Introduction: Huxley vs. Orwell
Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel Brave New World doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Orwell gets all the love. Always has. I get it, though. He brilliantly conjured a world ruled by three Stalinesque empires where oppression and fear crushed the human spirit. Reading 1984 means stepping into a bleak world of hate triumphant. Such evil is far more obvious than what we find in Brave New World. But who can deny that 1984 is among the greatest dystopian novels of all time?
But that’s not the world we live in. The regimes that inspired Orwell are long gone. Other than North Korea, there's nothing comparable to Oceania today. That’s okay. The novel was a warning, not a prophecy, and as a great work of literature, Orwell’s book stands on its own.
But Huxley had something else in mind. What if the human spirit could be snuffed out, not through terror, but by endless distractions and perpetual hedonism? That sounds quite relevant to me in our digital era.
In Brave New World, there is no Room 101 deep in the bowels of the Ministry of Love, where the ideological heretics are tortured into compliance before having their purified brains blown out.
There’s no overt oppression in Huxley’s unified World State. It’s not required. People are content because they’ve been conditioned to know no other way. Those who have deviant thoughts just take a soma pill to make them go away.
There’s a prescient genius in Huxley’s Brave New World. In many ways, ours is an imperfect or emerging version of it. Sure, the specifics are different—we don’t have a genetic caste system (yet), for example. But our corporate-conditioned pursuit of distractions echoes what Huxley was talking about.
After all, freedom of choice today has devolved into nothing but the latitude to choose from a prescribed set of products. Coke or Pepsi? Big Mac or Whopper? TikTok or Instagram? Apple or Samsung? More than anything, people want a frictionless world filled with endless fun and easy pleasure. They don’t want discomfort, pain, or anxiety. Who does? But the mistake is to confuse the easy life with the good life. They are not the same. In fact, they are hostile to each other. You can have one or the other, but not both.
A Utopian Thought Experiment
That sets up Huxley’s fascinating thought experiment.
What would utopia look like to you? That’s what Huxley wants us to consider in his novel. Imagine a world without disease, poverty, or unemployment. Everyone is ridiculously good-looking in a Derek Zoolander way; no one is fat or ugly. The humiliations and infirmities of aging are gone. You’ll never look older than 35. Death comes around age 60—painless, effortless, no strokes, no cancer, no Alzheimer’s.
But wait, there’s more!
World peace is taken for granted; wars haven’t happened in centuries; hunger is a thing of the past; consumer goods are inexpensive and abundant. Sadness and negative thoughts can be purged with soma, a pill the government hands out like candy.
"Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology." (Brave New World)
Even better, casual sex without messy attachments is available to all. You’ll never have a broken heart again. How? Because everyone is attractive, horny, and on the same page sexually. No awkward first dates. No mismatched desires. No longing. Everyone wants the same thing. Free love is easy love.
And work? What if your earliest education conditioned you for a career you were perfectly suited for? Your training would be such that you desired nothing more than what you were doing. Whether you were a parking lot attendant or a laboratory scientist, it would fulfill you completely. No existential angst. No restless ambition. Your potential was determined at birth. Don't worry about it.
However, your career would be secondary to the rest of your life, which would center around leisure, sports, going to the movies (“the feelies”), sex—including the occasional ritual orgy-porgy—and dining out with friends and lovers. A permanent vacation. A life designed and lived without friction, tension, or obstacles. Boredom is banished. So is loneliness. Life is a never-ending party.
"Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today" (Brave New World)
Would you sign up for this?
To be honest, framed this way, I find it tempting.
If I step outside the intellectual argument for a moment and go with my gut reaction, I must admit that Brave New World doesn’t sound all that bad.
I know I’m supposed to say otherwise—that I should peer through the illusion and denounce this kind of world for its spiritual emptiness. And yet, I see a lot that is appealing about it. I suspect I’m not alone in that.
I think most people quietly practice a form of utilitarian hedonism like this, even if they preach something else. I’m not judging. I’m probably one of those who would find Huxley’s World State not so bad after all—at least, as presented so far. It sounds like an easy life.
