Book: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.

People usually mention Brave New World along with 1984, so I had this one in my list for a long time now. Now that I read it, I can totally understand why both books are “related”, even with complete different plots.

Brave New World is about a dystopian future where humans are created to be happy. Things are engineered, so people will not feel unhappy and stability of the society as a whole is maintained. I really enjoyed when some main characters are discussing the state of society and the trade-offs of stability on that world, to me, it’s the best part of the book.

The concept of death not being a big deal because “the collective prevails” is something interesting to think about. I’m not sure if it’s on purpose, but I didn’t care about the fate of the characters, so that kept me thinking about it.

Huxley mentions in a letter to Orwell that he sees society manipulating us in a way that we like it and feel happy about it. This is to me the most scary part of Brave New World: the fact that people are OK with the world in the way it is because they are actually happy about how they live their lives and very few of them actually question this.

This book is a classic and definitely makes you think. Totally recommended.

Here are my raw notes about the book:

  • That’s the secret. Making people like their unescapable path.
  • You can’t consume if you sit still reading books
  • The forgetting of the past and destruction of museums.
  • Death conditioning start at 18 months
  • 💭 The conditioning of people to like their work is an interesting concept. It’s like the society makes them like useless work to not focus on other things because they can be happy doing it. I feel happy doing programming and totally matches this description.