Most people in today’s society build their lives along pre-beaten paths. These scripts, written by someone else, get transmitted through upbringing, culture, education, and the examples of others around you.
It’s a matrix that society has built around itself because it’s incredibly convenient for existence – the path of least resistance where you essentially don’t need to do anything. The answers to your questions already exist. You don’t even need to think about the meaning of the life you’re living.
You become an NPC – someone who never receives the red pill to exit to the other side of this matrix. But if you’re reading this, there’s likely something that distinguishes you from an NPC. You’re like Mr. Thomas Anderson, who doesn’t yet know he’s Neo, but is ready to swallow the red pill if offered one.
Why Most People Stay Trapped In The Matrix
Here’s the problem though – Morpheus never shows up. The white rabbit you should follow never appears. And what seems like a white rabbit turns out to be a scam or another fairy tale designed merely to attract attention and generate online discussions. Everything veers off from where you actually want to go.
So you continue living, walking in the same circle, the same beaten path that thousands, millions, hundreds of millions of people have already walked. Perhaps even billions, with billions more to follow behind you.
Because finding the red pill isn’t so simple. Finding your own Morpheus takes serious effort. And it seems not every person can be Thomas Anderson, the chosen Neo.
In human life, it’s not as simple as shown in films where there’s one main hero, one Neo, one Matrix, one Morpheus, and one red pill. One chance to exit the Matrix.
Each person has their own Matrix. Each person is the main character in their own film. Each person can find their own red pill, swallow it, and begin to see the Matrix from the other side of the screen.
We’ll return to a significant quote from Naval Ravikant, who once tweeted that someday there will be 8 billion monopolies. This will mean that each person living on Earth will exit the Matrix and become that Neo who swallowed the red pill, creating something for this world, creating their own version of reality.
They won’t remain in that programmed environment where they can only be an NPC. So how do you do this? Even if your life is already following a beaten path, a script not written by you, and Morpheus doesn’t exactly want to come and give you the pill – in fact, he’s hiding from you, concealing himself and trying to stay as far away as possible.
How We Become Dependent
You don’t need Morpheus. You don’t even need the red pill. The trick is that you can invent your own. And you can connect to the Matrix and learn kung fu if necessary to achieve your goals, just like Neo in the film.
So where do we start? You’re somewhere in the middle. Before you read these lines or watch this video, you’ve already lived a certain part of life. And likely, part of this life followed convention, that same script you want to break free from.
You already have education, probably some school or university. It doesn’t really matter. You have some job. Maybe even remote, meeting modern digital nomad standards, but it’s still a job.
Your income depends on it, and essentially your survival depends on it, because as soon as this job disappears, your income will immediately decrease or vanish completely, and you won’t even be able to pay for housing. Maybe you’re luckier and already have your own place, but then the question becomes what to buy food with.
Basically, everything depends on some other person, by whose will you currently work and receive money. One day a decision might be made not in your favor, and suddenly everything changes. And unfortunately, this decision doesn’t depend on you, not on your will.
Specialize Or Die
You’d like to change this situation exactly in the opposite direction, so that all this happens exclusively according to your desire. Traditional education is structured in such a way that it implies a certain program. That is, there’s a template, schedule, and list of specific disciplines you need to learn and master.
These disciplines are done in a specific order, and from the combination of different disciplines, a specialization is formed – the profession you’ll get, for which you’ll receive a diploma once you finish your education. A specialization you’ll be tied to for the rest of your life, or until you get another education, when another one will appear.
And then your choice will be whether to follow this discipline, work in it, or go somewhere else. Of course, the combination of this education, your existing skills, and acquired skills can change this trajectory and direct you in different directions.
For example, my specialty is systems analysis. But since I’ve been interested in computers, IT, web development, and so on since childhood, my career was built immediately in the IT field, and my first paid job was as a programmer. Since then, that’s how it’s been set.
Although most of my classmates, even those who went to work in their specialty, started working in logistics because there was a specialization in systems analysis in that field. But for some reason, I always saw it differently.
Systems analysis is an area that is used very widely and deeply specifically in information technology, and for me, it was always a path to IT. But the other guys saw it as a direct guide to action – that is, logistics is the specialization and, accordingly, the discipline of systems analysis. Okay.
Determine your future
“I never let my schooling interfere with my education.” – Mark Twain, author.
Well, please answer me this question. How are you supposed to know what you want from life or which interests you want to pursue, what goals you want to achieve at 17-18 years old? How are you supposed to make this choice at 17 when all you want is to hang out with friends, go to parties, build relationships, and basically learn about life?
How are you supposed to answer a question that essentially determines your fate – how your life will unfold? Because if the choice is made incorrectly, in a decade (put your own timeframe), some new technology appearing on the horizon might replace you. Hello, artificial intelligence.
Studies show about 27% of jobs in OECD countries are at high risk of automation by AI, especially those involving repetitive skills. Indeed, jobs that follow a conventional template (the ones “thousands of people have done”) are exactly those AI can easily replicate. A Reuters report notes 60% of workers fear losing their jobs to AI.
How are you supposed to see the future and understand that you could be easily replaced, that your life will simply be predetermined this way? You can’t, because the education system was built in an entirely different time, when everything was fairly predictable – much more predictable than now.
When technological progress wasn’t changing the global landscape at today’s speed. When it was assumed that society’s development followed a certain trajectory, and it was clear that its advancement depended on human effort, on the direct impact of human labor, and how people invested their resources of time, strength (physical and mental), and intellect into societal development.
However, even back then, science fiction writers speculated about how, at the very least, part of human labor would be replaced by robots, also created by humans but automated, and that humans wouldn’t need to perform complex physical tasks, for example. Well, now it’s the turn of intellectual tasks as well. We can delegate all this to machines, robots, AI.
Attention, this opens up a dilemma about how I can restructure my life so as not to end up being replaced by robots, machines, or AI. And the answer here is actually very simple.
The Path
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist
You need to turn off the beaten path of that same conventional scenario, which is pre-written by the same society I was just talking about above. If you follow it, the path is definitely predetermined. There’s simply no other option here.
But as soon as you turn off it, many other options appear. And here lies the most interesting part. The number of these options is infinite. And your task becomes to find your own path, find your own road that will lead you to the desired result, not to the result desired by other people.
And you need to start here with setting a goal to exit this matrix, to find that same red pill or, in our case, to create it yourself.
It’s like in the movie “Limitless,” which shows a similar theme but from a slightly different angle, where the main character already received a magic pill that unlocks his mental abilities and allows him to use his brain at a much higher percentage of its real capabilities.
But then, as the hero becomes dependent on this pill, his enhanced mental abilities allow him to realize that if someone invented this pill, he can synthesize it himself. Which is what he does. And this is the very solution that ultimately leads him to success.
All of this is very allegorical and metaphorical. Maybe someday we’ll invent such pills, but the point is that you need to at least try to find another path that differs from the one where all the answers to questions already exist.
You need to figure out how to do roughly the same thing he did. That is, invent your own pill, build your own path, blaze your own trail in a field where no one has walked yet. And in order to at least understand where to go in this field, if you’re not following the road that was built by other people, you need to understand the direction.
And this direction is that very goal. The proverbial one.