumed by the next episode, the next scroll, the next hit of dopamine.
In this slow surrender to sedation, freedom itself becomes meaningless, not because it is taken, but because it is no longer desired.
And yet—all is not lost.
Our ancestors, who lacked access to the luxuries we now take for granted, developed techniques of the self that are now resurfacing with new urgency. Fasting, prayer, solitude, silence were not acts of denial, but of liberation. They were attempts to disentangle the soul from the snares of pleasure. Neuroscience concedes today what mystics have long taught: that meaning, not comfort, is the foundation of enduring joy.
Reclaiming agency in the 21st Century is not a private whim—it is a political act. It is to unplug not just from the screen, but from the architecture of distraction. It is to rediscover the discomfort that leads to growth, the stillness that reveals selfhood, the boredom that births imagination.
So, if you find yourself restless, anxious, or unmoored—know this: you are not broken. What you feel is the soul’s quiet protest. It is not pathology. It is proof that somewhere within, you remember what freedom is.
The wake-up call you await will not come as a ping on your phone. It will arrive, quietly, from within—the last embers of selfhood whispering, once more: this is not freedom.
The writer is a professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahorer.