Modern life gives you an overwhelming number of lifestyle choices — what to buy, what to watch, what to eat, who to follow — but almost no choices that reshape the structure of your actual existence. In practice this means people mistake preference for autonomy: they choose their brand of cage (career cage, relationship cage, debt cage, sedation cage) and feel “empowered” simply because the wallpaper is personalized. The system deliberately floods you with trivial decisions so you never notice that the core conditions of your life remain untouched: your time is not yours, your attention is not yours, your values are not yours, and your desires are shaped by visibility rather than inner truth. Men express this illusion as “optimizing” their lives; women express it as “curating” — but both are forms of rearranging furniture in the same locked room. The blade cuts deepest when you understand that having choices and having freedom are not the same thing at all.