STOP WAR
Is there anyone alive out there? I want to stand in the middle of the square and scream: ‘Is anyone alive here? Anyone alive, answer me!’ But the only answer will be silence. Everyone walks around with stone-cold faces, drinking alcohol to forget, using drugs, dancing in clubs to music just to pick someone up or be picked up, to have quick sex without even knowing each other’s names, and then scatter in opposite directions. Download an app, go on a date. It’s not even a date—it’s an inspection before sex. And that’s it. Nothing more. Just plugging the inner void with another human body. A shell without a soul. Sad.
A rapid change of scenery. No matter where you go, it’s all the exact same thing. Everyone is just playing a game. Putting on social masks and acting out roles, reciting all these social passwords. There are no real feelings. Sick with the disease of numbness. You think, here is a living, genuine person, here are true feelings, here is love—but it’s just another deception, a set of manipulations and acting, nothing more. No feelings, no emotions, nothing. There it is: the price for enchantment and idealization is disillusionment. And all those moments of happiness turned out to be fakes. How banal.
Some preachers preach for money: ‘Believe in love, open your heart.’ Others preach: ‘Become a master of manipulation so they can never forget you—short and long leash, push and pull, hot and cold.’ Children’s games played by physically grown adults.
You drive in a car and watch the shifting houses, street names, people, cafes. Cities, countries—everything merges into a single picture, like a multiple-exposure photograph. One frame laid over another. And suddenly, the beautiful architecture that used to bring you joy turns into just a building. The streets become mere labyrinths.
It used to feel like happiness was a movement from point A to point B. That once you reached point B, achieved what you wanted, happiness would be right there waiting for you. That there was a concrete route and a final destination called ‘happiness.’ But you reach point B. You seem to get what you wanted before—here it is, take it. Wasn’t this what you wanted? Yes, this was it. So why don’t you feel anything? You don’t feel happy. Yes, it’s so strange—you realize these are just moments, isolated moments. Flashes of this happiness. When you are in it, you don’t record it; you simply live through that beautiful moment. Like when you go to the park with friends, bring a blanket, a bottle of wine, some cheese, and sit down. Springtime, warm already, everything blooming and smelling of jasmine. You talk about everything under the sun. You’re having fun, laughing, joking. Then you walk down to the embankment—there it is, the evening sun.
But now I am a refugee, not even an emigrant. All my friends scattered across the world, impossible to see. Rare phone calls that cannot replace real, living human connection.
And most people do nothing but search for leverage in relationships, in friendship. How can you be used? How can you be useful? What can you give? A function perceives another as a function, yet demands unconditional love and sincere, selfless friendship for itself. Pure absurdity.
I am a lonely traveler in the desert. The only thing to see is a mirage. There it is: the social game. Vanity Fair, the cult of narcissism. Like peacocks fanning their feathers in front of each other, shaking them passionately to show who’s superior. Clothes, statuses, reflections, masks on faces. Meanwhile, I pull back and become a detached observer of the society of the spectacle—a spectacle where they lost the plot and drifted away in time and space.
The reign of the bureau: bureaucracy running on autopilot. There’s almost no one left inside these buildings, and if someone in a suit remains, they are merely following instructions written by a machine, a program. But it’s just a simulation. It is the power of performance.
They search for meaning: what is it? Trying to solve a riddle—yet there is no riddle, only a trick. It’s like searching for a black cat in a dark room; I flip the switch and see there is no cat, and there never was one to begin with. Funny and tragic at the same time.
Everyone just wants to climb to the top of the mountain. It’s a damned pyramid, a pyramid. Who’s at the top of the pyramid? But there is no pyramid in reality; it’s just an illusion, an image implanted in our minds. There is no pyramid, and there is no peak. Illusionists casting a cognitive fog. Magicians distracting with sleight of hand. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Now I understand Hamlet’s monologue: ‘To be, or not to be? To sleep, perchance to dream. Is that not a consummation devoutly to be wished?’
My grandmother loved to quote Ecclesiastes: ‘For in much wisdom is much grief.’ Back then I didn’t understand. I thought, what does that mean? You need to know everything, I will learn it all, I will go behind the curtain. She would just look at me with sad eyes. Well, I went behind it. Behind the cardboard painted to look like the Garden of Eden, I found cobwebs, dust, and empty bottles. The theater manager took all the box-office cash and stiffed the actors again.
People kill each other for money just to buy items that will inevitably turn to trash. World Cup, Olympic Games, political commentary, showbiz gossip.
Sleep, sleep, do not wake up. May the sleeping never wake.
