Function Is Not Freedom: How Modern Life Trains Us to Become Dependent Human Beings
- Brendan Myers
- 1 day ago
- 14 min read
Most people that have this feeling, do not describe it as a problem. They call it being tired. Or busy. Or slightly disconnected, though from what, they are not entirely sure. There is a gap between how full their days are and how much of what fills them, actually feels like their own - a gap that tends to widen, quietly, over years, without anyone naming it as a loss.
I have watched capable, well-intentioned people move further from their own centre without recognising it as movement. They produce more, respond faster, stay more connected, and at some point realise they cannot sit alone for ten minutes without reaching for something. They could not tell you, with any real confidence, what they actually think about much - as opposed to what they have absorbed. They are, by every visible measure, functioning. And they know, somewhere beneath that functioning, that something essential has gone quiet.
That gap is not accidental. It is what these systems produce when they operate as designed - and five decades of observable social behaviour make that case without requiring any particular theory. The erosion of independent judgement, practical self-reliance, and the capacity to tolerate discomfort tracks directly with the expansion of systems built to manage those functions on our behalf. The relationship is not coincidental. It is structural.
Function Is Not Freedom
The standard measure of whether a person is doing alright is still, in most contexts, whether they can keep going. Work attended. Bills paid. Messages answered. Nothing visibly catastrophic. By those measures, a great many people are fine. By other measures - inner coherence, the ability to sit quietly with themselves, the capacity to form an opinion before checking what the consensus is - the same people may be in significant difficulty that their own metrics cannot detect.
Modern systems have become sophisticated at managing the visible symptoms of human distress without addressing what is producing them. They can teach breathing exercises to the chronically anxious without examining why anxiety is so widespread. They can offer therapy to the burned-out without questioning the conditions generating the burnout. They can sell sleep supplements to the exhausted while leaving the architecture of exhaustion entirely intact.
This is not an accusation against every doctor, therapist, or practitioner working in these fields. Stabilisation is sometimes exactly what is needed. Professional support and the help of others are not the enemy here. The argument is narrower: management and liberation are not the same thing, and a culture that consistently mistakes one for the other gradually loses the capacity to offer the second.
The administrative view of a human life asks whether the person can function - whether they can return to work, manage their symptoms, meet their obligations. It is a legitimate question in a crisis. The problem is when it becomes the only question. When the ceiling of ambition for a human being is reduced to: can this person keep going?
Brendan Myers puts it plainly in The First Gate: the system does not need you whole. It needs you functional enough to keep participating. That is not paranoia. It is a description of what incentive structures produce. The sickness economy profits more from managed chronic conditions than from cured ones. The attention economy profits from people who cannot put their phones down. None of this requires anyone to have planned it. Systems reward what benefits them. What benefits them, here, is a population that remains productive, consuming, and dependent enough to need what the system sells.
Function, in that context, becomes a kind of trap with a comfortable interior. The person keeps going, is told they are doing well, receives the external markers of adequate performance, and may not have the occasion - or the silence - to notice what is quietly narrowing.
How Dependence Gets Built
Dependence does not arrive in one decision. It accumulates across many small ones, most of which seem not just reasonable but obviously sensible at the time.
Navigation apps really are more reliable than trying to read a map while driving. Ordering food does save time on a difficult week. Consulting a professional about something outside your knowledge is the intelligent call. None of these things is, in itself, the problem.
The problem is what accumulates when outsourcing becomes habitual rather than occasional - when the question "what do I think?" is consistently answered by checking what someone else thinks, when the body's signals are routinely overridden rather than heard, when the practical skills involved in feeding yourself, navigating, forming an independent opinion, or sitting with uncertainty quietly atrophy through disuse.
There is research to support the specific mechanism. Studies on GPS-dependent navigation have found reduced hippocampal engagement in people who rely consistently on turn-by-turn direction - the brain region involved in building internal spatial maps becomes less active when the external system does the work. The capacity weakens when the function is delegated. This is not unique to navigation. When cognitive and practical functions are consistently handed to external systems, the underlying capacity for those functions can diminish. Not catastrophically. Not immediately. But measurably, and cumulatively, across years.
What is less measurable but no less real is what this does to a person's relationship with their own authority. After enough outsourcing across enough domains - memory, navigation, opinion, food, entertainment, practical capability, emotional reassurance - independence begins to feel not just difficult but unnecessary. The expert, the algorithm, the crowd, the approved commentary: they know. Who am I to form a different view?
