Are We Born Prisoners?

Life is a prison.


I'm not talking about the fact of being alive--a creature that moves, consumes, and reproduces--but rather about the life as a human being in the social construct of human beings.

Our values, beliefs, traditions, and so on all imprison us in a particular way of thinking and feeling.





When someone's family member dies, the automatic response is sympathy, sorrow, mourning, and all that messy crap that is expected of us.

Do we really feel the loss?

How do we discern between what is true for our life and what we are expected to think is true because of our society?


In order to "live", we must work, or find some angle to make society work for us.

Work is essentially bartering time and skills for goods, otherwise known as indentured servitude.  Maybe you don't see it that way and that's perfectly fine.  I have the luxury of being a cynic and seeing the world through a darker lens.


Everything we do is a reaction to our society.

We can conform and be what we were programmed to be, or we can "rebel" and do the opposite of what we were programmed to be,  but that's just reacting to the same set of variables no matter which course is taken.

Genetically, we are what came before; psychologically, we are what we are told to be; spiritually, we are utterly lost.  We know not what we are, why we are here, or how we got here; individually and collectively, we have no meaning.





If you feel imprisoned in your own body, enslaved to expectations, then you already know of what I speak.  If you don't, if you feel free, then you can't and won't ever understand these ramblings and that is fine.

As much as I experience life as a prison, I must acknowledge it is a by-product of everything experienced and all the things which imprison me.  I know it is and thus rail against it with no avail.


Even the animals are prisoners of their instincts, environment, and all that has shaped them into what they are.  They just aren't too worried about it.  A spider exhibits nothing to tell us it is dissatisfied with spinning webs, eating other bugs, and being squished by hairless primates--it just is.

We can't just be, now can we?


I'd say the vast majority of mankind is just being what they are: content to live out the life they find themselves imprisoned within and to make the best of it.

I just can't.  I reject it but remain imprisoned.