Living on autopilot: how to break free

There is a very specific moment in adult life. You have been chaining routines together for weeks, perhaps months. You wake up, look at your phone before looking at the person sleeping next to you, open the fridge without remembering what you had for dinner last night, choose the same t-shirt because today you do not have the energy to choose, go to work along a route that your car or subway could navigate on its own. And on any given day, in front of the bathroom mirror, while brushing your teeth, you realize something strange: you have not had a thought of your own all day. You have reacted. You have complied. You have executed. But you have not thought.

That feeling has a name that has become all too familiar: living on autopilot. And although it sounds like a minor issue, it is not. It is probably one of the quietest ways to waste a life.

What autopilot is not

To understand how to get out, we must first understand what we are talking about. Autopilot is not routine. Routine is necessary; it orders, it frees up mental energy for what matters. The person who cooks every day, the one who trains every day, the one who writes every day, relies on firm habits. That is not autopilot.

Nor is it tiredness. Being tired is part of living. Honest tiredness, the kind that comes from having given everything you had, is a sign that you have been present.

Autopilot is something else. It is that mild anesthesia that settles in when you stop asking yourself questions. When you accept your life without inhabiting it. When everything functions but nothing means anything. When you have been in the same job, in the same relationship, in the same city for three years, and you couldn't say if you chose them or if you simply failed to reject them in time.

It is the adult form of sleep.

The vertigo of being a threshold

The philosopher Fabrice Hadjadj, in one of his talks with The Nomba, says something that is worth reading slowly: the human being is the only animal that asks questions about its own life. Think of a bee: it knows what it has to do in the hive. We do not have a manual.

We are always, according to Hadjadj, on the threshold. Between two dimensions, the material and the spiritual, and between the present and the future. Looking out at a question that never quite gets answered: what am I doing here?

That condition is magnificent, but uncomfortable. Questioning is tiring. Living without a clear script produces vertigo. And then, says Hadjadj, a temptation appears: to stop being a threshold and become an instrument.

A fork is used to pierce food. A screwdriver is used to screw. You don't have to ask a fork about its purpose. It has a clear function, a precise end. And that, says Hadjadj, has its appeal: it is pleasant to be a robot, to be like an instrument. It is convenient to be a fork. This is how he describes that dream: "That way there is no longer any need to ask questions. What am I going to do with my life? What am I good for? I want to find, well, that kind of automatic purpose right away. I no longer want to be a threshold. I want to be an object placed among other objects, with a clear definition, with a precise purpose."

It is a brutal image. And it describes with precision what many people do without knowing it: they turn themselves into a function. I am "the risk analyst on the second floor." I am "Lucía's mother." I am "the one who spends the weekend in Sierra." I am "the one in charge of the monthly close." Labels that serve to avoid having to ask yourself who you really are, underneath it all.

That is living on autopilot. It is not doing nothing. It is having ceased to be someone to become a utility.

Screens are not the problem (and at the same time they are)

There is a nuance here that should be handled with care, because the public conversation about mobile phones has become a bit childish. The idea that the screen is the problem, and that it is enough to turn it off to return to life, does not hold up.

Hadjadj says it clearly: human beings have always approached reality by taking a detour. Primitive man, before hunting the gazelle, painted gazelles in the cave, prayed to the god of the gazelle. We needed the myth, the symbol, the book, the painting, the play. We have never looked at the world head-on, directly. We have always looked at it through something.

That is why screens are not an anomaly. They are the latest version of a very ancient human need. The problem, he says, is not that we use screens. The problem is that we get trapped in them. That the detour becomes the destination. That the screen stops being a bridge to reality and becomes a trap where the entire day is spent.

Applied to 2026: the problem is not the smartphone. The problem is that the smartphone no longer takes us anywhere. Before, you looked at Instagram to see what a friend was doing and then you called them. Today, you look at Instagram, you see forty lives of others in fifteen minutes, you close the app, and you do nothing with that. The screen has ceased to be a threshold. It has become a cave.