And in the day-to-day reality of modern life, isn’t easy what most of us want? We optimize our lives, streamline our schedules, and embrace technologies that remove obstacles and inconvenience, all in the pursuit of happiness. Likewise, we do everything possible to avoid pain and discomfort. We say we value struggle and depth, but do we live that way?
And if you say, "No way, I reject such a decadent utopia!"—why?
What else is there? Can you define the good life beyond a pain-free, pleasure-filled existence? It’s harder than it sounds without recreating some variation of the Huxleyan society I described above.
But what’s missing?
A lot, and Huxley knew that. That’s the point of Brave New World.
Positivity & Han’s Inferno of the Same
“Everything is positive inasmuch as it is edible and consumable” - The Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han
These thoughts and more came after re-reading Brave New World for the first time in decades while also reading several of philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s works. I was surprised to find how much of what Han writes about today was already covered by Huxley a century ago.
Building on Neil Postman’s earlier insights, Han is a sharp critic of our modern technological society and its growing resemblance to Huxley’s vision. He critiques our fixation on shallow distractions, the relentless drive to self-optimize, the transactional nature of relationships, and the spiritual emptiness of neoliberalism. Specifically, he describes two key concepts: “positivity” and “negativity.” He uses these terms in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, but they tie in perfectly with Brave New World.
According to Han, positivity is the modern drive to eliminate all friction and difficulty from our lives. For the most part, this is technologically driven. Everything must be quick, easy, and efficient, minimizing hassle and discomfort. Instant gratification is ideal; pursuing fun and pleasure is practically an imperative. Even those who aren’t happy must at least pretend to be, or else.
Work is also framed as a source of joy. Winners hustle and love what they do. Think of the American fetish for the entrepreneur, the self-made success, the tedious LinkedIn thought leader endlessly evangelizing productivity hacks and morning routines.
But a society soaked in positivity doesn’t tolerate resistance. A world optimized for efficiency has no place for struggle, depth, or ambiguity. A positivity-dominated society becomes seamless, flat, and uniform because capitalism demands efficiency at scale. The market rewards what is streamlined, predictable, and endlessly consumable. That goes for people as well. Anything or anyone that resists this logic by embracing depth, complexity, or real individuality becomes an obstacle to be removed or marginalized.
Fit in or fuck off.
And with every new technology that makes life easier, we surrender a little more agency, doing less to receive more in return. It seems like a fair bargain, but it isn’t. We become passive consumers rather than active participants in our own lives.
Han calls the world of positivity “the inferno of the same” because its flattening nature erases not just society’s diversity but the individuality of its people.
The positivity-conditioned individual, cloistered at home, always online, shunning real-world society, finds little room for growth. Life becomes easy but shallow—as shallow as a birdbath. Everyone’s different in the same ways. Even in an era with seemingly infinite choices, those choices have already been preselected for us.
The internet, for all its appearance of endless possibilities, is the greatest homogenizing force ever created. Its genius is that it convinces everyone of the opposite, that it somehow offers the best way to express our authentic selves. As if! In reality, it isolates and alienates us from one another while keeping us distracted and entertained.
So much of everything. So many endless choices. But all the same! The same! The same! That’s what it is! For all this comfort and ease, there is spiritual stagnation, isolation, and depression. And yet, the culture’s message remains: all you need is yourself, your self-sufficiency, and your curated digital persona. But this “freedom” only offers grinding loneliness masquerading as peaceful solitude.
In a way, that makes Brave New World a happier place than ours.
At least the citizens of the World State do everything together. They are hyper-social because they are conditioned to be that way. They would find our world of lonely screen scrollers dystopian in the extreme. After all, what is more isolating, being engineered for constant socialization or living in a society that preaches individuality while trapping everyone in algorithmically-conditioned digital silos?
Han laments that in a world of constant distractions, there is no time to pause, reflect, or think deeply. Instead, we do nothing but consume—consume podcasts, consume television, consume social media, consume content. We don’t even have original thoughts anymore, just reactions.
But positivity presents a paradox: it generates both fullness and emptiness. We have full bellies but restless spirits. Consumer options and personal identities blur into a numbing uniformity, optimized and primed for an endless cycle of production and consumption. This kind of positivity also leads to existential flatness.
