People love to talk about "The Matrix" as if it's some external thing..
The big invisible baddies, the system, the controllers, the thing done to you...
It's almost always imagined as external.
But the load bearing walls of the real matrix are internal.
These cultural ideas of how life is supposed to go: get good grades, go to college, work some corporate job, get married, get a mortgage, work til 65 and save thru a 401k, rinse repeat every day.
The script runs because you're running it.
Nobody forces anyone into this. You can eject at any time if you so choose.
But the ones that do are few and far between.
This Floorplan is held in place by assumption.
The script is designed by your culture, upbringing, experiences - especially as a child.
Which forms the uniquely shaded lense through which you view the world, which writes the script you follow.
It's a cultural lens so widely shared that it stops looking like a lens and starts looking like the structure of the world itself.
It may be your reality. But it's not THE reality.
The constructed thing becomes invisible and gets mistaken for the given thing.
Most people aren't choosing the script. They can't see it as a script. It's just "what you do."
The constraint that is invisible is far more difficult than the constraint you can see, the one you can't see you don't even realize exists.
The prison with visible bars is far less effective than the prison you mistake as the clear blue sky.
Humans are great at systemizing things. That's not a flaw.
It's the same pattern engine and desire to build structure that makes all the great things humans create.
But the engine doesn't know when to stop.
It's systemizes the things that need systems, of course, but it also keeps going... and systemized the things that were supposed to stay open.
The system building gift, pointed at your own existence, builds a track then convinces you it's the only one.
The prison is self imposed not because people are weak but because they're good at the thing that imprisons them.
The strength has a trap door. The faculty and it's failure mode are one faculty.
And the only way out of this prison is by going in deeper. And becoming aware.
Awareness is always the first step.