A Different Part of the Maze

Photo by Susan Q Yin on Unsplash

I read Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke over the summer. There’s a point in the book when Natalie, the trad-wife protagonist, meets Shannon, who will become her producer. It’s about 70% of the way in, but I don’t think it’s a spoiler. Shannon has bright candy-pink hair and a nose ring - not someone you’d expect to follow a trad-wife Insta account. Shannon says that Natalie found the way out of the maze. Shannon will soon discover it’s a lie, that Natalie is just living in a different part of the maze. But in that moment, Natalie thinks:

“Do you know what young women wanted these days? Not to be a mother or a worker, at least not in any traditional sense. Certainly not to be both… They wanted to backpedal slowly until they were back at the entrance of the maze, and then to turn around and walk away.” (p. 273)

The maze is modern life. And I so wanted the book to engage with this. To ask why we can’t escape the maze, especially if we run an Insta account. But it doesn’t. Instead, it takes the easy way out: blame the woman. (I know this is cryptic, but I don’t want to spoil the book for those who want to read it.)

I totally relate to Shannon and her friends who want to walk away from the maze. Modern life feels too chaotic, too demanding. The digital spaces I’ve spent time in have become gateways into the maze. They lure me towards an idea of what a real writer ought to look like: always on, always witty, always online. The more time I spend online, the more I feel I should be finding more, better ways to attract new readers. But the maze steals my writing from me. It’s not just the time I spend devising lead magnets or emailing book clubs to see if they want to read my book. It’s that I end up thinking about how to get my writing noticed instead of how to make it better.

Lately, I've found myself drawn to physical paper. Ways to fold it, use it, hold it in my hand. I’ve taken up letter-writing and origami, and I’m working out how to fold stories into paper. Right now I’m still on the Victorian Puzzle Purse, but I’m still exploring. I’ve stopped posting on social media. I know this means I probably won’t “break through”. Most days I’m fine with my stories not being read by a wide audience.

But is this just my Natalie exit? As Natalie thinks a few lines later: “[D]isappearing is an expensive magic trick.” I have the privilege of not needing an income from my writing. Most people can’t afford to step back and are trapped in the maze, chasing constant “growth”. Am I just living in a different part of the maze? And more to the point, have I left the Shannons to deal with it on their own?

For a little while, I thought that AI might be our collective way out of the maze. That it would chart a path to what Aaron Bastani calls Fully Automated Luxury Communism. But the same growth logic has taken over AI, and unless we change the system, it’s more likely to add corridors to the maze than to offer us a way out. Even the people building AI say they can’t slow down alone.

I don’t have an answer or an eight-point plan to get out of the maze. But I want to say this clearly: we are not crazy. Not for thinking modern life is too much. Not for wanting to step out of the maze, to stop performing productivity, to focus on what we love doing rather than our “marketability”. The answer can’t be an individual exit from the maze. We have to change the system. There must be a way for us to change the reality we live in without being detached from reality.