Let me ask you a question.
If you were offered a life of absolute comfort, every meal provided, every danger removed, every day a predictable hum of pleasantness, what would you be willing to pay for it?
The price, of course, is your freedom. Your autonomy. The very right to choose your own suffering.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."
Beautiful sentiment.
Spectacularly wrong.
Man is not born free. He is born screaming and helpless, desperate for the comfort and safety of the cage. The chains come later. We're the ones who forge them, link by link, telling ourselves it's progress.
Look around you. The chains are everywhere. They gleam like gold under the right light.
The nine-to-five job that pays for the apartment you barely have time to live in.
The student loan that buys you a degree, which in turn buys you entry into a more prestigious section of the same cage.
The social media feed that tells you what to want, what to desire, what to think.
The carefully curated life where every choice has already been made for you by someone smarter, richer, or just more willing to accept that freedom is messy and comfort is clean.
We trade the chaos of true freedom for a heated enclosure with a guaranteed feeding time. We are not conquered subjects. We are domesticated pets. We wag our tails, grateful for the leash, because it feels safer than the alternative.
Hey you.
The one reading this webnovel right now.
Have you ever really thought about your future? Not in the vague, daydreaming sense where you imagine yourself successful and happy and surrounded by people who love you. I mean the cold, hard reality of the path laid out before you like train tracks that only go one direction.
Have you ever imagined what it means to go to an academy? To grind for exams so you can secure a stable career? Have you ever questioned why that is the "correct" path? Or have you simply accepted it because everyone else accepted it? Because questioning it would make you seem lazy or ungrateful or worse, naive?
Have you mapped out the next forty years of your life?
Wake up. Commute. Work. Eat. Sleep. Repeat.
Maybe you'll get promoted. Maybe you'll fall in love. Maybe you'll have kids who will follow the exact same path. You'll tell them it's for their own good because that's what your parents told you.
The funny part is how we celebrate each step deeper into the cage.
Graduation. First job. First promotion.
Each one is a milestone. A cause for champagne and congratulations. Nobody stops to ask if the destination is worth the journey. Nobody asks if there was ever another road to take.
For most of my life, I never had that choice.
The cage was not gilded. It was made of sterile white walls and the crushing weight of perfection. It smelled like disinfectant and tasted like protein paste measured down to the gram.
But I saw it for what it was.
Now that I'm out, I see everyone rushing to build their own cages with their own hands. I feel a profound confusion that borders on pity. They smile while they do it. They compete to see who can build the prettiest bars.
I felt like—
"Xavi, your girlfriend is wanting to meet with you."