Manufactured Conformist
There’s a term I’ve been thinking about lately:
Manufactured Conformist.
It’s not a fancy philosophy. It’s just… a feeling that grew louder the more I paid attention to how we live today.
At first glance, life seems full of choices.
You can travel anywhere, buy anything, be anyone.
But beneath all that ‘freedom’, there’s an invisible hand pushing us toward dreams we didn’t even know were planted inside us.
Are the ‘freedom’ is really a freedom or it just a marketing strategy pushes by other influencer to influence your decision on your life without you knowing it.
It’s like someone grabbing you at the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs —
when you’re still figuring out basic survival, belonging, or self-esteem —
and forcefully yanking you straight to “Self-Actualization.”
They sell you the dream of “fulfillment” and “life purpose”
before you’ve even had time to build a solid foundation for yourself.
The result?
A dopamine overdose.
A high from attention and validation that feels incredible…
until the crash comes.
How to solve it ? Just repeat the entire circle again.
Take travel, for example.
You plan a trip to fulfill your sense of ‘freedom’ after an influencer, framed against saturated cliffs and cloud-lit horizons, urges you to ‘see it with your own eyes’.
But once there, it feels less like living and more like completing tasks for rewards: snap the photo, vlogging, tag the location, cross it off the list.
The same script runs deeper. You adopt an idea that feels right, seems brilliant—because someone else made it the protagonist of their story.
You graft their promises onto it:
The enlightenment you’re owed, the journeys that should “transform” you, the climax of validation waiting at the end.
But these aren’t your desires.
They’re borrowed lines, and you’re just rehearsing a play where someone else holds the script.
This is what I call the Manufactured Conformist.
It’s when your desires, goals, and identities aren’t born from deep within you —
but are carefully manufactured by outside forces:
algorithms, trends, validation loops, social expectations.
The scariest part?
You don’t even feel it happening.
You don’t feel forced.
You feel… natural.
Normal.
You conform without realizing you’re conforming.
You think you’re choosing freely — but the choice was planted in you long ago.
Until one day, you pause.
And the questions hit:
How do I know the choices I make are truly mine? That’s the heart of this frustration—am I ever the author, or just a character reciting lines?
Am I living, or just playing a role written for me?
I’m not saying I’m special or think differently.
What I’m trying to say is:
At some point, the line between what I want and what I’ve been conditioned to want became so blurry that I could no longer tell the difference.
Manufactured Conformist isn’t about blaming social media or calling society evil.
It’s about awareness.
This is the era where we finally see the strings - how our thoughts are shaped by others. We keep dancing anyway, convinced the movements are ours.
That’s the algorithm’s perfect trick: making puppetry feel like free will.
Now, back to the question:
Did my choices truly come from myself?