Category: Blog (Page 1 of 2)

“Magical theater, entry fee is your mind.” — Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

That said we can dispense with any further literary pleasantries. We’ll come back to those later, for now let me put in plain words what’s ailing me for quite some time:

This world has lost its mind.

By world I don’t mean trees, spiders, solar protuberances on the moonlight shining on the 12 pins in Connemara seen across the sea (actually something I had the pleasure to experience, back in 1988 on a trip to Ireland — one of those moments where you ask yourself, utterly influenced by Walt Disney movies, if nature can be tacky by itself. Well, it can’t, no matter how much blue and white animators use to really get to the bottom of the idea of “kitschy”). Some little aspect of the word world: usually it means “our world”, the world we perceive as the ocean of concepts in which we dwell. Reality is just one of those concepts and it’s quite difficult to say what this world means.

I won’t go into philosophical detail, because I’m sick with a slight fever and a very shallow essay is about all I can deliver right now. Just one observation about being “woke”.
To try to better the world is a noble concept, just like freedom and caring for others. But what about the permanent judgment of others or situations, ideas. Do you really become a better person by miming the moral blockwart of the universe? That is not to say that there is a crazy amount of things one can feel judgmental about. Former presidents, companies that sucked the blood of their employees, people who shit on the environment and above all racists, sexist, fascists. But you don’t succeed in changing anything on a basal level in the mind of people, when you put yourself above them, morally or concerning what your level of personal development might seem to you.

I think there’s the problem: you fixate on the problems around you to run away from emptiness, loneliness and a general lack of serenity. To put it that way: you don’t know nothing about yourself, but everything (and I mean EVERYTHING!) about everything else. Even when you have spent perhaps a decade or two max in this world which is quite a bit less than the 15 odd billion years the universe exists (in this case it’s universe, because it’s quite debatable if the word world in the sense I defined it earlier can be used for a universe devoid of minds to perceive it – and it’s not the time nor the place nor the physical state I’m in two get into a philosophical discourse about that).

In this is where the observation that the world has lost its mind comes in. Too many people talk about freedom and have no idea what that is (the freedom to do whatever you want is just the freedom of being dependent off to her whims and desires, so none at all), about being woke, while being just arrogant, about being creative, meaning using Instagram filters, or about a better world which to them is just a world that makes it so easy to live in without any effort of taking care of the world, others, or just trying not to be in asshole.

There are many people who are not like that, but you rarely find them on Instagram or Facebook, because it just do the right thing and don’t talk about. The world is not an easy place to live and there’s no reason why it should be. It’s the place where we are invited to stay for a while and then in the end find that in a way we mattered. And while on the bus tour called life don’t scream at the bus driver for not being exactly what you expected her to be while spilling your ice cream on the seats.

“Per aspera ad astra!”