That is not wisdom. It is a pattern that has been trained into place, over time, by an environment that consistently rewards it.
The Habit of Asking Permission
There is a legitimate version of deferring to expertise. Most of us lack the knowledge to second-guess a structural engineer or a specialist physician, and acting as though we do not, would be foolish. The problem is not with seeking expert knowledge. The problem is when the habit of consulting external authority becomes so automatic that it extends far beyond where it makes sense. The Government and the mainstream media for example.
When people begin checking what others think before they have formed their own view. When they wait for cultural permission before acknowledging what they already feel. When they need to read the commentary before deciding what they think about something they have just directly experienced. At that point, the habit of deference has moved well past its useful domain and into territory where the person is actually capable of thinking - and, without necessarily noticing, has stopped.
The distinction worth recovering is between using expertise and outsourcing judgement. Using expertise means drawing on relevant knowledge to inform a decision you still own. Outsourcing judgement means handing the decision itself over, including the right to have made it. These feel similar from the outside. Inside, they are quite different. One leaves you with a view that has been informed by good information. The other leaves you without a view, dependent on whoever you consulted last.
What makes this worse is that the systems around us benefit from the second position. Someone who trusts their own judgement is harder to sell to, harder to manage, harder to steer through manufactured consensus. Someone who does not - who needs the institution, the algorithm, the influencer, the peer group to tell them what to think - is considerably more tractable. Not because these systems have conspired to produce that outcome, but because dependence on external authority serves them, and systems tend to reproduce what serves them.
What Gets Done With Attention
Everything described above operates, at its most basic level, through attention.
Attention is the filter through which a person constructs their understanding of what is happening. What you attend to consistently shapes what you think about. What you think about shapes what you feel. What you feel shapes what you do. If you can reliably direct what someone attends to - through fear, outrage, social comparison, the engineered reward cycle of checking and being acknowledged - you can exert consistent influence over their emotional state, their sense of what matters, and ultimately their behaviour.
This is not a theory. It is the commercial logic of every platform designed to keep you on it. The attention economy is built on the understanding that sustained emotional engagement keeps people returning. Not calm, not satisfaction, but provocation, comparison, alarm. Outrage cycles, algorithmically amplified conflict, the endless machinery of social approval and its implied withdrawal - these are features of systems whose economics require sustained attention, and sustained attention is most reliably produced through emotional stimulation rather than through genuine usefulness.
The person who has no practice of gathering and directing their own attention - who has never spent twenty minutes deliberately without algorithmic input, who does not know what their mind does when left alone - is more susceptible to having their priorities shaped from outside than someone who has. Not absolutely. Nothing overrides the will completely. But the gap between those two positions is real and it compounds over years.
What the old contemplative traditions understood, and what has largely been lost or commodified, is that deliberate stillness - silence, breath, prayer, time genuinely alone - is not decoration. It is the specific practice by which scattered attention is gathered and returned to the person who owns it. That these practices have mostly been replaced by trackable, sellable versions of "wellness" is worth sitting with for a moment.
The High-Output Hollow
There is one version of this worth naming specifically, because it is the version most likely to go unexamined.
A person can be fully functional by every external measure - meeting deadlines, maintaining relationships, keeping pace with their obligations - while simultaneously becoming someone who cannot tolerate five minutes of unstructured silence, who cannot distinguish their genuine preferences from their conditioned ones, who is emotionally reactive in ways they find hard to account for, and whose exhaustion is the particular kind that sleep alone does not resolve.
These two conditions can coexist for years. The external performance continues. The internal narrowing continues alongside it. Because the external performance is what generates praise, advancement, and the reassurance of continued adequacy, the internal narrowing goes unnoticed until it becomes severe enough to produce a crisis that the person, by that point, genuinely cannot explain.
Management culture, at its worst, actively produces this. It promotes mindfulness when mindfulness means returning to productivity faster. It encourages self-care when self-care means maintaining the capacity to keep producing. Some of these tools do reduce genuine suffering, and it would be dishonest to deny that. But their ceiling is stabilisation, and stabilisation is not the same as restoration. A person who has been helped to function more calmly inside deteriorating conditions has been helped. They have not been freed.
