I’m in a pretty dark mood, so let’s talk about dystopias.

For those familiar with the genre, here is a question for 2026: which dystopia are we more likely to inhabit?

George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?

Orwell feared a society ruled through surveillance and fear. Huxley imagined something that looked more pleasant on the surface, and was perhaps more seductive: a society in which people would be controlled through pleasure. They would be entertained, chemically soothed and given enough comfort that they would no longer feel the need to question anything.

At first glance, Orwell’s vision seems the more frightening of the two. But look a little closer.

There is something brutally obvious about oppression. When a boot is pressed against your neck, at least you know you are not free. Huxley imagined a world in which people had surrendered their freedom without noticing. They had traded it for convenience, entertainment and the promise of permanent happiness.

No one had to force them into submission. A mild, droning satisfaction was enough.

The world of Brave New World has solved many of the problems that have followed human beings throughout history.

There is little uncertainty. People are assigned a place in society and conditioned to accept it. They have work to do, pleasures to enjoy and products to consume. There was alot of consumption. Zero creation. Sex is abundant. Solitude is discouraged. Ageing, illness and emotional disturbance have been pushed out of sight.

Whenever discomfort appears, there is the drug soma. Soma is the perfect drug. It removes sadness and offers relief without consequence. A difficult feeling can be treated before difficult questions come up. 

This is what makes Huxley’s world so unsettling. The people in it are not obviously miserable. Most are content. They cannot understand why anyone would choose grief, loneliness, longing or uncertainty when those feelings can simply be removed.

John the Savage, the novel’s outsider and hero of sorts, rejects this bargain. He insists on the right to be unhappy. He claims the right to grow old, to become ill, and to experience fear, hunger and pain. It sounds absurd. Why would anyone fight for suffering?

But John understands that a life protected from all pain is also protected from much of what makes a life human. To love someone is to risk grief. To want something deeply is to risk disappointment. To create is to risk failure. To hold a principle is to accept that it may cost you something. Remove every form of discomfort and you do not create paradise. You create a life in which very little matters.

Like many dystopian novels, Brave New World is suspicious of books. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, another classic of the genre, in making books the central threat to the society it imagines.

Books are dangerous. “Words can be like X-rays,” one character says. “If you use them properly, they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”

A well-functioning dystopia cannot allow people to be pierced. It wants them stable. Predictable. Functional.

John’s encounter with Shakespeare gives him a language for feelings that the society around him has tried to eliminate. Through Shakespeare, he encounters beauty, jealousy, courage, shame, love, betrayal and death.

The words awaken something in him. They also make it impossible for him to accept the shallow emotional life of the world around him. This may be one of art’s most important functions. A novel, film, painting or piece of music can reveal something we have been trying not to know. It can disturb the story we tell about ourselves. It can give shape to a dissatisfaction we had previously experienced only as restlessness.

That experience is not always pleasant. But meaning rarely arrives as a pleasant idea. It often begins as an interruption. Something we have tolerated becomes intolerable.

The workplace has its own forms of soma.

They do not arrive in small tablets. They arrive through busyness, status, deadlines, performance measures and the reassuring momentum of a full calendar.

Work can keep us occupied enough that we never have to ask what the work is doing to us.

In Brave New World, society is organised around Ford. Mass production has become something close to a religion. Human beings are conditioned for particular roles, placed within a hierarchy and trained to perform their allotted function.

Even though the novel was published in 1932, there is a familair industrial logic to the way work is described. Break work into repeatable tasks. Remove variation. Standardise behaviour. Reward compliance. Treat the organisation as a machine and the employee as a component inside it.

That model created extraordinary productive capacity. It also shaped a view of work in which thought belonged to management and execution belonged to everyone else. The worker’s personality became a source of inefficiency. The best system was one in which people could be made interchangeable.

We may speak a different language now. We talk about culture, creativity, purpose and innovation. Yet the old machinery remains visible. Roles are still narrowed. People are still measured against templates. Professional success still depends, in many places, on becoming legible to a system.

