Imo what we call modern life is a natural advancement of feudalism and western imperialism, or perhaps imperialism in general, but because of its scale and the refinement of social control techniques that are passively used to coerce the majority of people to participate willingly it's vaguer and more difficult to grasp the foundations of and the immensity of what's wrong and why we're led through unhappy lives. I have a whole section of my brain dedicated to this but most of the time it's like I'm walking through a fog and only every once in awhile can I manage to dust off the cobwebs. I'm convinced that this fog is itself a byproduct of modern living.
People tend to change a lot after adolescence, I've noticed, and I don't think that most of those changes are truly willing. It's like any one human's natural growth process is hijacked by the pervasive and forceful ideological climates of now, which tend, in my opinion, to be eerily similar but superficially different enough to present the illusion of diversity. We don't spare children either, the twelve years of wrongful imprisonment that we call primary and secondary education are necessary for this process to occur efficiently. It's a sorting hat, a social conditioning instrument and a way to catch and condemn outliers early all in one.
The real problem is that we are not free, that our lack of freedom is backed by concepts that we're impregnated with that bind us unknowingly (let's call abrahamic religions a test run), and when those fail outright violence that people turn a blind eye to because of how we're taught to think of justice, that we have endless illusory distractions from our lack of freedom, and that we can't even trust our own perceptions if some of the foundations of those perceptions directly antagonize us in ways we're not aware of. The only thing that can't be taken away from us is the core intuition that something is wrong even if correctly naming it is an uphill battle.
Maybe I'm being a tinfoil hat, which is another trick, association of a valid thought or behavior with one that appears ridiculous, I can't begin to tell you how often I was knee jerk accused of being a scientologist whenever I would attack psychiatry, it was honestly surreal, and reality always sucks. I'm sure it does, but hopefully not this bad.
Deprogramming is hard because of how deeply it reaches but on the rare occasion it happens reality looks very different. And we have mental hospitals for people who do that too, there's already a system in place to discredit or mislead, or even give catastrophic brain damage to anyone who begins to grasp the truth of what's really going on.