The Invisible Prison

The best prisons (or is it worst?) don't have walls.

They have Netflix autoplay. And Instagram feeds. And great insurance and free coffee in that comfortable job you're too scared to leave.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky knew what was up when he wrote:

After all, the man left a great engineering job, followed his passion, and served eight years in a Russian gulag.

Some say it was four years of hard labor, not eight. The point is, the man thought it better to clean toilets, malnourished, diseased, and freeze his junk off rather than get a free gym membership from his job.

The funny thing is, when Dostoyevsky wrote about prisons, he wasn't just talking about iron bars and concrete walls. He saw something more subtle and dangerous - something we live through now.

And it doesn't matter where you are. Beijing, Mumbai, Dubai, Lagos—same trap, different decoration.

Look around. The bars are invisible, but they're everywhere:

You're scrolling through Instagram, thinking you're choosing what to watch. But that algorithm chose for you hours ago. It knows exactly what will keep you scrolling just a little longer. Just one more reel. One more post. It's Hotel California—once you enter, you can't leave.

In a sense, you are Dostoyevsky, and the phone is your gulag.

Take food delivery apps. "I'm too busy to cook," you tell yourself, ordering a $20 pad thai for the third time this week. The app knows your usual orders and your favorite restaurants. Two taps and dinner's solved. No thinking about recipes, no grocery shopping, no cleaning up. Pure convenience.

But this comfort comes at a price—not just money, but the slow death of basic life skills. The ability to feed yourself becomes a forgotten art, replaced by the inviting glow of delivery tracking screens.

This is the comfort trap. And we're all in it in a never-ending cycle. Because we don't even realize we're in it.

But there's hope and a final escape plan (if I’m being optimistic). And it starts simple:

Open your eyes. Open your mind.

That's when the prison walls become visible.

Maybe it hits you when Netflix asks "Are you still watching?" for the third time. Or when you realize your "dream job" is a better-decorated cell. These moments of clarity are dangerous to the system. They're cracks in the illusion.

Like when Neo in The Matrix suspects something is off.

The most successful prisons of our time aren't built with steel and concrete. So we don't have to Shawshank Redemption it. They're built with convenience, routine, and monthly subscriptions and maintained by algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves. And sustained by our fear of discomfort.

Your comfort zone might be the most elegant prison ever built. But remember, you have the key. You always did. You just misplaced it.

You can always buckle down, dig through the dirt, and find it. And escape the prison, the comfort trap, whenever you want.