What’s missing?
Han says negativity is missing.
Negativity & the Necessity of Struggle
"Yet today, negativity is disappearing everywhere. Everything is being flattened out into an object of consumption." —The Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han
Negativity is the counterforce to positivity. It’s everything that interrupts the seamless flow of comfort, pleasure, and convenience. It is friction. It is resistance. It’s the uncertainty in our relationships, the rejection we fear, the failures that humble us, and the hardships that shape us.
Put that way, it’s no wonder that most people embrace technologically-facilitated positivity. Who wouldn’t want to eliminate suffering if they could?
But negativity isn’t just suffering, it’s meaning.
The world is becoming a never-ending sensory smorgasbord that cuts our attention into ever-smaller fragments. In return, we get comfort and predictability. And so the life of positivity becomes the default setting. Just sit back and scroll. But in doing so, the hyper-connected, hyper-online individual becomes nothing but a parrot, always reacting instead of thinking.
Negativity is the antidote to this “inferno of the same.” It carves out space for silence, reflection, and real intimacy. It’s the empty space where creativity and independent thought emerge. It’s where we sit alone with our thoughts or where we engage deeply with a friend or partner without a device mediating the interaction. It’s also where we fight for things that matter.
In a frictionless world, love itself becomes a casualty. Real love, or the kind that endures, requires conflict, struggle, and the risk of loss. A love without tension will not endure. That’s why Brave New World’s sanitized, state-approved sexuality feels so hollow. The price of easy pleasure is the loss of deeper connection.
In short, negativity gives life its texture. The struggle, the tension, the failures, the risks, the conflicts, these are what give life meaning.
Indeed, Han says that the simple act of closing one’s eyes from this constant barrage of distractions is the first step toward thinking for oneself. It is an act of rebellion against the noise, the digital clutter, the optimized efficiency of a world that wants you passive.
Without negativity, there is no real thought, only reaction.
There is no passion, only fleeting stimulation.
There is no mutual love, only selfish transactions.
There is no fantasy, only porn.
There is no art, only memes.
Everything is available, and nothing matters.
While positivity has been on a century-long winning streak, negativity still exists, for now. But in Huxley’s Brave New World, it has been completely abolished. The only place it remained was on the Savage Reservation, where a small population of “primitives” continued living as their ancestors had. For the rest of the World State, positivity ruled.
There were no unanswered existential questions because no one asked them.
There were no great works of art because no one created them.
There were no books because no one read them.
There were no unsatisfied desires because free sex and soma made sure of that.
Love and monogamy were seen as quaint anachronisms.
"Everyone belongs to everyone else." —Brave New World
If unpleasant thoughts arose, if any rebellious urges emerged, a soma pill could erase them in an instant, dissolving them into narcotic bliss. Life was a perfectly engineered loop of distraction. The vast majority of the World State’s citizens never questioned this arrangement.
Why would they?
It was all they knew.
Brave New World vs. 1984: The Comfort Trap
Han argues that a life without negativity is a life without substance. And this is why Brave New World is a far more insidious dystopia than 1984.
Orwell’s dystopia is a world of brutality, surveillance, and total control. 1984 is a nightmare where thought is policed, history is rewritten, and love is a crime. Winston’s gradual awakening sharpens his perception. He comes to see the regime for the monstrosity that it is. But he is only one man. His struggle is courageous, but in the end, he is crushed, reduced to a hollow shell whispering his love for Big Brother.
But what is there to resist in Brave New World?
That is the subtle brilliance of Huxley’s vision. The people of the World State aren’t really oppressed at all. They are comfortable. They are entertained. They are well-fed, well-pleasured, and well-medicated. And comfort, taken to its extreme, is just as spiritually toxic as fear because it leaves no space to question, no desire to strive, and no discomfort that pushes people toward something greater. That’s what makes Brave New World so terrifying.
It doesn’t coerce submission; it makes submission pleasurable.
It’s a world that requires nothing of you but your unthinking participation in its endless hedonism. Sound familiar?
But without obstacles to overcome, there are no challenges. Without risk, there is no success. Without failure, there is no meaning.
There is nothing but a flattened existence, lived from one meal, one orgasm, one soma-induced escape to the next.
