the cage

may 8, 2026

we built it. we can't leave it. we can only optimize the wheel we run on inside it. a framework for the people who are still mad they're alive in the modern world.

There is a metaphor I have been running on for a few months now. I want to write it down because the metaphor changes how I see almost everything.

The metaphor is the cage.

Humans, over the course of about 12,000 years, built a cage around themselves. The cage is what we call society. It includes language, agriculture, schools, currency, contracts, mortgages, ad markets, dating apps, college admissions, and 30-second TikTok videos. We built it incrementally. Each piece of it was a solution to a real problem. Each piece of it also moved us slightly further away from the way our bodies were built to live.

Hunter-gatherers did not have this problem. Their daily lives were aligned with their biology. They walked. They lifted. They ate when food was available. They slept when it got dark. They lived in tribes of 50 to 150. They knew the people in their tribe. They had problems but the problems were the problems their bodies had evolved to solve. Find food. Avoid the lion. Bury the dead.

We are not them anymore. We are descended from them but we live in the cage they did not build. The cage is artificial. The cage is also inescapable. You cannot leave it without dying.

This is the part most people miss when they read about hunter-gatherers and decide modern life is the problem. Just go live in the woods. The woods are not the woods anymore. The land is owned. The food is regulated. The "off-grid" influencer still needs an Amazon delivery to maintain the cabin. There is no exit. The cage is the world.

What you can do — what I think is the only thing you can actually do — is optimize the wheel you run on inside the cage.

This essay is about how I think about that. It is the most useful framework I have arrived at in two years of writing about my own life, and I want to put it down so I can refer back to it.

the misalignment

The reason modern life feels hard for so many people, in ways that hunter-gatherer life didn't, is that our biology evolved to solve a different set of problems than the ones we now face.

Your body wants you to walk eight hours a day. You sit. Your body wants you to live among the same 50 people for 60 years. You scroll Instagram. Your body wants you to eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full. You eat scheduled meals around an arbitrary calendar built for an industrial workday.

Modern life has installed a series of artificial solutions to maintain the alignment your body wants. The gym is the artificial solution to the you-should-walk-eight-hours-a-day problem. Social clubs are the artificial solution to the you-should-be-in-a-tribe problem. Cooking is the artificial solution to the you-should-be-foraging problem. Therapy is the artificial solution to the you-should-have-a-trusted-elder-to-talk-to problem. Reading is the artificial solution to the you-should-be-learning-from-stories-around-a-fire problem.

Each of these solutions works. The gym actually reduces all-cause mortality by 20%. The book club actually replaces some of what the tribe used to do. Therapy actually heals some of what an unbroken extended family used to repair. The fact that the solutions are artificial doesn't make them worthless. They are necessary.

What the solutions don't do is remove the cage. They make the cage livable. The wheel still spins. You still run on it. The trick is to run on a wheel that fits the body you actually have.

Most people pick a wheel by accident. They take the wheel their parents had. They take the wheel their high school pointed them at. They take the wheel their college major prepared them for. The wheel may or may not fit. If it doesn't fit, the misalignment shows up as the kind of low-grade unhappiness that you can't quite explain and that no amount of mindfulness app subscriptions will fix.

You can pick a better wheel. That's the project. The project is the project for the rest of your life.

the wheel and the rat

There is a related image I think about. We are all rats running on different wheels in different cages.

I do not mean this in a degrading way. I mean it operationally. Every person you meet is running on a wheel. The wheel is the configuration of activities, relationships, jobs, hobbies, and goals that they have organized their life around. The wheel keeps them moving. The wheel may or may not be a wheel they consciously chose.

The cage is the cage. We share the cage. None of us picked it.

The wheels are different. The hedge fund analyst is running on a make-numbers-go-up wheel inside a finance cage. The teacher is running on a kids-learning wheel inside an education cage. The startup founder is running on a ship-product wheel inside a tech cage. The artist is running on a make-stuff-real wheel inside a creative cage. All of these wheels are inside the larger cage of being a 21st-century human with a phone and a body. None of them escapes the larger cage.

