The rub of cold metal against the wrist is not, for many, a sign of oppression. It is a relief. A man adjusts a fitness tracker that dictates when he should breathe, how much he should walk, and when his heart is failing in the simulation of productivity. He doesn’t question it. On the contrary, he smiles at the notification. The coffee leaves a dark ring on the glass table, a stain no one cleans while he consults his schedule of “voluntary restrictions.” In a world that screams at us that everything is possible and that the sky is the limit, the only thing we truly desire is for someone, or something, to finally say: “No.”
Sade would have laughed at our supposed liberation. He, who spent half his life between real walls, knew that absolute freedom is a desert where desire dehydrates due to a lack of friction. Today, the absence of borders has left us orphaned of resistance. That is why we seek the dungeon in the gym, in extreme diets, or in apps that block our own phones. Visual freedom burns. It literally tires you out, and nobody admits it.
Ni siquiera sabe cuál es el límite que busca. Pero lo necesita.
The Bureaucracy of the Fence: The Fetish of the Norm
It is almost touching to observe how we pay subscriptions for an algorithm to limit our options. The remote control is lukewarm in the hand, almost sweaty, while we search for a category to classify us. Something contracts in the collective marrow when we realize that “do whatever you want” is the most exhausting command of the 21st century. It isn’t laziness. It is the need for a frame that saves us from the paralysis of the infinite.
The system does not sell possibilities. It sells padded walls.
Nothing more.
And it succeeds. Once the subject accepts that the limit is a refuge, obedience becomes a luxury. The mechanics of this nostalgia are of an icy precision: they allow us to feel sovereign only because we have chosen our own jailer. Maybe it isn’t a regression. Or maybe we were always children frightened by the vastness of the playground. It isn’t serious. But it isn’t innocent either.
And the problem is this: the void has no handholds
We observe people on the subway, desperately looking for a rule to follow, a guru to forbid them from gluten, or a time management system that chains them to a military routine. Sade understood that the dungeon is the only place where the will becomes solid by crashing against stone. We, surrounded by air and constant “yeses,” have become gaseous. The coffee is cold again and the dark ring on the table becomes sticky.
Who has the courage to be free without an instruction manual today? Maturity in this era of infinite expansion consists of accepting that we are in love with the latch. We’ve been convinced that the lack of limits is the goal, but the retina wears out when there is no horizon to rest upon. We seek the dungeon because total exposure has left our skin raw. We don’t even know if we like being locked up. But at least, inside, we know where the room ends.
Inventory of a Programmed Submission
We explore a map where “everything is possible” is the true censorship—the one that prevents us from choosing a single path and following it to the end. The dungeon fetish has handed us a catalog of small daily prisons so that life doesn’t slip through our fingers like water. We are subjects seeking confirmation of our own existence in prohibition.
Maybe it isn’t dungeon nostalgia.
Or maybe it always was.
And tomorrow we will adjust our wellness app limits again. We will look at the progress bars hoping they reach 100% and finally allow us to stop choosing. As if we didn’t know that the only real limit is the one we put on ourselves to avoid looking at the abyss behind every open door. In the end, the key was always in our hand. But nobody wants to be the one to open the last door.
