There are moments when I read a book and feel as though the author is personally haunting me through time. That’s how I felt with The Handmaid’s Tale. Not the obvious stuff, like the forced baby-making or the red bathrobes (though I’ve worn enough shameful Halloween costumes to relate), but something subtler, something that got under my skin like a splinter of moral panic.
It wasn’t the physical control of bodies that bothered me most; it was the realization that in a future creatively sterile world, people like me, or you, might be conscripted to bear not children, but ideas.
An odd thought experiment but, let’s jump in and see where it goes.
I have always thought of myself as a free thinker. Not in the grand, torch-waving sense of “Free the masses!” but in the quieter, messier way of being a mildly weird, out of the box kind of person. My mind, for better or worse, still has its own way of seeing things and has always resisted the popular narrative.
But lately, I’ve started to wonder if my inner reality is no longer destined to be mine alone.
Technology, you see, has turned our inner lives into a sort of buffet of unlimited limited choices. And the thing about buffets is, eventually everything starts to taste like the sneeze guard, or what’s on it.
I used to have thoughts that came out of long walks or strange dreams or poorly timed coffee. Now, half my “ideas” come from memes, subreddits, or those Instagram reels that start with someone whispering, “This changed my life”.
We live in a world where creativity has been digitized, branded, and monetized into oblivion. Content is pumped out like ground meat through a stainless steel tube, and all of us are expected to consume it; and then, somehow, produce even more of the uniformed and soulless drivel.
And if you still happen to be capable of a new, original thought (something that hasn’t been harvested, tagged, and served on a Canva slide deck) you may be eyed the way a fertile woman is eyed in The Handmaid’s Tale: as a resource.
I’ve had startling conversations lately that feel more like a prequel to the movie Stupidocracy. Things like: “You still write in long form?” someone asked me, eyes wide. “You still think? With like… paragraphs?” There’s a hunger behind their questions, a hunger that suggests they want me to be fruitful and multiply: ideas, podcasts, branded metaphors. They’re not wanting me to create for joy. They’re hoping for someone to rescue a culture that can no longer create for itself.
And that’s where Margaret Atwood got me. Right in the tender bits.
Because The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t just about literal fertility, it’s about what happens when a society becomes so starved for imaginative oxygen that it has to enslave the few minds still capable of breathing it. In Gilead, that means wombs. In our world, it might mean minds. Especially the ones not yet flattened by algorithms and “content strategies” and twelve-slide carousels explaining “How to Manifest While Eating Pasta.”
I used to think the future would be full of neon and flying cars. Now I think it will look more like a sterile co-working space where every wall has a quote about innovation that no one dares to question. In that future, if you hazard to suggest something poetic or creative, someone in a blazer might sidle up to you and whisper, “Careful. You’re still fertile.”
I worry that I’ll be taken into a sleek, minimalist room with a focus group and a whiteboard, and be asked to “ideate freely”; a phrase that already makes me want to scream at the top of my voice. I’ll be told that my quirky, original thoughts are a gift to a barren world, and wouldn’t I please, just once a quarter, release them into the collective so they can be monetized into inspirational YouTube ads?
To which I would hope to say: absolutely not.
I would like to think that I might refuse to become a handmaid of the imagination. That I might refuse to be a vessel for TED Talk aspirations or an unpaid idea surrogate for a content-starved dystopia. If I had a thought, I would want to reserve the right to keep it for myself (and my dozen or so readers), nurture it in secret, and maybe scribble it on a napkin that ends up in the laundry.
Or maybe I would whisper it to my basil plant. He’s not too bright, but still listens better than most of the internet.
Join us in making the world a better place — you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.