During the COVID pandemic, something strange became impossible to ignore.

Across the world, people were exposed to the same information. News updates. Scientific explanations. Government announcements. And yet, responses could not have been more different.

Some trusted what they were told. Others rejected it completely. Protests erupted in many countries, not against markets as such, but against institutions, media, and authority itself.

What interested me was not who was right or wrong, but this. If ideology is so powerful, if it shapes us as deeply as some theories suggest, why did people respond so differently to the same messages?

That question took me back to a theory I first encountered at university.

Louis Althusser argued that ideology is one of the main ways society maintains itself. Not only through force or law, but by shaping how people see themselves and their place in the world. We are taught, often without realising it, what is normal, what is expected, and which roles feel available to us.

In simple terms, ideology works best when it feels natural.

According to this view, people tend to reproduce the system they were born into, not because they are forced to, but because adapting often feels safer than questioning. Over time, this helps existing structures remain stable.

For a long time, this explanation made sense to me.

I recognised parts of myself in it. Not as someone fully embedded in institutions, but as someone shaped by their expectations. Even working independently, I still feel how economic logic frames success, productivity, and legitimacy. I understand how routines form around those pressures, how adapting can feel safer than questioning, and how stability often disguises itself as neutrality.

But the more I sat with Althusser’s ideas, the more something felt incomplete.

What the theory does not fully explore is the role of media.

Most of what we know about the world does not come from direct experience. It comes through news, images, commentary, and repetition. The media does not simply reflect ideology. It actively shapes it. And because media is owned, funded, and structured within economic systems, it often protects the interests of those who already hold power.

This complicates the idea that ideology can simply be seen through.

If the media itself is ideological, then accessing truth becomes a negotiation. Between trust and scepticism. Between experience and information. Between belief and fear.

COVID made this visible.

People were not simply passive subjects absorbing a dominant narrative. They interpreted what they saw in very different ways. Some followed scientific consensus. Others distrusted institutions entirely. Many acted from personal history, community influence, or emotional response.

In other words, people exercised agency.

This does not mean ideology disappeared. It means it was not total.

People not only absorb dominant narratives. They respond to them, resist them, reinterpret them, and sometimes oppose them outright. That response can lead to clarity or confusion, care or harm. But it is still a form of human agency.

This is where Althusser’s explanation feels limited to me.

Ideology is powerful. The media is powerful. Economic structures shape both. But people are not empty vessels. They are not endlessly passive. Human behaviour is more contradictory, more emotional, and more unpredictable than theory often allows.

Recently, I’ve been learning to view these structures in a different light, not by rejecting them, and not by positioning myself against them, but by paying closer attention to the quieter work they do inside people. Before we step into public life, before we perform roles, opinions, or certainty, there is a private inner space where identity is shaped through emotion, memory, fear, and desire. Writing has become a way of slowing that process down, of noticing how assumptions settle there, how feelings form before words, and of creating space for reflection before reaction.

(1)Arise Stories (@arise1109) | TikTok

That is part of the intention behind Arise Stories. Not to dismantle systems, and not to tell people what to think, but to make visible the inner work that often goes unnoticed. The space where private identity meets public life. The emotional labour of becoming someone in a world full of expectations.

Sometimes understanding does not begin with resistance.

Sometimes it begins with attention.

This reflection continues in fiction.

My upcoming novel, The Mask We Wear at Work, is a work of dark tragic-comedy. Its characters are not portraits of real people, but symbolic figures shaped by systems, routines, and expectations that quietly govern everyday life.

One of them is known as The Milk Lady — Creative Process.

She appears harmless. Familiar. Easy to overlook.
A background figure in the workplace.

Until it becomes clear she understands the systems better than anyone else.

She wears tradition like armour, faith like silence, and routine like control. In a culture obsessed with performance and wellbeing language, she represents something older, compliance disguised as care.

She is not a villain.
She is not a judgment.
She is a mirror.

This is her first appearance.
The story is coming.

The Mask We Wear at Work, coming up.