The Path of Least Resistance Is the Path of Least Life
Being Carried Is Not the Same as Walking — But You Will Not Know This Until You Refuse to Be Carried
Once, I turned off the navigation and tried to find my way on my own.
Not because the signal was bad. Because I suddenly realized: this is the city I grew up in, and yet in so many parts of it, I still need that little blue dot on my phone, inching along, to know where I am.
I can recognize a street. I can recognize a building, a familiar corner. But that feeling of I’m here, and I know how to get there — it isn’t there.
I stood at an intersection, tucked my phone in my pocket, and tried to orient myself.
What I felt in that moment was strange. Not the panic of being lost. Something else — like reaching out to grab hold of something, and finding that whatever should have been there, wasn’t.
After that, I started noticing moments like this.
Scrolling on my phone for an hour, putting it down, realizing I have no idea what I just looked at. Not forgetting — never having been there at all. My eyes were moving. Content was flowing past. But where was I? I don’t know.
Opening a food delivery app, staring at it for a long time, realizing I don’t know what I want to eat. Not because there were too many choices. Because I’d lost the sense of what “wanting something” even feels like. I knew how to select from options. But that signal from the inside — I want this — was barely audible. Almost gone.
At first I thought it was just occasional distraction. Occasional tiredness.
Then I realized it wasn’t occasional.
Those systems were never designed to need me present.
Navigation doesn’t need me to judge direction. It only needs me to follow. The algorithm doesn’t need me to decide what to watch. It only needs my eyes to keep stopping. The delivery app doesn’t need me to know what I want. It only needs me to tap. Every piece of it is frictionless — and whether I’m truly there or not, the outcome is the same. My presence, if anything, is excess. The moment I start making my own judgments, I interrupt the flow.
I came across a line once, and I sat with it for a long time afterward: when an action can be completed without any feedback from you, you are no longer the one doing it. You are being carried.
Being carried.
I stayed with those two words. Because being carried and walking look identical from the outside — you’re both moving, both going forward, both arriving somewhere. The only difference is this: in one, you are walking. In the other, you are being taken through.
But the deeper problem isn’t that I was being carried.
It’s that I started to think being carried was the same as walking.
That feeling of I am the one doing this — I can’t fully describe it, but I know it when it’s there. Writing something that rises from the inside, pressing outward. Finding my way through an unfamiliar city without a map, on my own. Making a decision not because an algorithm surfaced it, not because everyone else was doing it, but because I wanted to. Each of these has a recognizable quality. Not excitement, not a sense of accomplishment. Something quieter. Something that simply says: that was me.
But if you go long enough without that feeling, it starts to blur. Not disappear — you start to doubt whether it was ever real. You begin to think: maybe that was just self-sentimentality. Maybe “rising from the inside” and “being pushed along” were never really different. After all, you got there either way. You finished either way.
That’s the deepest place.
Not that you’ve lost agency. But that you’ve lost the awareness that you’ve lost it. You no longer know the difference between the two feelings — or you know, but you’ve started to think the difference doesn’t matter.
Can you still feel the distinction?
Between doing something — truly doing it — and being carried through it?
Is there still something in you that can tell those two apart?
You don’t have to answer. But it’s worth stopping, and sitting with that for a moment.