Imagine a prison where people don’t want to escape. A society where control doesn’t come from force, but from pleasure, where the future tyrant doesn’t shout orders at you, but whispers, “Relax. You deserve this. Don’t think too hard.”
Almost a century ago, Aldous Huxley saw this in Brave New World. He realised that the next version of oppression wouldn’t come with chains and torture chambers, but with comfort and constant stimulation.
Huxley showed a society where no one really feels pain, but no one really lives either. There is no depth, no struggle, no real meaning, only carefully managed pleasure. The secret was in anaesthetising the senses. Keep people busy with games, shows, and distractions, and they won’t have the stillness needed to ask, “Why am I here? Who am I becoming? Where am I going after I die?” Entertainment becomes a smokescreen, a drug that hides the brutal questions of existence.
On the other hand, Huxley realised that pain always sparked revolts. When people suffered, they came together and fought for change. Entertainment does the opposite: they go quiet. They stop asking questions. They don’t protest. They don’t reflect on where their life is going. It separates people, each in their own little world of personal entertainment. It’s as if each person has their own private universe, decorated with everything they like, and they just swipe.
Introducing Soma
In Brave New World, that private universe or golden cell had a name: Soma; the most dangerous drug that ever existed.
Soma solved any emotional problem. Were you sad? Take Soma. Were you anxious? Bored? Lonely? Restless? Take Soma. It was the magic solution for everything. No one needed to wrestle with their emptiness, their sin, their guilt, their conflicting desires. Just swallow, feel better, forget. Today we don’t have a pill called Soma, but we have many other things that play the same role. You’ve probably taken Soma today without realising it.
Social media functions as modern Soma. When the person feels lonely or insecure, they grab their phone and dive into the virtual world. There they find likes, comments, funny videos. For a few hours, the ache disappears. But when the screen goes dark, the emptiness returns, often deeper and louder.
Pornography is another type of Soma. It offers instant pleasure without having to deal with the complications and responsibility of a real relationship. The person doesn’t need to know themselves, doesn’t need to grow emotionally, doesn’t need to face their fears. But each time the “high” gets shorter, and the emptiness inside only expands.
Food can become Soma, when eating becomes an escape. Stressed? Eat. Sad? Eat. Bored? Eat. Similarly, shopping becomes a drug. A stressful week, an identity crisis, low self-esteem? So go on a spree. We feel powerful, desirable, successful for a few hours. The bags in our hands feel like proof that we matter. But again, the high wears off, the same old ache comes back, asking the same unanswered questions.
Even medications can become Soma when they’re used to escape from life, as can smoking, drugs, music, or even the gym. It’s like putting a band-aid on an infected wound. The pain goes away for a while, but the rot continues underneath.
Freedom to slavery
The promise of the entertainment world was freedom. But what emerged was altogether different: voluntary slavery.
This is precisely the diabolical genius of this system, that it doesn’t seem bad. On the contrary, it seems wonderful! Who doesn’t want to be happy all the time? Who doesn’t want to avoid pain and discomfort? This is what makes it much more subtle and socially accepted, because this slavery looks like freedom. It feels like you’re choosing. You click because you want to. You watch because you choose to. You consume because you feel like it. But in reality, you are not choosing, you are being chosen by your impulses. You have lost control over your life.
Pleasure functions as an invisible chain. The person doesn’t see they’re trapped because the chain is made of pleasant things. It’s like an addiction to sugar. The person knows it’s harming them. They feel the crash and sense the damage, yet they keep reaching for it because it tastes good.
