Invisible cages

I moved from Malaysia to New Zealand when I was eleven. Over almost twenty years, my default misconcepts have quietly rewired themselves around a Western culture.

Every time I go back to visit my family, I notice the contrast more and more. It's there in the social obligations that go unquestioned, in the attitudes towards work, in the unexamined assumptions about what a good life is even supposed to look like.

This contrast led me to an observation on how most people follow the rules of their social environment, assuming that's just how the world works. Few ever pause to go one layer deeper.

Who created the rules? Why these rules and not others? What assumptions produced them? Who benefits from them? What possibilities do they exclude?

And because of this, those rules become their reality.

Building our own cages

In 2005, David Foster Wallace gave a commencement address at Kenyon College that would go on to become one of the most famous graduation speeches ever given. He opened This Is Water with a classic parable.

"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?'"

The fish-in-water idea wasn't new, but Wallace's speech gave it its modern cultural weight, reframing it around the daily effort of staying conscious of the environment shaping us, rather than drifting through it by default. The speech's popularity reflects how much the idea struck a chord, perhaps because most of us carry a subtle, nagging dissatisfaction, quiet enough to ignore for another day, loud enough that we know it's always there.

Some of that dissatisfaction comes from assuming we're stuck in the water we swim in. For us, that water is our cultural norm, the unspoken rules, values, and expectations we absorb growing up that feel like "just the way things are."

Without the capacity to step back and rationally criticise the implicit rules of the social systems we live in, we can eventually internalise these rules as self-limiting beliefs. Nobody has to stand over you and say no. You're simply self-enforcing those rules, building your own invisible cage.

You don't ask why the rules exist. You only ask how to succeed within them.

And in that way, we limit ourselves without even realising it, spending our finite life resources optimising within a game we thought was our only choice.

Real freedom starts with stepping out of autopilot long enough to notice the water we're actually swimming in.

Stepping out

Not all rules are bad, though. There's a big difference between rules as legally enforced laws or safety precautions, and rules as socially enforced expectations. Traffic rules. Sterile technique. Aviation procedure. These are all useful and valuable.

The trap arises when we treat socially enforced rules with equal reverence, letting them dictate our lives even when the real cost of breaking them is far less severe than it feels.

Choosing to go against the grain can feel threatening, because you're opening yourself up to criticism and we're biologically wired to care about the opinions of others. We're taught from childhood to abide by rules, spoken and unspoken.

But other people's disapproval of a choice that's yours to make is just another unexamined rule talking, a reflection of the fact that you're not living according to their preferences. If you let yourself be shackled by that, you're also letting them choose how to spend your finite life resources for you.

You don't have to live according to anyone else's preferences. Your opinion about your life matters more than theirs. After all, you're the one who has to live it and you're the one with more context on it than anyone else.

What rules are weighing you down right now? You get to challenge those rules. You get to ask what it actually means to live a good life. And you get to walk out of any cage you built yourself, the moment you decide to.

So what cage are you living in, with invisible walls built out of rules nobody ever asked you to follow?