Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

I think Brave New World has aged better than any other dystopian political fiction. And that includes 1984.

Don’t get me wrong — 1984 was brilliant. Orwell nailed plenty of things that have lasted: doublespeak, the Two Minutes Hate, the surveillance state. But 1984 spoke to a specific moment in time, a specific threat (i.e., The Cold War & actual Soviet-style Communism). It was about totalitarianism, about Big Brother crushing dissent with boots and torture.

Brave New World sketched out a much more cohesive vision of the dangers facing the liberal, prosperous world order that we all benefit from.

And that danger isn’t authoritarianism. It’s comfort.

The Seeping Danger of Comfort

Huxley understood something we’re still figuring out: you don’t need to oppress people if you can distract them. You don’t need secret police if you have Soma.

Soma — the drug that keeps everyone in Huxley’s world detached from reality, perpetually distracted, always comfortable. It’s not forced on people. They want it. Life without it seems unbearable.

I’m not going to be that guy who rants about smartphones destroying civilization. I’m a huge fan of technology. But we do carry devices offering infinite distraction. We have streaming services designed to keep us watching forever. Apps engineered to be addictive. Entire industries built around keeping us comfortable and just detached enough from reality that we never quite engage with it fully.

That’s the thing about Brave New World. It doesn’t imagine a future where we’re oppressed. It imagines one where we’re so comfortable we don’t care enough to resist anything.

Why I Came Back to This Book

I first read Brave New World in high school. Thought it was fine. Interesting, I guess. But obviously teenage me thought 1984 was way cooler — more dramatic, more rebellious, more important.

I read it again recently and was surprised by how much better it held up.

There are plenty of books that don’t age well. Books that felt profound at sixteen but seem dated or shallow now. This isn’t one of those books.

Brave New World feels like it was written yesterday. It’s surprisingly accessible and well-written for something from 1932. The prose is clean, the ideas are sharp, and the world Huxley created is both alien and uncomfortably familiar.

What Makes It Relevant Now

Here’s what struck me on the re-read: we’re not headed toward 1984. We’re already living in Brave New World.

We don’t have a boot stamping on a human face forever. We have algorithmic feeds optimized to keep us scrolling. We don’t have Thought Police. We have influencers and parasocial relationships and platforms designed to keep us just engaged enough to stay but never quite connected enough to matter.

We don’t need to be forced into compliance. We choose it. We choose comfort. We choose distraction.

And unlike the overt oppression in 1984, this kind of thing is much harder to fight. How do you resist something that feels good?

Worth Reading

If you haven’t read Brave New World, read it. If you read it in high school, read it again. You’ll see different things now.

It’s not a perfect book. But it’s held up remarkably well. And it might give you a different lens for looking at all the comfortable distractions we’ve built for ourselves.