In that reaching, they gradually become what the Prophet ﷺ warned of:
تعِس عبدُ الدينارِ ، تعِس عبدُ الدرهمِ ، تعس عبدُ الخميصةِ ، تعس عبدُ الخميلةِ
Miserable is the slave of the dinar, miserable is the slave of the dirham, miserable is the slave of the luxury cloak, miserable is the slave of the fine garment.” [1]
Yes, the person can do everything they want. Eat, drink, have sex, buy, have fun. But the problem is not in what they can do. It’s in what they can’t not do. When pleasure becomes mandatory, when you become violent if your console is taken away from you, if you threaten suicide if your phone is taken from you, it stops being pleasure and becomes prison, as Allah says:
أفرأيت من اتخذ إلهه هواه
Have you seen the one who takes his own desires as his god?” [2]
Once it becomes the thing that makes you laugh and cry, the thing that measures your happiness and decides your worth… once you crave being alone with it, and you start making friends and enemies for it… once you sacrifice prayer, purpose, time, and even family ties for it — what is that, if not the essence of worship?
But why would people choose a life of slavery over freedom?
The Prophet ﷺ answers:
حُفت النار بالشهوات وحفت الجنة بالمكاره
Hellfire is surrounded by desires, and Paradise is surrounded by hardships.” [3]
Being a slave to entertainment, sadly, is often easier than being free. Freedom takes work. It demands responsibility and it can be uncomfortable. Slavery, by contrast, offers a deceptive sense of security and comfort. Over time, that kind of life begins to leave its mark: patterns emerge in the behaviour of this stimulated slave, until they start to look like carbon copies of one another, mass produced clones stamped from the same template.
For starters, the person can no longer be alone with their thoughts. Being in silence, doing nothing becomes torture. The person has lost the ability to find peace and joy within themselves.
This is a condition which Allah has named in the Qur’ān:
وَلَا تَكُونُوا كَالَّذِينَ نَسُوا اللَّهَ فَأَنسَاهُمْ أَنفُسَهُمْ
And do not be like those who forgot Allah, so He made them forget themselves.” [4]
Because they’ve spent so little time with themselves — working on themselves, building themselves — they’ve slowly forgotten who they even are, and no one feels comfortable being alone with a stranger. So they keep the noise on because silence would force an introduction to the self they’ve neglected.
Then, intellectual paralysis happens. When the brain is always busy with superficial stimuli and lives of fragments — clips, feeds, headlines — it loses the ability to think deeply. It’s like eating only fast food. It satisfies hunger but doesn’t really nourish. Thinking deeply becomes exhausting, ideas are accepted, never challenged, and truth becomes very difficult to recognise.
Then, their emotions become shallow because they never have to deal with real difficulties. It’s like a muscle that isn’t used. It gets weak. So, they lose the ability to feel deeper things like compassion, courage, or true love, let alone the ability to taste khushūʿ, to linger in tafakkur (contemplation), to tremble under the weight of meaning.
Then, there’s another disease that enters, political apathy. The world can burn, injustice can spread, corruption can thrive, and people remain seated, distracted, pacified. Politicians can do whatever they want because the people are absorbed with entertainment. Should they ask difficult questions, it’s easy to manipulate them, like giving a lollipop to a child who’s nagging. It’s also a lot easier to complain about the government from the couch at home than to go out on the street to protest or campaign.
Then, spiritual alienation creeps in, another serious consequence. People stop asking life’s big questions. “Why am I here? What’s the meaning of all this? How do I return to Allah as something better than I am now?” These questions are uncomfortable, so it’s easier to turn on the screen and forget about them for another day.
Then, comes the fear of confrontation. The online world trains the soul to believe that escape is a solution. There, you can switch off the console the moment you start losing. You can block someone the moment they disagree with you. You can close the app, mute the conversation, turn off the TV, and walk away instantly, cleanly, without consequence. And slowly, without realising it, the heart starts expecting life to work the same way. But real life doesn’t have an “off” button. Marriage can’t be muted. A collapsing career can’t be unfollowed. Mental health can’t be blocked. Your Islam can’t be paused until you “feel ready”. Poverty and injustice don’t disappear because you changed the channel. Yet because they’d lived inside a world where discomfort is optional for so long, their capacity for patience, responsibility, and hard conversations fades.