Memory Erasers and Experience Vampires
And yet, as I type those words, I hear a voice in my head asking, “Well, so what?” What’s wrong with such a life if I freely choose it? Eat! Drink! Be Merry! Right? Not everyone needs or wants to chase deeper meaning. In fact, most don’t—and yet, are they any less happy than a wannabe sage like me? Can I fault them for wanting to live their lives and get by the best they can, even if that means spiritual slavery?
Besides, we seekers of deeper truths never really find them, do we? Not really. Everything is only ever a partial truth, a fleeting glimpse into the sublime if we’re lucky. But genuine enlightenment? Come on! That almost never happens. And I’m convinced it never can, not with a well-stocked fridge, a warm bed, and a glowing screen in front of our faces. Trade-offs, I guess.
Maybe I’m framing it all wrong. Maybe Han’s “inferno of the same” isn’t just about sameness, it’s an inferno of the present. If positivity flattens everything into sameness, it also erases time. The average person now spends six to nine hours a day staring at a screen and consuming content. That’s madness. Like Huxley’s characters in Brave New World, we technically could do otherwise, but we don’t. It never even occurs to us.
Never before have so many people spent so much time in such an existential void masquerading as something far more benign. Digital distractions are the most efficient memory erasers and experience vampires ever devised. They consume the present, hollow out the past, and promise a future that’s just an endless loop of the same. And that, more than anything, might be the saddest, most dystopian truth of our era.
A good life isn’t like this; it has texture, shaped by moments that challenge us, change us, and stay with us. But in a world where experiences are flattened into digital consumption, what happens to memory? What happens to meaning?
So let me look in the mirror for a minute.
Let me tell you about all the memories I made on the internet over the last twenty years—the hundreds (thousands?) of videos I watched, the thousands (tens of thousands?) of emails I sent, and all the witty memes I shared or scrolled past on Facebook. Thousands of hours, devoured.
And yet, I can’t think of a single profound moment spent online that stands out. Not one that matters, anyway. All that time, whitewashed from my memory like it never happened.
What about you? Did all those hours online create the kinds of memories you’ll always cherish?
We’re back to Han’s “Inferno of the Same.”
Now think about the moments—good and bad—that actually shaped your life.
I can tell you, in granular detail, about the week I hiked all 135 kilometers of Hadrian’s Wall in the first week of June 2009. How I walked through the moors and explored the Roman ruins during the day, slept under the stars at night, and popped the blisters on my feet every morning before setting off. It was magnificent.
I could tell you (but won’t) how magical it was to make love to my wife for the first time all those years ago. I remember it as if it were yesterday and always will. I knew that night that she was The One. It was sublime. The uncertainty, the risk of opening my heart to love, none of it mattered in the end. It was worth it. And what it led to was something even greater: the day my son was born, the awe of holding that tiny, beautiful life in my hands. It was the purest joy and the cleanest love I’ve ever experienced.
None of that happened in front of a screen.
None of it happened without taking risks.
But it wasn’t all joy. I also remember the raw terror and confusion of waking up from a coma, dimly realizing I couldn’t think straight or talk or move the left side of my body, and being told that all this might be permanent. But time passed, and I recovered enough to go home. I still remember riding through Fort Lauderdale on my first night out of the hospital, the car window down, breathing in the fresh air of life, looking up at those same starry heavens with a rediscovered awe. My God, I felt reborn. I can still close my eyes and taste the echo of that memory.
All of it, the loves and heartaches, the successes and failures, the deep friendships that came and went, all shaped who I am today. Some of those experiences were painful, some humiliating, while others brought me profound joy. All of them mattered because they gave my life a texture it wouldn’t have otherwise had.
Again—and I repeat this to remind myself—none of this happened in front of a screen.
And yet, as technology advances, we are trading these textured experiences for something easier, more convenient, and ultimately, emptier. This is the trade-off Brave New World warned us about. This is the same flattening of existence Han laments.
Until the last few years, I kept the memory erasers and experience vampires at bay. But it’s a struggle. They never stop whispering their seductive bargain—“Sit back, my friend. We have a better way. Just give us your time and attention. We'll take care of the rest. Oh yes, we will. It'll be fun. Now relax, but don’t forget to hit the subscribe button.”
