cages or wings - which do you prefer?

Popular culture seems to agree with this view. Morning routines, writing routines, exercise routines—these are the blueprints of modern self-actualization, shared online one after another for a perpetually searching public. We study them like clues that may lead us to the correct way to be. The correct way to repeat ourselves.

thinking in categories would interfere with my ability to freely pattern-match

under capitalism, we all do live on a spectrum of captivity, with access to social and physical and intellectual stimuli unequally distributed. And thus we live on a spectrum of forced introspection, in which we ruminate on our own lives excessively because we do not have adequate access to external stimuli.