After all, it’s easier to pretend everything is fine than to admit what is breaking. Easier to believe there are no problems than to look suffering in the face. Easier to tell yourself “It’ll work out” than to do the uncomfortable work of change. The culprit, again, is the training ground of entertainment that conditions the soul into a kind of cowardice where the first reflex, whenever reality becomes heavy, is simply to walk away.
Here lies the danger for the one who calls himself a believer. Truth is almost never comfortable or gentle. It requires the person to face things about themselves and about the world that they’d rather not see.
This is why Allah intervenes with an honest question:
أحَسِبَ النَّاسُ أَن يُتْرَكُوا أَن يَقُولُوا آمَنَّا وَهُمْ لَا يُفْتَنُونَ
Do people think that they will be left alone to say, ‘We believe’, and that they will not be tested?” [5]
Allah also says:
إِنَّ اللَّهَ اشْتَرَىٰ مِنَ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ أَنفُسَهُمْ وَأَمْوَالَهُم بِأَنَّ لَهُمُ الْجَنَّةَ
Indeed, Allah has purchased from the believers their lives and their wealth in exchange for Paradise.” [6]
A purchase means ownership changes hands. If Jannah is your goal, then your comfort can no longer be the final authority over your life, and a deliberate plan is necessary to reclaim your life and focus, to retrain your soul for struggle, to reconnect with what is real to ease your journey to Jannah and its unavoidable struggles along its way.
How can I emerge from this?
How does an ordinary person — who has a job, a phone, a family, a life in this noisy world — free themselves from control through pleasure without disappearing into a cave and becoming a monk? The answer isn’t to reject all pleasure. That would be impossible and even harmful. Amid all this manipulation through pleasure, below are five paths of liberation, five ways to remain in control of your life, without running away from life.
Awareness
Most people don’t choose their pleasures. They arrive, and we obey. A notification appears, a craving arises, an ad flashes, and your thumb, your eyes, your wallet move almost automatically.
Awareness is the moment you quietly step between impulse and action, and say: “Wait. Who’s driving right now?” That small space between desire and response is where taqwa should intervene, asking: “Why am I doing this right now? Am I running away from some feeling?” The habit of asking this honest question can be the first step toward your true freedom from the automated responses where you soul is no longer allowed to move without permission.
Reintroduce silence into your life
The constant flood of stimulation has trained the mind to never truly switch off. There is always a sound, a screen, a scroll, a voice, a vibration. Thoughts and mental chatter overlap without pause — worries, plans, fears, fantasies — until the heart forgets how to rest. When was the last time you sat in complete silence?
Real interior silence isn’t emptiness, but where the deepest transformations begin. It’s the moment you finally hear the questions you’ve been drowning under noise: “What am I really running from? What do I actually want? What does Allah want from me right now? How do I justify my existence?” There, you discover what you actually need.
Think of your heart like the surface of a lake. As long as stones are being thrown in — notifications, imagery, conversations, content — the water ripples and distorts, and you won’t see the bottom. But when the water becomes still, what was always there becomes visible. That’s why it’s no coincidence that the Prophet ﷺ withdrew from the bustle of Makkah to the silence of Hirāʾ. In that stillness, answers descended, revelation began, and an entire civilisation changed.
Here’s a simple practice. Start with just 10 minutes a day without any stimulus. No phone, no music, no television, no book. Just you and your thoughts. At first it will be uncomfortable, restless even, as your hand twitches towards your pocket. And that’s exactly what makes the exercise valuable. It’s a diagnosis that shows how much we depend on external distractions to just feel okay. But stay with it, breathe through the discomfort, and bring your tongue to “SubhānAllah, alhamdulillāh, lā ilāha illā Allah, Allāhu akbar”. With silence on the outside and dhikr on the inside, that is where the heart slowly re-learns how to rest.
Learn to relate to discomfort differently
Break out of the cycle of running away from every discomfort. Instead of escaping from sadness, anxiety, or boredom by reaching out to your phone, the cigarette, the music, the shopping spree, try observing these feelings with curiosity. This process requires facing dark parts of yourself.
