At the core of what makes the movie Wall-E and the book Brave New World dystopian is the loss of human agency.
In both the film and book, people inhabit a world of near-constant pleasure. Everything is served up to you exactly how you want and when you want—from food to sex to friendship to entertainment. The meeting of your each and every desire is engineered to be perfectly timed, and if for some reason it’s not, all you need to do is a press a button and beckon what you want. Your sole job is to sit back and enjoy.
And yet, rather than becoming paradises, these worlds become closer to hellscapes. The reason is fairly simple: the characters sacrifice their agency to be active participants in their lives and instead become passive consumers of everything. Passive consumption feels good in the short-term, but over time, the greater proportion of our lives that are filled with passive consumption, the more numbed out we become. The more numbed out we become, the more we sacrifice all the good stuff about being alive.
It’s not just the movies. A slew of research backs this up. In older adults, active leisure activities predicted life satisfaction. A long-term study found that too much passive leisure activity (e.g., watching television) at age sixteen was related to psychological distress at age forty-two. While active leisure activities at age sixteen (e.g. reading books) were not. Studies even show that there’s a difference between using social media passively (mindlessly scrolling) and actively (using what you come across to create and connect offline). A meta-analysis found that passive use was associated with worse emotional outcomes. The same holds true in our relationships. Couples who participate in active and engaging dates have higher levels of personal and relationship growth than those who are more passive.
When you actively engage in the world, you send a signal to your brain that what you are doing is important. Your brain responds by shifting your attention, increasing your cognitive engagement, and boosting your memory. In other words, active engagement primes you to to be in a state to learn, grow, and feel—instead of merely just existing.
One of the gravest, albeit most under-looked, risks of today’s world is that we are increasingly become passive consumers of content and data instead of active participants in life. Technology promises to optimize our lives and make everything we do frictionless, and it’s very good at that. But in the process, we miss out on a lot of the experiences, struggles, and feelings that make life worth living.
A few examples:
– The difference between deeply reading a book, which takes you into an active conversation with the author and with yourself, and passively consuming fifteen minute summaries on an app or tweets about the book.
– The difference between doing your workout, paying close attention to your body and learning to read fatigue signals and differentiate good pain versus bad pain, and having your workout do you—e.g., starring into a screen the entire time desperately trying to hit some kind of contrived metric.
– The difference between deeply learning a subject, struggling to make connections and approach it from different angles and understand what those before you thought, and consuming an artificial intelligence generated report with three-bullet answers for everything.
– The difference between enjoying a meal and tasting the flavors versus stuffing your face with food items designed to be stuffed into your face as fast as possible.
Thanks to incredible progress in technology, for nearly every element of our lives we can either take the deep and active route (that includes friction) or the shallow and passive route (that is frictionless). Sometimes the latter makes sense. For example, Brad has a terrible sense of direction and no real interest in working on it. He is a super-user of GPS. Just about every adult has the experience of being in a rush and inhaling food in their car. Doing so doesn’t automatically make for a bad life. There is nothing inherently wrong with convenience, and there is plenty that is good about it!
But when passive and frictionless activity comes to dominate our lives, when we are no longer making a choice to go the passive route, but doing it mindlessly and without evaluating how it changes (and often degrades) our experience, then we inch closer to the hellscape of Wall-E and Brave New World.
Fortunately, with an awareness of the distinction between active and passive, you can begin to choose which parts of your life you want to protect for active engagement. A few examples for both of us (Brad and Steve) are reading full books (instead of summaries), doing our own deep-dives on topics and outlining by hand (instead of using artificial intelligence), using minimal technology for our physical training (and learning to get intimate with our bodies), and prioritizing longer phone conversations where we go deep on topics (versus short text messages).
Where you choose to protect active engagement over passive consumption will differ based on numerous factors including your goals, interests, and innate temperament. However what matters for all of us is ensuring that the majority of our lives stay active, that we don’t become passive consumers of everything, that we use our technologies instead of our technologies using us, that we don’t become chat-bots, automatons, or characters in Wall-E and Brave New World.
At root, this is a fight for our humanity. We are meant to struggle. We often think of exerting effort as negative, something to minimize and avoid. Yet research consistently shows that exerting meaningful effort is enjoyable and supports our mental health. It explains the feeling of satisfaction you get after a solid workout or after figuring out how to turn an abstract idea into a coherent thesis.
As Steve points out in his upcoming book, famed mythologist Joseph Campbell showed us the way years ago: “People say that what we’re all seeking is meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive,” says Campbell. When an interviewer asked him about such experiences in his own life, Campbell replied by describing a relay race he ran in college at the Penn Relays.
In a world that pushes us towards ease, comfort, and passivity, active engagement is what makes us feel alive. We must protect it.
