Humanity has a tendency to stray away from suffering and discomfort if given the opportunity, but protecting ourselves from these strong emotions typically comes with a cost. The loss of a loved one is heart wrenching and nearly unbearable, but is it worth having never loved in the first place? Sexual frustration can drive a person crazy, but is it worth eliminating by making sex meaningless? Delayed gratification is tedious and frustrating, but aren’t the most rewarding things in life the ones we have to invest vast amounts of time and effort towards?

Dystopian universes like Huxley’s Brave New World, Louis Lowry’s The Giver, or Rush’s 2112 show us that peace is not a difficult thing to achieve. In order to reach it, we simply have to give up everything worth fighting for. But, as the protagonists in each universe discover, it is in such things that we find the most meaning. They realize that peace in a world worth living is impossible, because the things that make life fulfilling are the things we would lay down our lives to protect. As John put it:

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

While it is safe to say we have not desensualized our lives to the point of Huxley’s world, it seems like our final destination might be rather similar. Given that, there are many lessons we can all learn from the warnings of these dystopian authors.

Firstly, we live in an age where everyone can sit behind the anonymity of their screen and create whatever facade for themselves they want. Many will scroll through the feeds of their friends and see what glamorous lives they’re all living. They then become depressed and anxious that they themselves are not doing anything meaningful. We must remember that we all only put what we want others to see online. We create a persona of what we wish our lives to be, not what they really are every day. When people can simply portray images of what they want others to see of them on social media, it’s important to remember that:

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Next, it is important for us to spend our time doing meaningful and passionate activities. Where short term indulgences are all around us, we must look past them and rely on delayed gratification. While it’s nearly impossible to never partake in the temptations of hedonism our technology offers, we can certainly limit ourselves. We are all limited to one chance on Earth. Squandering it away in frivolities is one of the worst disservices we can do to ourselves. As Daniel Keyes writes in Flowers for Algernon:

“I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.”

Another problem plaguing the modern man is our inability to distinguish what is relevant to our lives in an age where we are flooded with constant information. With the news and entertainment of an entire world being constantly shown to us, it can be an exhausting task to sift through it in search of what actually matters to you. This is a rather unprecedented problem for humanity to overcome and my only advice is to try discerning for yourself what information merits you spending your time on. In the days of celebrities in politics, fake news, and alternative facts, it is worth keeping in mind:

“[M]ost of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Finally, we should never give up the things that we are most passionate about in life simply because we are afraid of how much they may hurt us. When we dull ourselves to the point of never being hurt, we simultaneously make life more meaningless. The novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky once wrote:

“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.” ―Notes from Underground

Allowing ourselves to be passionate and let things close to our heart will inevitably result in pain and hardships at one point or another, but the consequence of never allowing ourselves to feel pain is a punishment far worse than any heartache could ever bring: a life void of meaning.