How Our Lucidity and Free Will Are Being Stolen — and What It Takes to Make Conscious Choices

Attention, conformity, adaptability: the new chains of proclaimed autonomy

1. Platforms want our attention: time diversion as the dominant economy

We live in an economy where attention is the raw material. Digital platforms don’t just offer content; they are actively designed to make it difficult for us to turn away from it.

Every second spent scrolling, every click, every emotional reaction becomes an involuntary act of production, feeding business models built on capturing as much available time as possible. Persuasive design, constant notifications, short-form videos—everything is optimized to maintain a state of mental availability, but never true freedom.

Hyper-connected youth are the perfect targets. Far from encouraging autonomy, these interfaces create environments where choices are already guided, and where reflexivity is short-circuited by immediate gratification.

Attention has become a capital to be exploited, not a capacity to be cultivated.

2. Schools want our conformity: education as normative adjustment

Despite its discourse on innovation and personal growth, the school system remains largely structured around an implicit goal: producing individuals compatible with the existing order. This is done through standardized assessments, the hierarchy of academic tracks, repetitive instructions, and, above all, the valorization of “readable” and “useful” trajectories.

Under the guise of equal opportunity, education molds students to fit into predefined frameworks, rather than teaching them to interrogate them. Orientation is rarely approached as a reflective process, but rather as a form of rationalized sorting.

Even well-intentioned support structures are often shaped by paternalistic or maternalistic logics: students are guided, reassured, advised… but rarely truly equipped to think the world critically.

Conformity becomes the price of recognition, and critical thinking an anomaly that is tolerated—but rarely encouraged.

3. The labor market wants our adaptability: flexibility as contemporary dogma

The word “adaptability” now dominates HR rhetoric, career guidance materials, and job interviews. Young people are no longer asked what they want to do, but what they can take on. The underlying message is clear: you must change, pivot, bounce back, and accept uncertainty as a permanent condition.

In this paradigm, the individual becomes a reactive actor, expected to mold themselves into a shifting environment. They are not asked to anticipate or resist, but to self-optimize in order to remain employable.

Here lies the major shift:
Career orientation is no longer about building a project, but about managing imposed instability—a survival skill that often comes at the cost of meaning, joy, or coherence.

Adaptability is held up as a supreme virtue, when in reality it is often a forced response to a system that abdicates its responsibility.

4. Who wants our lucidity? Restoring critical meaning to decision environments

This is the uncomfortable question—and one that too often remains unanswered.

Because no major player in our current system seems to benefit from individuals becoming truly lucid:

• not the platforms, which would face a mass exodus of critical users

• not the schools, which would be forced to fundamentally reform

• not the labor market, which would have to reckon with more demanding, less compliant workers

And yet, lucidity is the precondition for real freedom, not a luxury reserved for the enlightened. It requires understanding what influences, shapes, and limits our choices. It involves both personal introspection and a collective transformation of the environments where decisions are made. It cannot be decreed from above; it must be cultivated.

It is not autonomy we should prioritize, but our capacity to grasp the conditions under which autonomy becomes possible.

Changing the question

Instead of teaching how to make the right choices, we must teach how choices are made.

That is where orientation, education, and even technology could become levers of emancipation—if they cease to function as flow management systems, and become spaces for rebuilding meaning.

So yes, the question “What do you want to do later?” still has value—
but it now must pass through another:

What are you willing to resist, here and now?