Destined to Divide. The Choices we Never Made.

VICTORIA WESTERGAARD

Most of the readers of this paper are likely university students as I am, recent graduates now employed, or perhaps still finding their footing in the post-graduation frenzy. The kind of people, who over a dinner or a pint at the pub, brace themselves for that inevitable, dreaded question of: “What are you planning on doing with your life now?”

For the economics and finance students, the answer rolls of their tongue with a practised ease; “Just boring finance stuff,” they smirk as they slip into a well-rehearsed complaint about their hours before carefully comparing starting salaries. But for the philosophers, anthropologists, and political theorists, the question is far thornier. A flicker of panic might cross their faces as they stumble through their answer, offering one that never quite satisfies the person who asked, and suddenly, it feels as though an invisible divide has ruptured the dinner table.

At university, we don’t feel too dissimilar. We trudge the same campus paths, study in the same library corners, and complain about the same looming deadlines, but graduation has a way of reshaping us, or perhaps just exposing the barriers that were always there. Our social circles start narrowing, surrounded with people from our chosen fields who share eerily similar perspectives on life. The heartless banker, the empathetic social worker, the restless academic… are these stereotypes born out of our career choices, or were we destined to fall into these roles; born and raised with perspectives that we continually search to affirm.

What if these divides don’t occur in the workforce, but much earlier in our childhood, etched into our minds deeper by the very subjects we choose to study in our teens and twenties? Could our university years not only prepare us for careers, but also act as years of diligent tending and nursing to our sacred perspectives of reality itself - which ultimately aren’t shaped by our proclaimed “truly insightful” seminars or lectures, but were rather there all along.  And what happens when we’re forced to confront the ultimate question about reality: what if it doesn’t matter at all? 

Imagine this: a machine that can deliver your perfect life… adoration, fame, fulfilment, power; every desire fulfilled, every pleasure maximized, you can love and be loved back, end world hunger, or become the leader in your field of choice, all whilst feeling as though you’re actually doing it, “from the inside”. 

The catch? 

None of it is real. You’re plugged into a machine, your brain flooded with signals convincing you of reality, and you’ll never know otherwise. 

The experiment, first proposed by philosopher Robert Nozick, is simple: Would you plug in? It is a question designed to unearth our deepest values - if life’s purpose is happiness, the answer should be obvious - yes, plug in! Yet, most people instinctively recoil, as reality itself matters to us infinitely more than just pleasure. 

Are humans truly hedonistic - do we live purely for the highs of pleasure and avoidance of pain? It turns out that we don’t. Even when offered paradise, most of us reject it. There must be something about reality so sacred to humans, that we’d rather endure any imperfections than trade it for an idealist illusion, but what is it?

And what if I told you that our response to this question is not as universal as it seems? That your decision to plug in or not, might just be because you are innately human, but because of who you are, deep down.

The Experiment.

I decided to put this theory to test. Gathering 19 participants; friends, family, and acquaintances from a range of disciplines and ages, most in their early 20s, I asked them questions to confront Nozick’s experiment. Their answers were as illuminating as they were unsettling.

To begin, I asked my participants if they value “real” experiences over simulated one's, and the answers were completely consistent; not a single person dismissed reality as unimportant, or claimed indifference. A staggering 73.7% said it was very important their experiences be real - the remaining 26.3% answering somewhat important. This was a rare, unifying moment, and proof that deep down humans value the sacredness of the real.

However, when asked whether happiness and pleasure are the most important factors in determining a good life, it became increasingly fragmented. Whilst the majority agreed, with 52.6% answering they strongly agree, and 21.1% agreeing, among those who disagreed, they painted a more complex picture. Disagreement correlated strongly with fields of economics, engineering, and data science, with these disciplines being known to prize practical problem-solving over philosophical reflection, emphasising chaos, achievement, unpredictability, over considerations of happiness. Their answers hinted at something deeper already – a divide in how we define a life “worth living”.

But when I posed the ultimate question: “Would you enter the machine?”, all remaining unity shattered. Only 21.1% said yes, and among the four individuals willing to plug in, three studied empirical disciplines like data science/medical science, and economics. In my personal knowledge of them, they share traits of realism, pessimism, and even a simmering disillusionment with the world. 

One of the most fascinating responses came from a family member in his 50’s who chose to enter the machine. Reflecting on his decision, he said: “There’s a high likelihood that I would have had more faith in everything going to plan in my 20s, so I wouldn’t have needed the machine then. Probably age and suffering are predicting factors.”

His response was a stark reminder that optimism isn’t a constant - it erodes with time and experience. Meanwhile, my grandfather in his 70s who declined to enter the machine had a chilling rationale on what might have convinced him to: “The most appealing part of it would be the end of the human world.”.

My grandfather’s perspective revealed just how deeply age shapes our worldview and can destroy roots that once were impenetrable. Through his disillusionment with the modern world, he had transformed the machine into an escape hatch away from a reality beyond saving.