Not all pain is your enemy, as Allah says:
وَأَخَذْنَاهُم بِالْعَذَابِ لَعَلَّهُمْ يَرْجِعُونَ
We seized them with punishment so that they might return.” [7]
The pain was a signal, a tap of the heart. So yes, it’s okay to feel empty at times. A believer may experience doubt. Instead of masking it with another distraction, ask: “What are they trying to teach me? What unmet need of mine do they reveal?”
Often, our discomforts are windows to self-knowledge and growth. At first, it’s uncomfortable, but then comes the incredible feeling of being truly alive, of being in contact with meanings greater than us.
Meaningful service
There is a joy Allah pours into the heart through serving others that no online pleasure or entertainment in this world can imitate. We are creatures of matter who long to matter. Begin building a project for your Ākhirah — something of real benefit to people.
The Prophet ﷺ said:
من نفس عن مؤمن كربة من كرب الدنيا نفس الله عنه كربة من كرب يوم القيامة، ومن يسر على معسر يسر الله عليه في الدنيا والآخرة، ومن سترمسلما ستره الله في الدنيا والآخرة، والله في عون العبد ما كان العبد في عون أخيه
Whoever relieves a believer of a hardship from the hardships of this world, Allah will relieve him of a hardship from the hardships of the Day of Resurrection. Whoever eases matters for someone in financial difficulty, Allah will ease matters for him in this world and the Hereafter. Whoever conceals the faults of a Muslim, Allah will conceal his faults in this world and the Hereafter. And Allah remains in the aid of a servant so long as the servant remains in the aid of his brother.” [8]
Once a person discovers the sweetness of being useful to others, how do you sell them fake happiness? How do you control someone with shallow pleasures when they’ve learned to be content with generosity and meaning? Start a project for your Ākhirah, and one of its immediate effects is how quickly the world’s distractions lose their hold, for the simple reason that your heart becomes busy building something far greater than life itself.
Meaningful return to Allah
- To reconnect with salāh.
- To walk with righteous friends.
- To rediscover intimacy with the Qur’ān.
- To finally make peace with Allah after years of distance, compromise, and inner unrest.
At the core of every escape, every addiction, and every restlessness is a heart that simply wants to come home.
Ibn al-Qayyim captured this reality by saying:
فَفِي الْقَلْبِ شَعَثٌ، لَا يَلُمُّهُ إِلَّا الْإِقْبَالُ عَلَى اللَّهِ
In the heart there is a scattering that nothing can gather except turning to Allah.”
وَفِيهِ وَحْشَةٌ، لَا يُزِيلُهَا إِلَّا الْأُنْسُ بِهِ فِي خَلْوَتِهِ
And in the heart there is a loneliness that nothing can remove except with the warmth of solitude with Him.”
وَفِيهِ حُزْنٌ لَا يُذْهِبُهُ إِلَّا السُّرُورُ بِمَعْرِفَتِهِ وَصِدْقِ مُعَامَلَتِهِ
And in the heart there is sadness that nothing can remove except the joy of knowing Him and being true with Him.”
وَفِيهِ قَلَقٌ لَا يُسَكِّنُهُ إِلَّا الِاجْتِمَاعُ عَلَيْهِ، وَالْفِرَارُ مِنْهُ إِلَيْهِ
And in the heart there is anxiety that nothing can calm except gathering yourself for Him — and fleeing from Him back to Him.”
Source: Islam21c
Notes
[1] Sahīh al-Bukhāri; https://sunnah.com/bukhari:6435
[2] al-Qur’ān 25:43
[3] Sahīh Muslim, 2,822; https://sunnah.com/muslim:2822
[4] al-Qur’ān 59:19
[5] al-Qur’ān 29:2
[6] al-Qur’ān 9:111
[7] al-Qur’ān 43:48
[8] Sahīh Muslim, 2,699; https://sunnah.com/muslim:2699
