PHILOSOPHY

Why the Bluepill Dilemma Is Older Than Time Itself

Why taking the blue pill makes us happier and why we should still take the red one.

There is this one scene in the 1999 movie “Matrix”, when the protagonist stands before a choice: Take the red pill and see through the simulation of this world, but at the same time also see all the horrors it comes with or take the blue pill, forget all of this is a simulation and go on, living a happy life. Neo takes the red one.

I opened my laptop this morning and wanted to write a story for Medium.

And I wrote about two sentences, when I remembered that I wanted to research a new Note Taking App I recently heard of.

I want to move from Notion to a platform that values my privacy more and allows features normally only known from Obsidian.

The application I found is “Anytype” and it is simply amazing.

So what I ended up doing all day, was transferring my entire Notion Hub into Anytype, but of course, how could it be any different, there were problems and things didn’t work out the way I wanted them to.

I spend the whole day, trying to transfer my complex productivity system into a new app. And in the end, I did not even come close.

I wasted a whole day

And that is the fucking red pill I took.

I was happy until I learned about the price we pay for all the amazing free services we use.

I would happily continue using Notion, Google, WhatsApp, etc., but now these thoughts run through my head when I pick up my phone.

Meditation taught me not to get carried away by them, but they still bother me.

I noticed something when the blue and red pill analogy entered my mind

The dilemma is much, much older than 25 years.

The Bible described the life of Adam and Eva in Paradise as worryless, free, and happy. However, Eve takes the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and God punishes the humans, banning them from paradise and giving an even harder punishment to Eva for taking the fruit. Women will give birth under enormous pain from now on. All because Eva wanted to have a little knowledge of the world.

It was when I read “Sapiens”, that I saw a parallel between this biblical Genesis story and how we today see the development of the Homo Sapiens.

Throughout thousands of years, we developed bigger and bigger brains and heads, helping us to create fiction, make up the concept of good and evil, wrong and right, and me and you. This is the only difference to all the other animals: A bigger brain with more processing power.

However, it came at the price of egalitarian life in nature, creating big urban cities and economies that promote social injustice and oppression. And what most struck me, was that women suffer from the big heads they give birth to.

So maybe the Bible wasn’t that wrong after all, but we need to read in between the lines.

Evolution forced the red pill upon us and we took it. There is no way back to being hunters and gathers.

So maybe this was a bad deal, but I wouldn’t trade it back. Imagine a life without all the things our big heads created:

Literature and Art. Paintings, hundreds and thousands of them. Books, texts, essays, newspaper articles, poems, novels, and romances. Philosophy, logic, science, music, sports, and language.

I would not want to imagine a world without all of this beauty.

So I will continue to take the red pill, see the brutality of this world, and maybe trade it for a piece of my happiness. Why? Because in the end life is about experiencing as much as possible and seeing as much of this world as possible.

Without knowing what is wrong, we will never be able to make this world a better place.

Have a great day.