A Wrinkle in Time, a fantasy novel written by Madeleine L’Engle, is about a travel between dimensions. The protagonist, Meg, journeys to other planets with three strange old ladies, her brother Charles, and her friend Calvin, by employing a special technique called “Tesseract” to find her father, who disappeared several years ago. Along the way, this group fights against darkness and defeats the evil planet leader using love allowing the family members to finally meet each other again.

Within this book, one scene in particular is most thought-provoking. When Meg and her team go to a dark planet called Camazotz, they are surprised that everything on this planet is identical to each other. Every house has the exact same designs,  the same amount of flowers on the lawns, and the same sequence of color. Even children playing in the backyards are skipping ropes and bouncing balls in the same rhythms. After a while, Meg and her friends find out that someone in charge called IT makes all of the people think of nothing but what IT tells them to do—in a specific pattern. In IT’s own words, it provides all people with joy and freedom, because they do not need to plan anything and do not feel pain anymore. Even though that is not what today’s society would call “happiness and freedom,” is this not an accurate depiction of life? 

In modern society, people tend to have problem finding jobs. In order to keep their professions, they have to work hard, and try their best to produce great performances for chances to be promoted. As a result, people’s lives have become more and more formulaic: going to work, come back home, work, home… In the future, the competition between one other will be more difficult, because humans will all have high educational backgrounds while there might be less jobs available caused by the invention of artificial intelligence. Thus, human will have to work even harder for their livelihoods, and the most efficient way to do so—in most of the situations—is to work robotically by concentrating on their jobs, just like individuals under IT’s control in Camazotz. After a period of time, maybe decades or centuries in the future, people will lose all of their emotions and concentrate only on earning money, even without a controller like IT present.

Through the novel, the author wishes to tell readers that no one wants to live while daily working in such a manner without their own thoughts. In a formulaic society, living a colorfully would be discouraged, leaving behind those who unknowingly become machines, both in Camazotz and in real life. Some people in the real life believe that they will get a wonderful reward for their hard work. But how many people are able to reach that? IT is just like this social situation that pressed people to do their own works. 

Another idea the novel provides is that people nowadays are caring less about their families. They are losing a sense of love. In the story, Meg uses love, which IT doesn’t understand, to recall the memory of her brother Charles to help him being released from IT’s control, and that might be the author’s point: everyone should love the people around them. There are always children complain that their parents work all day long and do not have any spare time to play with them. They cannot feel any love from their parents. However, these parents, without a doubt, love their children; that is why they are working so hard, which also leads to fading of real love. In the end, the most important thing is not material wealth, but emotional wealth. 

Stopping humans from becoming machines may be impossible, but as long as there is love, light and joy will still remain.