Luke works as a bricklayer. He’s always worked in the trades, ever since leaving high school early because the only topic he enjoyed was mechanical engineering. He does his 9 to 5, bantering with his like-minded workmates, sensing his career path forward in a vague yet certain way. He will be “on the tools” for 5-10 years, then he’ll be promoted to a supervisory role, and eventually he’ll start his own business. He’ll get a mortgage to buy a house, marry a woman he meets through his friends or on a dating app. They’ll have “a few” kids. He’ll retire in his mid-sixties, playing golf on the weekends, or going fishing with his grandkids. All of this was decided on the day Luke was born. Luke walks a path that was laid out for him by the universe, from the moment of conception until the moment his soul leaves his body. Only a significantly unusual event could change this story. It’s not a “bad” life. But it is a conditioned life. Luke has had no choice but to play his role, like an actor following the instructions of an invisible director. In the late 1800s, a researcher named Ivan Pavlov discovered that he could make dogs salivate as if food had been placed in front of them simply by ringing a bell. He conditioned the dogs to associate the sound of the bell with receiving food, until he could remove the food and just use the bell to get the same response. In the early 1900s, Edward Thorndike showed us that humans respond to a basic reward process, where we’re more likely to repeat a behaviour if it consistently gets satisfactory outcomes, and how this could be used to influence people into learning things. We would later discover that we could apply this to people against their will, essentially using rewards to force them to act in certain ways (e.g. gambling machines). A few decades later, behaviourists like John Watson and B.F. Skinner showed us that we could accurately control the behaviours of others through operant conditioning - using specific combinations of reward and punishment to make people behave in certain ways, regardless of the person’s original beliefs about such behaviour. We discovered that “voluntary” behaviour eventually can be moved into controlled behaviour, and if interviewed, the person would report that they “chose” to do it, even though it could be clearly demonstrated that they were programmed to do it.