Hello to Sad People.
Homage to Ayn Rand.
Lament.
From a long withdrawn observation of other people, you’ve become inclined to admit that it is possible that many of them enjoy, no live for, bodily experiences.
How wonderfully useful, you hurry to admit. From the moment we open our eyes, we belong. Embedded in fuzzy structures of emotional, social exchanges, our lives depend on navigating social cues, making favors to get some back.
And if one should depend on others’ liking, then enjoying the bodily experiences (eating, drinking … ) with others is nothing but wonderfully useful.
No, you say, it is more. All the sweet promises of the 21st century technology are empty. The platformization of society in thousand twitters, linkedins and facebooks; none of that could ever replace the personal requisite to belong.
You need to have friends, dear boy. One ‘friend’s’ suggestion beats thousand clicks. Just a digital charade built on top of messy human structures, you say. That charade may be a good profit model — an advertisement channel hitting their brains with hard short dopamine shots — but it does not allow you to operate in their absence.
The choice is simple. Sit down, sweat in tears to then send painfully executed hours of music, text, work off to oblivion, or go among them. Go and belong because if they know you, if they like you, only then will they become interested.
Resolve.
There is this doomed tension between wanting to belong and having to belong because, you see, none of what we do makes any sense without witnesses, except that the belonging also carries a heavy weight of duties, favors and exchanges that we tend to lose ourselves in.
Belonging is hard work, you know. One can spend his whole life maneuvering social cues, making favors to get some back, but forgetting why, then slowly reaching the sorry state of looking for self-worth in the opinion of others.
This pulsing, heavy organism of human exchanges becomes them. A self-reinforcing fabrication of items of desire, rules for punishment, symbol statuses, thousands of synthetic constructs to keep them inside.
How strange! but true that every human being can find a work that uplifts her soul. Something that removes her from the suffering of knowing her existential minimum, the certainty of death and the lack of purpose.
Of course, looking for it is just like walking blindfolded. It does not have to be a thing that one is good at; it absolutely has to be a thing after which one feels less terrible, lighter, more complete.
It requires willingness, no freedom, to waste energy and time and then risk ending up with something that has no value to them.
Fury.
Look at them, you say. Do you know any that would fill you with respect? Any that you’d feel particularly small next to?
Men sitting at their desks, half-empty, scheming their next move to please someone above, housewives pushing trolleys at supermarkets, brats smoking cigarettes behind school for the petty want of esteem. Or their equivalents. No witnesses there, dear boy.
Nothing matters and everything hurts. Cut loose, run amok looking for things that complete you. You will know when you are there, you will be alone.
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