The productivity metrics cannot distinguish between resilience and trained tolerance of deterioration, between emotional regulation and the chemical or procedural management of states that are trying to signal something important. The person running on empty and the person genuinely well can look identical from the outside. Only one of them would be able to tell you, honestly, how they are.
What Becomes Available at the Lever
When dependence reaches a certain breadth, something shifts in a person's relationship to the systems around them. Not through any act of deliberate targeting. Not because anyone has planned something specific for any individual. But because dependence, as a condition, creates predictable leverage - and predictable leverage is useful to any interest whose preferred outcome is a particular behaviour.
Someone who cannot regulate their own fear can be reliably frightened. Someone who cannot tolerate silence can be kept perpetually occupied through stimulation. Someone who needs social approval can be steered by its implied withdrawal. Someone who has outsourced the practical capability to meet basic needs becomes vulnerable when access to the relevant services is conditional. Someone who has lost confidence in their own judgement will seek authority from outside and follow whichever source is most insistent or most convenient.
This does not require malicious intent. It is the natural output of incentive structures encountering a population with diminished inner capacity. The person who has retained some measure of self-command - who can sit with fear without immediately obeying it, form a view and hold it without constant validation, tolerate the discomfort of uncertainty without outsourcing it - is harder to steer. Not invulnerable. But harder. And that gap between the two positions is built, or eroded, in small increments across ordinary time.
This is one of the central recognitions in The First Gate: the first act of reclamation is not a protest or a dramatic gesture. It is returning to the seat of inner command - learning to observe your own state rather than being silently governed by it.
What Sovereignty Actually Is
The word sovereignty has gathered some company worth separating from the idea. Total withdrawal from society. Refusal of all professional support. Distrust of every institution. The performance of self-sufficiency as a personality trait. None of that is what is meant here, and none of it produces anything useful.
Sovereignty, in the sense used in The First Gate and in this article, means inner authority with responsibility. Nothing more dramatic, and nothing less demanding.
It does not mean rejecting expertise. It means receiving expertise as information to be weighed against your own judgement rather than as an instruction to follow without further thought. It does not mean disconnecting from technology. It means being capable of functioning without it, so that your relationship to it remains one of use rather than of need. It does not require self-sufficiency in any survivalist sense. It requires enough practical and inner capability that your participation in the systems around you represents a genuine choice rather than merely the only available option.
The realistic target is not independence from everything. It is enough recovered capacity that the dependencies you carry are chosen rather than structurally necessary. Enough stillness to notice where your attention actually goes. Enough practical competence to feel capable rather than permanently reliant. Enough confidence in your own judgement to form a view before checking whether the crowd agrees.
That is available to ordinary people living ordinary lives. It does not require a retreat, an extreme protocol, or any particular belief system. It requires honest noticing - of where the authority over your own life has been handed to something outside you, and whether you want some of it back.
Where to Actually Start \ Reclamation
The beginning is observation, not action. Before you change anything, map the territory honestly.
The First Gate includes a practice called the Outsourcing Inventory - a structured set of questions designed to show where sovereignty has been handed over, across the areas that most reliably accumulate unnoticed: how you form your views, how you respond to the body, what commands your attention, where you are waiting for someone else to act rather than taking the next responsible step yourself.
The principle is worth adapting without the full structure. Set aside twenty minutes without your phone. Ask yourself a few honest questions and write the answers down rather than just thinking them - thinking is easier to edit than writing.
Where do you let other people think for you, and which voices do you treat as automatically superior to your own? Where have you trained yourself to override your body's signals through scrolling, eating, stimulation, or constant movement? What emotion makes you most reliably susceptible to influence from outside - fear, outrage, the need for approval, shame? And where are you waiting for someone to come and sort something out that is actually yours to sort?
When you have the answers in front of you, do not collapse into self-recrimination. Shame is often another way to avoid moving. Pick one thing - one specific place where something has been outsourced that you could begin to recover - and do the smallest concrete action that begins to reverse it.
Turn off the notifications that reach you on someone else's schedule rather than your own. Form an opinion before you check what others think. Cook one meal without a screen. Walk somewhere without headphones. Sit in genuine quiet for ten minutes - not as a technique, not to optimise your focus, just as a decision to be alone with your own mind for a few minutes and see what is actually there.
