I was in a room with 200 people when I first understood something about how choice actually works. Not how we think it works, not the careful weighing and reasoning we believe we’re doing, but the real thing underneath all of that. It took a French facilitator with a flair for theatre, a pair of imaginary ice creams, and a moment of mild public humiliation to show me.
That was around the year 2000. The Matrix had just come out. And I’d no idea then that both of those experiences were pointing at the same thing, or that a decade later the image at the heart of one of them would be stolen and turned into something that would have been unrecognisable to the people who created it.
The breakfast that changed things
Towards the end of the nineties, I was a music teacher, struggling to make ends meet with a young family. A good friend sat me down for breakfast one morning and said he was fed up with listening to me moan about my lot. He asked me a simple question: what did I actually want?
I knew the answer immediately. I wanted to buy a van, fill it with drums, and take them all over Europe running team-building and connection events in schools and businesses. I’d been sitting on this knowledge for years, buried under a pile of reasons why it couldn’t happen. My friend took me through a process that didn’t argue with the reasons, didn’t analyse them or try to dismantle them one by one. It just moved the focus elsewhere. By the end of breakfast, the reasons had lost their grip.
The next morning I walked into work and handed in my notice. I had nothing in place. No contracts, no bookings, no business plan. Just the choice, made cleanly. Drum Crazy Ltd ran for fifteen years, put me in front of hundreds of thousands of people across Europe, and gave me some of the most meaningful work of my life.
That friend was an introduction leader for Landmark Education, and the breakfast was, in its way, a preview of what I’d encounter when I eventually walked through their door.
The room, the microphone, the ice cream
Landmark Forum events in London put 200 people in a room facing a stage and two microphones for an entire weekend. A facilitator presents ideas and invites participants to come to the microphone and speak about how those ideas have landed, what they’ve stirred up.
One exercise was about choice, and specifically about what gets in the way of it. The facilitator, a wonderfully expressive Frenchman, held out his hands as if offering two ice creams. Chocolate or vanilla: which do you choose?
I went to the microphone. I chose chocolate. He asked me why. I offered something lame about liking chocolate. It wasn’t good enough, and he let me know it. Person after person came up and gave their reasons: taste, habit, childhood associations. None of it was good enough.
Then someone cottoned on. When asked why they’d chosen chocolate, they said:
“for no reason.”
That was the point. The most powerful choices don’t require reasons. They might be driven by gut feeling, instinct, or simply clear attention to what’s true for you. The moment you start building a case for a choice, you’ve introduced doubt. You’ve invited the defence to cross-examine. And usually, the defence wins.
What this looks like in the therapy room
I use this in sessions regularly. I don’t call it the red pill, for reasons I’ll come to. I call it vanilla or chocolate, and I tell the story. Then I ask the person in front of me to choose one.
We look at where they get stuck in their own lives, the decisions that have been circling for months or years, the choices that should feel simple but have become exhausting. Usually, what’s happened is that they’ve become so entangled in reasons, in logic, in looping thoughts, that the moment of decision keeps passing them by. And when you don’t make the choice yourself, someone or something else makes it for you.
The invitation isn’t to act recklessly. It’s to notice that underneath the noise of all that reasoning, there’s often something that already knows.
A film made by two women who’d taken the pill themselves
The Matrix came out in 1999, just before my Landmark period. At the time it wasn’t a stretch to see the connection: Morpheus offering Neo a choice between a blue pill, which keeps the comforting illusion intact, and a red pill, which opens the door to a starker and more demanding reality.
What I didn’t know then, and what many people still don’t think about, is who made that film. The Wachowskis, who wrote and directed The Matrix, are both trans women. The red pill wasn’t an abstract philosophical device. It was a deeply personal metaphor about what it costs to stop living in the illusion others have constructed for you, and what it means to step into who you actually are. The blue pill is the easier path: continue the performance, maintain the mask, accept the story being told about you from the outside. The red pill is the choice to live as yourself, with all the difficulty that brings.
The film holds that meaning precisely. It’s not an invitation to cynicism or to tearing down the world. It’s an invitation to authenticity, at significant personal cost.
What this means when I’m sitting with a trans client
I work with trans clients, and the Wachowskis’ original meaning lands differently in that context, more directly, more personally. The blue pill, for someone navigating gender identity, is the illusion that the external features of their body define who they are and who they’re permitted to be. It’s the illusion that sex is binary and fixed, and that the body as it presents to the world is the authoritative text.
The red pill is the choice to live into the gendered identity that’s been present all along, to reject the performance of something that was never really there. It’s rarely a single moment. It’s a series of choices, often made without reasons that will satisfy anyone who needs to be satisfied. It’s vanilla or chocolate, made again and again, in a world that keeps asking you to justify yourself.
The hijack
The manosphere found the red pill and took it somewhere else entirely. In incel and men’s rights communities, being “red-pilled” means waking up to the supposed truth about women, about male victimhood, about a natural order that feminism and social progressivism have corrupted. It’s dressed as an act of seeing clearly, of dropping illusion.
What it actually offers is a different illusion: one of coherence, of brotherhood, of an explanation for pain that locates the cause firmly outside the self. It’s not the red pill. It’s the blue one, with different packaging. The hapless boys drawn into this world are being handed an elaborate story about their specialness and their victimhood and told it’s liberation.
I’ve stopped using the phrase in sessions. It’s been too thoroughly contaminated. Vanilla or chocolate does the same work without the baggage.
The irony at the centre of it all
There’s an irony here that’s almost too neat. The red pill was created by two trans women as a metaphor for the courage it takes to live authentically rather than in the illusion others prefer. The manosphere has taken that same image and built from it an ideology grounded in the hatred of women and trans people, among others.
A binary choice invented to show you don’t need reasons has become a binary choice used to justify every reason you have to hate the world.
The Wachowskis made a film about what it costs to stop performing. The people who stole their metaphor are performing constantly, and calling it truth.