I had a thought the other day about what it truly means to live in captivity. We use the term all the time, most frequently when we talk about animals in a zoo. I would say 80% of the time we probably use the term in a negative connotation as a synonym for trapped or unable to live freely. This is the point when I thought, perhaps many of us are living in captivity of the mind, we aren’t physically trapped, yet we cling to the life that keeps us safe and has as little risk as possible.
When it comes to human psychology, I always find the amount of people who live in the area they grew up in to be absurdly high. In fact not only do 40% of people never move from their hometown, but a much higher percentage ultimately return to spend the majority of their lives there. That always reminded me of the quote by the author Harun Yahya, which says “I always wonder why birds choose to stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth, then I ask myself the same question.” To that question I would probably say that it is somehow conditioned into us while we are being raised.
The ways and people we were raised around ultimately can dictate what our future experience will be like if we let it. Just like an animal that has been raised in captivity, can never be released back into the wild, in many ways we would not survive other ways of life without adapting on levels that most people wouldn’t be comfortable with. So we tell ourselves that our captivity is good for us and we never try to venture out and confront any other reality. Maybe we go on a vacation once or twice a year, but we stay in nice tourist areas that cater to our comforting needs.
The HBO television series based off of the 1970s movie, Westworld also questions the reality of what it truly is to be human. One of the creators comments on human perception and lifestyle by saying “Humans fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops, as tight and as closed as the hosts”. The truth is perhaps we are in just as much captivity as the animals we see at the zoo, conditioned to do our jobs and live in our own little world away from reality.
Animals in captivity tend to live much longer than those in the wild, mostly because they lack the risk of every day situations could arise there. As humans we do the same, we spend our lives avoiding risk so one day we can retire, own a nice house, nice things, ect. However I ask, is this truly living or is this what we have been conditioned to desire all along. Are we living in the captivity of a society that pushes us towards the wrong desires and ultimately takes much of what makes human beings, human beings, from us?