Learn one practical thing you have been reliably handing over to someone else. Not to become self-sufficient. To have the experience of being capable of something you had quietly categorised as beyond you.
Choose the option you will actually do, not the one that sounds most committed. Reclamation is not measured by how serious the intention was. It is measured in what changes when the old habit asks for obedience again.
What This Is Actually About
The argument here is not that modern life is a conspiracy or that every system is designed to weaken you. It is more ordinary than that, and in some ways more uncomfortable.
Function and freedom are different states. Environments designed to keep people producing and consuming are not, by design, environments that develop inner capacity, independent judgement, or practical self-reliance. They reward the first set of qualities and have no particular incentive to cultivate the second. Over time, without deliberate effort in the other direction, the second set quietly diminishes.
A person can keep everything running - meeting obligations, managing appearances, holding the symptoms of whatever is accumulating at bay - and still have lost something worth recovering. Not because they have been destroyed or targeted, but because the ordinary pressure of modern life, accumulated across years, produces a narrower person than the one who arrived in it.
You do not have to refuse what modern life offers. But it is worth knowing which parts of yourself you handed over in accepting it - whether you meant to or not, and whether you would like any of them back.
From This Article: The First Gate
The First Gate: Declassified Consciousness Research, Ancient Gateways, and the Recovery of the Sovereign Self takes the questions raised here into practice. It examines how inner state governs perception and behaviour, how attention is recovered through deliberate practice, and how the work of inner command is rebuilt - not as philosophy but as daily conduct, grounded in breath, prayer, and action. It draws on declassified intelligence material, consciousness research, ancient tradition, and the neuroscience of state change. If what this article describes interests you, the book is where the practical work begins.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean to become psychologically dependent on systems you don't control? It means your capacity to function stays intact - you keep working, consuming, meeting obligations - while your capacity to act from your own judgement, regulate your own state, and make meaningful decisions without external input quietly contracts. The outer life keeps running. The inner range of motion narrows. Dependence of this kind rarely feels like loss. It usually feels like convenience, or just like normal life, until something removes the scaffolding and you discover how much weight it was bearing.
What is "the managed human"? The managed human is someone who has been conditioned - through environment, reward, and repeated experience rather than conscious choice - to seek permission from outside before trusting anything from within. They consult the institution on what is real, the algorithm on what matters, the crowd on what they are allowed to think. They are not weak or stupid. They are the predictable output of conditions that consistently reward outsourced authority and make independent operation feel unnecessary or risky.
What is the difference between management and liberation? Management stabilises the output. It reduces visible symptoms and returns the person to function. Liberation restores inner capacity - the ability to think independently, act from genuine authority, tolerate uncertainty, and live from something more than adaptive compliance. Management is sometimes necessary and can be genuinely valuable. The problem is when it presents itself as the horizon of what is possible, and when stabilisation is quietly treated as the same thing as restoration.
Is sovereignty the same as self-sufficiency? No. Sovereignty in this context means inner authority with responsibility - having enough inner and practical capability that your participation in systems represents a real choice rather than a structural necessity. Absolute self-sufficiency is neither the goal nor possible. The goal is a relationship with the systems around you in which you retain genuine agency, rather than one in which the alternative to total participation has become too unfamiliar to take seriously.
What is the difference between using expertise and depending on it? Using expertise means drawing on knowledge to inform a decision you still own. Depending on expertise means handing the decision itself over, including the right to have made it. The first is intelligent engagement with complexity. The second, applied broadly enough, produces a person without much that could honestly be called their own judgement. The question is not whether to use expertise - it is whether you remain the one who decides.
How does attention affect independent thinking? What you consistently attend to shapes what you think and feel, which shapes what you do. When the direction of your attention is reliably commanded from outside - through fear, outrage, comparison, or the approval and disapproval loops built into social platforms - those systems influence your emotional state and priorities in ways that are difficult to detect from inside the experience. Independent thinking requires the capacity to direct your own attention deliberately. That capacity can be developed or allowed to atrophy, like most things.
What is the first practical step toward less dependence? Honest observation before any change in behaviour. Map where your attention goes automatically, what decisions you outsource without pausing, what you genuinely could not manage without, and what emotional states make you most susceptible to external direction. One honest inventory of where sovereignty has been handed over is more useful than any resolution. From that map, choose one specific thing to begin recovering - the one you will actually do - and take the smallest step toward it.
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