Welcome to By the Books, a newsletter dedicated to capturing and distributing wisdom from works of classic literature.
Each post will take less than 5 minutes to read, and will feature one great book, including:
A brief summary
A distillation of relevant themes
One actionable insight
Live by the best books, one day at a time.
“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
In lieu of a plot summary of this prescient and popular classic, I’m going to instead copy and paste a thematic summary that I wrote in a post on my other publication more than a year ago:
Brave New World, is about a society of decadent abundance. There are some “uncivilized” people living less abundantly on what are basically reservations, but the general population doesn’t think about them much. They’re too busy eating, drinking, and being merry. And we’re given to understand, by the end, that their blithe, unending circus of pleasure is totally self-perpetuating. There can be no hope of a revolution. The system wins. The end.
I’m hardly the first to point out that this reads like a pretty accurate description of western civilization.
If consumerism is the religion of our modern era, instant gratification is its holy sacrament, distributed by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zukerberg, high priests of this great and abominable church.
“I don't want comfort.
I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness.
I want sin.”
Actionable Insight*
In Brave New World, the population is pacified with an abundant and freely available drug called soma. It pacifies conflict. It cures depression. It ends suffering.
Sound familiar? We’ve all got an infinite supply of this stuff in our pockets. But instead of ‘soma,’ ours is digital dope. Most people (myself included) are conditioned to reach for it before the onset of even the slightest twinge of boredom, anxiety, or any other type of psychological (or even physical) discomfort.
But the thing about life is it’s inherently uncomfortable. As Adam Miller explains, “suffering is a natural fact…of the material order.”
In other words, discomfort is where all the living happens.
We all know it feels good to feel good and it feels bad to feel bad. But we also know where the path of least resistance leads.
So put down the digital dope, and embrace a little discomfort.
*As a lover of literature, I must emphasize that the best way to truly absorb the wisdom of any work of literature is to actually read it, from start to finish, the way the author intended. I hope By the Books will occasionally inspire you to do just that.
Every time I'm waiting l, I auto-pull my phone out to fill the space. Sometimes I realize what I'm doing and am blown away at how hard it is to just NOT look at my phone when there is nothing else to do. Those circuits are deep!
This does resonate today! I’ve recently had a difficult medical diagnosis and have been pretty (and I think wisely) permissive with myself in terms of distraction. however, I’ve been realizing it’s going too far. I need to cull a bit of the digital dopamine to face what I’m dealing with in a way that will, in the end, suit me much better. So thanks for a timely reminder. :)