CHAOS VS. CONNECTION

The participants who rejected the machine were just as fascinating as those who accepted it, but their reasonings couldn’t have been more different. Whilst approximately half justified their answer through prioritising human connection and authenticity, much of the other voices craved chaos in the pursuit of achievements.

Students in humanity-centred fields like law, politics, and business were deeply concerned with the relational aspects of life; A 21-year-old law student answering:  “Happiness is relative - without some ‘real world’ experience and hardship, it would be difficult to appreciate happiness on its own.” 

Another politics student echoed this sentiment, rejecting the machine for its inability to replicate genuine emotional connections:  “I don’t think the perfect life I created would make me genuinely happy, so it would be pointless because it’s fake.”

For these individuals, happiness was not an isolated feeling but something deeply intertwined with connections, and the felt contrast between highs and lows. The machine, no matter how perfectly programmed, they believed couldn’t simulate that.

In contrast, participants from empirical fields approached the question with a more analytical lens. Their rejection of the machine had little to do with authenticity or relationships, and everything to do with challenge - 20-year-old data science student declaring: “I need chaos to thrive. The machine wouldn’t give me the unexpected drawbacks that life brings. It doesn’t promote chaos—my life currently promotes chaos.” 

Another economics student, 20, agreed, emphasizing the importance of “curveballs” in life: “Sometimes you want life to throw curveballs at you to see how you’d react and become more self-aware. Life would be boring if you knew everything that would happen.” 

When I pressed him further, pointing out that the machine could be programmed to include curveballs, he replied: “AI can’t program things the way real life can. AI is based on stuff that’s already happened—it can’t create completely new things with no data behind them.” 

This response revealed something profound: that for these participants, chaos wasn’t just a feature of life, it was its essence. Their aversion to a world devoid of unpredictability suggests not just mere preference, but a fundamental fear of stagnation, where meaning dissolves in the absence of struggle.

THE MACHINE IS ALREADY HERE

But here is where it gets interesting. While most participants rejected the machine, we’re already living in a world that eerily resembles it. Social media, virtual reality, and AI have blurred the line between the real and the artificial, allowing us to construct, edit, and optimize our online presences in an illusion of control over reality itself.

We don’t need to be plugged into a high-tech machine to live in a simulation; we curate one for ourselves every day. We cherry-pick which moments to share and which flaws to erase, presenting not our reality, but a loosely related version of it. 

We imagine the perfect balance of chaos and control, aestheticized spontaneity in meticulously crafted photo-dumps with the perfect balance of scenery and friends. It is messiness, but only the kind that photographs well. We claim to adore imperfections, (but really only the ones which have been reframed, softened, the one's which are not quite real…)

Would the economics student who claims to “crave real-world struggles” log off Instagram where they rely on reels as a form of comfort, and would the data scientist who craves chaos delete TikTok where the algorithm serves plattered dopamine tailored exactly to his taste...  Is this not what they claimed to despise? The very people who insist they reject artificiality and preordained realities are also the ones who willingly engage with them… everyone does, perhaps not in the dramatic form Nozick imagined, but in the subtle, insidious way that modern technology demands our attention – persistent, unrelenting, and almost impossible to ignore. 

If we were truly so committed to reality, wouldn’t we act like it? Perhaps reduce our social media intake, maybe step outside and away from EatingWithTod’s endless reels, abandon the algorithms, and embrace life in its raw, unoptimized imperfection? 

The machine isn’t a dystopian future - it’s already here. We are all half-plugged in, not because we were forced, but because we have chosen the version of it that feels the least artificial. Regardless of whether we claim to fight it, we indulge in the very illusion we pretend to resist, as it feels impossible not to.

What Does This Say About Us?

By the time we sit down at that dinner table and face the inevitable question, “what are you doing with your life?”, the answer has already been written. Not in the sense of fate, but in the deeply ingrained ways we perceive reality, long before we consciously make our choices.

Economists, with their cold logic, are primed for synthetic hedonism. Lawyers, with their obsession for struggle and meaning, are wired to reject it, and geographers, with their logic and confusion at the burning planet, cling to authenticity as if it’s all they have left. The philosophers however, intellectualize it all from the comfort of their armchairs, already half-embedded in the fake world they claim to fear. The lives we lead, though unpredictable in detail, are preordained in essence, shaped by the lenses through which we view the world - this became glaringly evident in the responses I observed. 

When we find ourselves, decades later, at a work party nodding in agreement with those in our field, sharing uncannily similar worldviews, this won’t be mere coincidence. We all fight against the pull of the machine, against the homogenization of thought, and cling to the divisions that bind us - perhaps revealing the machine’s greatest paradox; that it fragments us in our choices, yet in that fragmentation, it unites us in a shared illusion of choice.

The machine isn’t just a thought experiment. It’s a mirror. And perhaps the question isn’t whether we’d plug in, but whether we ever were truly unplugged in the first place.