Throughout history people have searched for the meaning of life. Some people think we each have a fated purpose, that our destiny is to do a certain thing. Others think that we must make our own lives meaningful each day by doing good deeds or following our passions. Religions, sciences, and cultures have all tried to give one answer to the question, but if any of their attempts are right it is only in the mind of the individual. We all have our own interpretation of why we are here, and why we should keep on living.
In this short story, the government has removed the individual from the purpose in life. The Bureau of Attainable Futures instead assigns roles as if it were a god. In Fahrenheit 451, a similar method is attempted- only instead
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They provide an illusion of transparency to the people, and it seems to be accepted without question. The NewsDrones™ were nationalized because of “accidental collisions”, wholly for the benefit of the people, not because it could be convenient to have constant surveillance of everyone. All the footage is accessible to all the people, not edited or expunged- at least that's what they are told. Think about how easy it would be to assign someone a “Purpose” to censor what everyone else sees, think about how easy it would be to convince them that it is for the good of the community to make sure that most people don’t see the scary events, or the ones that would make them sad, or the parts of the footage that is really just cameras pointing inside the few houses without internal security cameras accessible by the Bureau. The idea that “everybody knows you get your purpose at 17” illustrates the simplifications understood as facts, and the false transparency fed to the society. As the story moves on, we seem to get to the juicy gossip, then the ‘hidden’ secrets. Yet even in the description of Neverland, supposedly something only the most rebellious of the teens even dare to whisper about, the government is referenced. Its as if the people are allowed small feelings of freedom in gossip and secrets, but at the discretion of the ones in