While You Were Watching for Quicksand
The real danger was never dramatic enough to make a movie about.
(Alternate Title) The Unexamined Life: On auto-pilot, inherited scripts, and the danger nobody warned us about.
Can we talk about quicksand for a minute?
If you were born somewhere in the late seventies or eighties, you already know where this is going and you’re already smiling. Because for a glorious, deeply committed stretch of that decade, quicksand was basically a celebrity villain. Always lurking. Rarely booked for a full speaking role. But absolutely dedicated to swallowing someone whole at the most dramatically inconvenient possible moment.
The Princess Bride. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The NeverEnding Story. Saturday morning cartoons—Scooby-Doo, Tarzan, take your pick. Hollywood ran what I can only describe as an extraordinarily successful PR campaign on behalf of a threat that the vast majority of us will never, not once, actually encounter.
I was born in 1979. I am moderately well-traveled. I can confirm with complete certainty that I have never engaged with quicksand. The closest I’ve come was watching a friend lose a tennis shoe to the marshy edge of a lily pond. That’s it. That’s the whole story.
And yet. For years, some quiet corner of my childhood brain had quicksand filed under “legitimate things to watch out for.” A real and present danger, lurking at the edges of an otherwise navigable world.
I think about this now and I find it equal parts hilarious and genuinely instructive.
Because here’s what nobody made a blockbuster about. Here’s the villain that never got the Hollywood treatment, never had its own dramatic theme music, never inspired a single Saturday morning cartoon episode despite being present in virtually every human life on the planet.
Auto-pilot.
The Villain Nobody Warned You About
I was in my mid-twenties when it hit me. New mother, doing the parenting thing alone, running on approximately no sleep and the particular kind of determination that kicks in when you don’t have the luxury of falling apart.
Somewhere in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day, I had this sudden, startling epiphany.
Quicksand isn’t even a fraction of the villain auto-pilot is.
Not because auto-pilot is dramatic. It isn’t. That’s precisely the point. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t have a theme tune or a warning sign or a slow-motion cinematic moment where you realize what’s happening in time to grab a vine and swing to safety. It simply... takes over. Quietly. Gradually. So incrementally that by the time you notice you’ve been running on default, you genuinely can’t remember when you stopped driving and let the script take the wheel.
Auto-pilot is the life you’re living without having consciously chosen it. The habits you inherited without examining. The beliefs about what’s possible for you, what you deserve, who you’re allowed to be, that were handed to you by your family, your culture, your education, your religion, and installed so early and so quietly that they feel like facts rather than choices.
It’s the relationship dynamic you recreate because it’s familiar rather than because it’s good. The career path you stayed on because leaving felt too uncertain. The version of yourself you present to the world because it keeps everyone comfortable, including you.
None of this is dramatic. None of it will make a blockbuster. But it is, I would argue, the single greatest thief of joy operating in most of our lives right now.
Socrates Died for This
Here’s where I want to introduce someone who understood this problem so completely that he literally died for it.
Socrates. Athenian philosopher, deeply inconvenient person to have at a dinner party, arguably the most important thinker in Western history—built his entire life around one central conviction.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
He said this, for the record, at his own trial. In 399 BC, he had been accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and failing to acknowledge the gods the state endorsed. His actual crime, as far as I can work out, was going around asking people very uncomfortable questions about things they thought they already understood— virtue, justice, courage, piety—and revealing, through the relentless application of curiosity, that most of them didn’t understand these things nearly as well as they assumed.
Athens found him guilty. Sentenced him to death. And Socrates, given the opportunity to propose an alternative punishment, essentially said, I could stop. I could go quietly. But a life in which I stop asking questions is not a life I’m interested in living.
He chose the hemlock.
I am not suggesting you need to die for your convictions. But I find something deeply clarifying about the fact that the examined life—the life of genuine curiosity, of questioning inherited assumptions, of refusing to simply accept the script you were handed—has always been, in some way, a radical act.
It was radical in 399 BC. It is radical now. Different stakes, same resistance. Because the people and systems around us, then as now, tend to prefer that you don’t ask too many questions. Questions are destabilizing. Comfortable auto-pilot is productive, manageable, easy to predict.
Waking up is inconvenient. For everyone, including sometimes yourself.
But Socrates was right. He was irritatingly, irrefutably right. The unexamined life—the one lived entirely on auto-pilot, running inherited scripts without ever pausing to ask whether they actually belong to you—is not, in any meaningful sense, YOUR life at all.
It’s just the life that happened to you while you were busy watching for quicksand.
What Waking Up Actually Looks Like
I want to be careful here because “waking up” as a concept has acquired a lot of baggage. It can sound like a dramatic singular event, the thunderbolt moment of revelation that divides your life into before and after.
Sometimes it is that. More often, in my experience, it’s quieter and smaller and considerably less cinematic.
It’s the moment you catch yourself saying “I’m fine” and then pause just long enough to check whether that’s actually true.
It’s noticing that you’ve been dreading Sunday evenings for a decade and finally asking yourself what that dread is actually telling you.
It’s questioning, gently but honestly, whether the story you tell about what’s possible for you is something you consciously believe or something you absorbed from someone else’s fear.
It’s lying on a bed as a dreamy, restless child on a seventy-two acre farm, hating the ordinariness of it all, and instead of talking yourself out of that feeling, letting it point you somewhere.
Waking up is not a destination. It’s a practice. A repeated, daily, sometimes uncomfortable choice to pay attention—to your life, your choices, your inner world—rather than simply running the program.
Socrates called it examination. Henry Miller called it awareness. I call it the foundation of everything we do here.
The Question Worth Carrying
Here’s what I’d like to leave you with today.
Not an action plan. Not a five-step framework. Just a question. The kind that does its best work slowly, in the background, while you’re walking the dog or sitting in the school pick-up line.
Where in your life are you watching for quicksand—spending your energy on a threat that isn’t real, a fear that was inherited rather than earned—while auto-pilot quietly drives?
You don’t need to answer it right now. You don’t need to answer it out loud, or to me, or to anyone.
Just let it sit. Let it do its slow, patient, thoroughly un-cinematic work.
That’s how the unexamined life starts to become examined. Not with a thunderbolt. With a question you’re finally willing to let breathe.