Living on autopilot, to a large extent, is living in a cave illuminated by a screen.

"Comfort rots and discomfort builds"

The anthropologist and science communicator Izanami Martínez, in another of The Nomba's talks, says it in a way that sticks: "Comfort rots and discomfort builds." She says so herself: it happens to her every day, because scrolling is addictive and designed to be. When she has been at it for more than fifteen minutes, she imagines her neurons rotting (it is a metaphor, she clarifies) and tells herself to stop and do something that requires effort.

Her thesis is this: we live in a society that has equated comfort with happiness. And they are very different things. Comfort anesthetizes. Happiness, the kind that really matters, requires crossing something. Growing hurts. Contributing hurts. Taking charge hurts. And the cultural offering we are immersed in —algorithms optimized to keep you hooked, infinite content that demands nothing of you, ultra-processed food delivered to your door in fifteen minutes, relationships that end with the press of a button— is designed so that you never face anything uncomfortable for too long.

The result? An entire generation with more options than any other and a chronic feeling of living on borrowed time. Of watching life from the stands.

Izanami adds another layer: constant exposure to other people's suffering keeps raising our threshold of indignation. For far less, she says, forty years ago people took to the streets to protest and to demand change. Today we post a story on Instagram and feel we have already contributed, and we carry on, in her words, "idiotized" in front of the screen. The anesthesia is not just personal. It can also be collective.

Why it is so hard to break free

If it is so obvious that autopilot consumes us, why don't we break free?

Because a good part of what we carry was formed in a world where leaving known territory could cost you your life. That inheritance pushes us toward the safe and makes us distrust uncertainty. The part of us that prefers to watch the ninth season of a series instead of starting the project we have been talking about for three years is the same part that helped the species survive. It would be unfair to despise it.

But it would also be suicidal to always obey it. Because the world changed. And because the only way not to die slowly is to dare to do more than just survive.

How to start breaking free (without the drama)

There is no manual. There are three small, almost timid movements that can begin to change everything. Do not approach them as a 30-day challenge. Approach them as small thresholds you cross every other day.

First: notice. Before changing anything, dare to notice what is happening. In what moments of the day am I really present? In which ones am I absent? What do I do when I feel uncomfortable? What do I cling to in order to feel nothing? A notebook and five minutes at night are enough. This is not trendy journaling. It is simply describing the day as if you were watching it from the outside. Honest description is already half the way out.

Second: do something difficult every day. Something. Not much. A phone call you have been postponing for weeks. A conversation you are avoiding with your partner. An uncomfortable email. A class that scares you. A dense book you have been avoiding. A walk without headphones. Izanami says this is how she does it: when she has been scrolling for more than fifteen minutes, she stops and does something that requires effort. Read a book. Listen to music. Be in silence, without stimuli. Learn. Anything your brain labels as "uncomfortable" will probably be the right direction.

Third: look at small things with real attention. This sounds soft, yet it is the most radical of the three. Hadjadj points to the great still-life painters, who painted a glass of water, an apple, and who, through the way light falls on that everyday object, make us cross the threshold. "Transcendence is not something that is far away or beyond. Transcendence is found in the small things, the trifles, the trivialities." If you look at reality with an attention you are not used to giving it, that very reality begins to open up. The trap of autopilot is living surrounded by things you no longer see. The way out is to see them again.

The threshold is at the sink

Go back for a moment to that scene at the beginning. You in front of the mirror, brushing your teeth, realizing you haven't had a thought of your own all day. That small discomfort, that quiet warning, is not a problem. It is an invitation. It is your life asking your permission to return to you.

There is no need to tear anything apart. No need to leave everything behind and move to Bali. Nor is there any need to applaud yourself for a small bathroom realization. You only need to do one thing: take that feeling seriously and not anesthetize it with the next scroll.

Because that, exactly that, is crossing the threshold. Not the grand gestures. The daily micro-choices in which you continue to be a threshold instead of turning into a fork.

And so, with patience and with discretion, is how a life stops passing you by, and you begin to inhabit it again.