They make it so easy to succumb.
Maybe that’s why I still read so much. Why I still get involved in my community. Why I fight to preserve my own spaces for memory creation. Or sometimes, I just let myself be bored. And it’s why I still blog, though few read anything on here anymore (fuck you, AI).
Because doing so is a way to carve out a little agency in a world where it’s getting harder and harder to preserve it.
Final Thoughts
Now and then, I read something that stops me in my tracks. I finish and can’t stop thinking about it. A little earthquake rumbles through my soul, and I find my perspective has shifted a little. Such moments of revelation are fleetingly rare, but they are why I remain (and will always remain) an avid reader of books. Hard books. Long books. Books that slow me down and make me pay attention. Books that challenge me.
Not airport books.
That happened at the end of Brave New World, in a scene that barely registered the first time I read the novel three decades ago. But times change, and the best books offer fresh insights with each reading. That was the case here.
In that climactic scene, John the Savage confronts World Controller Mustapha Mond in a fascinating clash of ideals. Unlike the citizens of the World State, John grew up on the Savage Reservation, a place untouched by the engineered comfort and relentless positivity of civilization.
Until his “rescue,” he has known nothing but struggle, hardship, and survival, with none of the technological conveniences or numbing pleasures the World State provides. His only real exposure to literature is a battered copy of Shakespeare’s works. (And honestly, if a person could have only one book to grasp the depth and breadth of the human experience, you could do worse than Bill Shakespeare.)
At first, John is thrilled by the prospect of integrating into this highly advanced society. It must be better, he thinks. It has to be. After all, they have levels of comfort, stability, and abundance he could never have dreamed of on the Reservation. Surely, the people there must be wiser, deeper, and happier than the struggling natives of the Reservation.
But what he finds is not the utopia he imagined. Instead, he encounters a world where happiness is engineered, suffering is abolished, and everything real has been replaced with distraction. It’s not just disappointing, it’s horrifying. A life so frictionless and sanitized feels empty. His disillusionment is total.
He can’t take it and begins agitating, trying to wake people up to their spiritual slavery. But his resistance fails before it even begins. They don’t see it that way. They can’t see it that way. To them, John is just an oddity, an amusing spectacle, a curiosity rather than a prophet.
And so, after he fails to stir the masses, he is brought before Mustapha Mond, one of the World State’s rulers. Mond doesn’t want to hurt John. He is no O'Brien. Mond doesn’t need a boot stamping on a human face forever. He simply needs John to see reason. Their subsequent confrontation eloquently captures the tension between positivity and negativity that I’ve been discussing.
And like O’Brien vs. Winston in 1984, Mond vs. John is a mismatch. Mond is smarter, better educated, more articulate, and utterly convinced of his own worldview. After all, the world he rules is superior to anything John can imagine: no war, no sickness, no want, no loneliness, and most of all, no inconveniences. He makes a compelling case.
John is having none of it.
John: "But I like the inconveniences."
Mond: "We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."
John: "But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
Mond: "In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
John: "All right, then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
"There was a long silence. 'I claim them all,' said the Savage at last."
With those final words—"I claim them all"—John makes his stand. He understands that negativity is not the enemy but the missing piece, the thing we don’t want but can’t live without. I suspect that Han would also agree with John. It’s easy to argue that our world today isn’t so different from Huxley’s, not because we’ve eliminated difficulty, but because we’ve tried to erase its meaning.
We distract ourselves from discomfort, medicate away our sadness, and do anything to chase away our creeping boredom, never realizing that in doing so, we flatten our own existence and make the creation of happy memories impossible.
John understood that. And so, in the end, he made the only choice left to him. He refused to live in a world without struggle and pain, choosing the most negative of escapes: death.
It was a heroic suicide.
Supplementary Material
Works Cited
Han, Byung-Chul, et al. The Agony of Eros. MIT Press, 2017.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World Aldous Huxley ; Foreword by Christopher Hitchens. HarperCollins, 2004.
Paul D. Wilke
Dry Grove, Illinois
March 2025