Quote of the Day: Aldous Huxley on Daily Inspiration

It’s November, the light goes thin early, and you catch yourself doom-scrolling in the blue glow, refreshing, replying, buying, comparing, while dinner cools and a real conversation waits in the next room. Your calendar is optimized, your feed is curated, your errands are one-click; still, you feel oddly less present, less patient, less free. That’s the moment Aldous Huxley hands you a splinter of clarity: “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”

Huxley’s sting is aimed at our favorite superstition: that newer automatically means better. Efficiency can be a marvel, until it becomes a moral alibi. When speed is the only metric, we start calling friction “failure,” even when that friction is where judgment, empathy, and depth are formed. The machine doesn’t ask whether the goal is worthy; it simply helps us reach it faster.

“Going backwards” isn’t nostalgia. It’s regression in attention, in civic trust, in our capacity for genuine humanity. Mass production can swell abundance while flattening taste and exhausting the planet. Instant communication can widen connection while making misinformation frictionless and surveillance routine. Technology scales whatever we are already doing, kindness or cruelty, curiosity or contempt, often before we’ve decided who we want to be.

Aldous Huxley, the sharp-eyed novelist and essayist behind Brave New World, spent a lifetime probing how comfort, entertainment, and control can quietly trade places. His work is less anti-technology than pro-awareness: a plea to keep freedom human-sized and intentional.

Whatever today’s headlines, the application is immediate: before adopting the next tool, ask what it rewards in you, speed or wisdom, noise or discernment, convenience or conscience. Progress isn’t what our devices can do; it’s what they help us become.