Imagine you’re given the following choice.
You’re going to spend several years locked in solitary confinement, in a cell with no lamps or artificial lighting. The cell is 150 square meters. That’s the size of an apartment that would rank among the most expensive in the world, anywhere you happened to buy it.
But there are two kinds of cells, and you have to choose one.
The first has a concrete ceiling and windows in its walls, looking out onto something like a small garden. The second has a completely glass ceiling. You can see the clouds, but there are no windows in the walls.
Most people choose the one with the windows.
Why? Because the garden changes more visibly than the sky. And the rate at which things change affects how we perceive the passage of time.
Is that true? Yes and no.
People calculate which view offers more visual variation, but their calculations are biased. They make those calculations based on their experience of living freely, outside prison, in apartments with concrete ceilings and windows in the walls.
Without that bias, they might reach a different conclusion. They might even correctly realize that the cell with the glass ceiling receives several times more natural light than the other one. And nothing in solitary confinement reduces the suffering of being imprisoned quite like an abundance of natural light.
This is a kind of paradox: a person trying to escape their old cell chooses their next cell to be made of the same things as the last one.
In the previous cell, their brain had learned to switch off certain alarms after ignoring them for long enough.
If something tells you a hundred times that you’re in the wrong place, and you keep ignoring it—or have no way out—the hundred-and-first time, it stops telling you. Once the alarm goes silent, the steering wheel turns in exactly the opposite direction. You may even start adding certain features to the list of reasons why your situation is good.
Like when someone shows you an apartment whose builder has already installed metal bars on the windows, and you think, Great. I won’t have to install them myself.
The alarm that used to tell you, Windows with bars mean you’re the prisoner, not the thief, has been silent for a long time.
It went silent in your previous cell.
One of the most important questions anyone can ask themselves is this: Why do I like the things I like?
And the answer belongs to you. No one else can give it to you.
But whatever the answer is, it leads back to the cells you’ve been imprisoned in before. The things you learned to tolerate. The things you stopped questioning. The alarms you trained yourself not to hear.
That’s why leaving a cell doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve escaped it. You can walk out of one prison and carry its architecture inside your head. You can even mistake that architecture for your own taste, your own judgment, your own idea of a good life.
There is a passage from T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men that captures something of this condition:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellarShape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
True escape, then, cannot happen without a kind of death.
Not physical death. The death of the person who lived in that cell. The person whose desires were shaped by its walls, whose fears adapted to its limits, and whose idea of comfort was built around what they had learned to endure.
To leave the cell for real, that person has to die, and someone else has to be born in their place.
And most people would rather remain prisoners than face the death of who they used to be.