The danger is not always that work becomes unbearable.Sometimes it becomes bearable enough to stop us asking whether it has any claim on us at all. A monthly salary can soothe the question. So can a promotion. So can professional prestige, another project or a new title. 

None of these things is inherently empty. But they can become a way of avoiding the more difficult encounter with ourselves. A life can be perfectly productive and still be profoundly unlived.

There is a story from Greek mythology about Procrustes (that I have explored in a previous essay), who offered travellers a bed for the night.

The guest had to fit the bed perfectly. If they were too tall, Procrustes cut off their legs. If they were too short, he stretched them.

We still build Procrustean beds. We create systems, technologies and institutions to serve human beings. Then, slowly, human beings are reshaped to serve the systems.

The person must fit the job description. The teacher must fit the metric. The patient must fit the process. The creative act must fit the platform. The human conversation must fit the allotted thirty minutes.

Technology is particularly good at making the bed look inevitable. Each new tool promises to remove friction. Faster answers. Easier decisions. Fewer mistakes. Less waiting. Less effort.

Gen AI now extends that promise into areas once thought distinctly human: writing, imagining, interpreting, advising and making sense of experience. The danger is not simply that machines will do more of our work. It is that they may remove more and more of the friction involved in doing the work.

Friction in some ways can be a good thing. The struggle to find the right words may clarify what we believe. Sitting with uncertainty may change the question. Wrestling with an idea may reveal that the first answer was too easy. A difficult conversation may ask more of us than efficiency ever could.

Every technology removes some burden. Huxley’s question is what happens when we remove so much difficulty that we also remove the encounter with ourselves.

Why is Brave New World a dystopia?

Its people are comfortable. They are entertained. They have work, pleasure and relief from emotional pain. But their happiness has cost them the inner conditions from which meaning grows.

They do not choose their lives in any serious sense. They do not wrestle with who they are. They do not have to confront longing, doubt or the possibility that the world around them is wrong.

There are many forms of soma now. Some arrive through a screen. Some through consumption. Some through work. Some through the stories we tell ourselves about being busy, successful and fine.

None is evil in itself. The danger begins when relief becomes a way of never hearing the questions that life is asking us

Huxley’s people were protected from misery. They were also protected from beauty, grief, solitude, love and the difficult knowledge that something might be missing.

Perhaps that is what Brave New World understood most clearly.A meaningful life may not always feel happy.

And a perfectly happy life may not be much of a life at all.

New episode alert!

Sita Sargeant has built her work around a simple question: Where are the women?

That question became the foundation of She Shapes History, a social enterprise making women’s history more visible, accessible and central to the way we understand Australia.

In the latest episode of Finding Meaning in Work, Sita and I talk about how the idea began, how it grew from a weekly walking tour into a national organisation, and what it means to build something with both purpose and ambition.

We also explore:
• Why the stories we tell about the past shape who is valued in the present
• The difference between seeing work as a job, a career or a calling
• The tension between meaningful work and overwork
• The loneliness that can come with being a founder and CEO
• Why leaders sometimes need to step back and let other people do their best work
• Why a meaningful life ultimately needs to be bigger than work alone
Sita is thoughtful, candid and refreshingly honest about the rewards and costs of building something that matters.

This is a conversation about history, identity, leadership, ambition and what it really means to find meaning in your work.

About Sita:

Sita Sargeant is a social entrepreneur, author, and one of Australia's leading voices in women's history. In 2021, she founded She Shapes History, a feminist experiences company on a mission to make women's history accessible, engaging, and relevant. They currently operate in four cities: Canberra, Sydney, Wollongong, and Melbourne, with plans to be in eight cities by the end of 2027.

In 2025, she published a book by the same name sharing the stories of over 250 women who helped shape 31 towns and cities across Australia. In 2026, she was named the ACT Young Australian of the Year. She was named the 2026 ACT Young Australian of the Year. She is a 2025 Snow Foundation Entrepreneur Fellow and AMP Foundation Tomorrow Maker, recognised through both the IGNITE (2025) and SPARK (2024) programs.