The system doesn’t lock you up with force — it lets you choose the style, color, and aesthetic of the cage so you mistake customization for freedom. In practice this means you “choose” your job, your routine, your debt, your distractions, your coping mechanisms, your self-image, your digital identity, and your lifestyle, but every option you pick still keeps you inside the same structure of exhaustion, dependency, emotional suppression, and self-comparison. You feel free because modern cages come with comfort: nice restaurants, streaming platforms, weekend trips, pretty cities, curated apartments, and endless ways to soothe the discomfort of a life you didn’t consciously build. Men brag about their cage as “status”; women curate their cage as “aesthetic”—but both are still living inside choices shaped by pressure, fear, mimicry, and survival instinct rather than sovereignty. The blade cuts deepest when you see that the system never needed to take away your freedom — it only needed to convince you that choosing your prison counted as liberation.