What changes between people is which wheel. And the wheel is something you can pick, even though most people don't realize they're picking.

When I judge other people for the wheel they're on — when I look at the Foster kids who are going to take the Big Four accounting jobs and live in Bellevue and think that's a worse life — I am doing two things wrong. I am pretending my wheel is objectively better when it is just a different wheel I happen to like more. And I am ignoring the fact that they are in the same cage as me, just running differently.

The framework that emerges from this: don't argue about whose wheel is better. Argue about whether the wheel you're on is the wheel you picked.

The Foster kid on the accounting wheel is fine if he picked the wheel. He is not fine if his parents picked the wheel and he never thought about it. The artist on the make stuff wheel is fine if she picked it. She is not fine if she picked it because she was scared of math.

The diagnostic isn't what wheel. The diagnostic is did you pick it.

the plinko ball

The other thing this framework gives me — and the reason I think it is more useful than the alternatives — is a clearer view on free will and determinism.

The framework I run on is: life is mostly determined, and we should pretend it isn't anyway.

The determined part is the part most people don't want to look at. You did not choose to be born. You did not choose your parents, your country, your race, your family's class, your native language, your neuroticism, your IQ, your face. By the time you were old enough to make choices, the most important parts of your life had already been chosen for you. The Dutch Hunger Winter studies show that babies whose mothers were starving in the third trimester are 50 times more likely to be obese as adults. That is an epigenetic decision made before the kid was born. Most decisions are like that. The Plinko ball drops from the top of the board and bounces through the pegs and ends up where it ends up. The ball does not choose the pegs.

This is the determinist view. It is roughly correct.

The reason I do not actually live as a determinist, even though I think determinism is true, is that acting as if you have free will produces a better life than acting as if you don't. If you believe you can't change anything, you don't try. If you don't try, you definitely don't change anything. The determinist view is true at the species level and useless at the individual level. So you delude yourself into believing in free will for practical purposes.

The benefit of holding both at once — life is determined AND I should act as if I have free will — is that it changes how you treat other people. When someone is cruel, or stupid, or insufferable, you do not have to hate them. You can see the Plinko ball. The pegs they bounced through made them what they are. Most of what they did was not their choice. The choice they did have — at the margin — they used badly, and that's worth noting, but the bulk of what they are was made by pegs you didn't see.

This makes it easier to set boundaries without holding grudges. You can avoid an insufferable person without believing they are evil. They are the product of their pegs. I do not have to subject myself to them. I also do not have to hate them.

I have been running on this version of the framework for about a year. It has reduced the amount of judgment I carry around by roughly half. The other half is judgment I am still working on.

how to pick people

If the framework above is correct, then the question of who to be close to becomes a different question.

Most people pick friends by accident. They take the friends their school sat them next to. They take the friends their job introduces them to. They take the friends their partner brings into the relationship. The friends may or may not be friends they would have chosen if the choice had been conscious.

The conscious choice — the friends-as-deliberate-portfolio choice — is something I am still learning how to do.

The criteria I have arrived at, after about a year of trying to be more intentional, are three:

Passionate. The person is animated by something. It doesn't have to be the thing I'm animated by. What matters is that they are animated. The opposite of passionate isn't calm. The opposite is bot. Most people are bots, in the sense that they are running on autopilot without an explicit thing they care about. Bots make fine acquaintances. They do not make fine close friends.

Curious. The person asks questions. They do not just wait for their turn to speak. They want to know what you think and they will keep asking until they have understood you, and they will hold what you said and refer back to it three weeks later. Curiosity is rare. It is the most underrated trait in adult social life.

Open-minded. The person can hold a position and update it when new evidence comes in. The closed-minded version says this is what I think and pulls the position out every time the topic comes up. The open-minded version says here is what I think, let me hear you, oh that's interesting, I want to think about it some more. This is also rare.

These three criteria — passionate, curious, open-minded — let me find the people I should be spending time on. Without the criteria, I default to whoever is around. With them, I have a filter.

A note on what the criteria are not. They are not agrees with me. They are not shares my interests. They are not is impressed by what I do. I have made the mistake of using those as criteria. They produce friendships that feel good in the moment and shallow over time. The three criteria above produce friendships that feel uncomfortable in the moment and deep over time.

I have one analogy I keep coming back to. It is from food. I don't care about the specific ingredients of the dish someone is cooking. I care about technique and passion for the dish they chose to cook. The hedge fund analyst can be a worthy close friend if she runs her wheel with passion, curiosity, and openness. The artist can be a bot if she runs her wheel without them. The criteria are wheel-agnostic. They are about how someone is running, not what they're running on.

the compartmentalization move

The other move I think the framework points to is one I learned recently and have been trying to practice.

You don't have one friend group. You have many.

Most people try to have the friend group. The one set of people who know all the parts of you. The integrated social life. This is the way it was for most of human history, when you lived in a tribe of 50 to 150 and everybody knew everybody. The integrated tribe was the default.

In a modern cage, the integrated tribe is rare and probably impossible. The people who like to play poker do not also like to read philosophy. The people who do philosophy do not also work in finance. The people you build with do not also want to talk about your faith. Each context has its own social fabric. Trying to merge them is a category error.

The fix is to compartmentalize. Poker friends. Philosophy friends. Work friends. Church friends. Build friends. Each group gets a different version of you. None of the groups gets the integrated version, because the integrated version doesn't exist socially — it only exists internally.

This sounds lonelier than it is. The lonely version is I have no one who really knows me. The compartmentalized version is I have many people who know one true piece of me, and the integration is my own work. The latter is harder. The latter is also closer to honest.

A side effect of compartmentalization is that you will alienate some people in each group by sharing the wrong parts of yourself in the wrong context. The poker group does not want to hear about Beauvoir. The Christian group does not want to hear about ad hooks. The Foster group does not want to hear about Halmeoni. You have to learn what to share where. Sharing the wrong thing in the wrong room is the most common social mistake I make. The framework gives me at least a chance of making it less.

optimizing the wheel

The practical version of all of this, for me right now, is to optimize the wheel I am on.

The wheel I am on, at 19, has four main spokes.

The work spoke. OpenClaw, Photon, Moonshot, the dropshipping brand, the marketing thesis, the writing. This is what I spend most of my time on. It is also the spoke I most identify with. It is the wheel that, if it spins well, the other spokes can spin well too.

The body spoke. Sleeping at a reasonable hour. Working out. Eating food that is for me rather than for the dopamine. This is the spoke I am worst at and that I have been trying to improve for two years with mixed results. The Promise category essays — the 27 broken renewals — are mostly about this spoke.

The mind spoke. Reading, thinking, writing, prayer, philosophy, the long-form essays on this site. This is the spoke I am best at. The Odegaard 200 books. PHIL 149. The journal entries. The reading list of behavioral economics + philosophy + business that I have been chewing through since 2023.

The people spoke. The hardest spoke for me. The one this essay is most about. Family, friends, eventually a partner, eventually children. The wheel doesn't spin well long-term without this spoke, and I have been undersupplying it for years.

The point of the framework — the cage, the wheel, the Plinko ball, the criteria, the compartmentalization — is not to escape the cage. The cage is the world. The point is to run a wheel that, when I look at it in 10 years, I am proud of having built.

This is the project. Not getting out. Building well inside. Picking the wheel on purpose. Picking the people on purpose. Sharing the right parts in the right rooms. Reducing the judgment toward the people on other wheels. Doing the work to keep the four spokes moving even when one of them is wobbling.

I am 19 and I am inside the cage and I am running a wheel I am mostly happy with.

That's the framework. I think it's the most useful one I've got.

the cage is the world. the wheel is mine to pick. picking is the work.

Sources: philosophical conversation transcript (the cage metaphor, evolutionary misalignment, the Plinko ball, social selection criteria, the food/technique analogy, compartmentalization, optimization of personal wheel) + (11/25) - Day Notes + KSA names (perimeter player observation, the criteria for who to talk to) + (1-9) (the lonely chapter prayer) + Letter Five to Grace (the four spokes implied) + the May 2026 reflection on 16yr-old red pill content reframed through this framework.