Suggested listen: Kasabian - La Fee Verte
It's my impression that most of us go through the same cycles of losing trust in humanity. When you're just a little kid, without any concrete understanding of the world enclosing, everything and everyone amazes you. It feels like people are out there, obtaining a great deal of information and building intriguing things. Every conversation is another opportunity for learning something new. That feeling quickly fades away as you step into your early teenage years though. As you grab a stronger hold on life (also with the help of your hormones going haywire), you tend to realize everyone is, kinda, faking it. Adults with all that confidence, just as lost as you were. Not only are they uninformed, but they also lie, deceive, and are drenched in illusions.
This sudden realization naturally has a great amount of effect on us that reshapes all of our ways of thinking. After all, almost overnight, your reality collapses (for the first time, remind you) and you have to embrace a new one. It’s such a staggering experience that most people refuse to go through another one when it’s time to do so. Puberty takes your innocence away. It leaves you bitter, more wicked in some ways. You cannot find an infinite amount of love towards every stranger you meet anymore. In fact, you start to despise people. You see through their personas and focus on their insecurities. All of your peers do the same, so you’re subjected to the behavior as well.
Before all this, you would never care what people would think of you. Because everyone was compassionate towards you. You felt cherished. You cherished them back. But after that threshold, everything turns into a popularity contest. I believe that triggers two things; a strong tendency to form group dynamics and survival instinct (that goes well beyond physical aspects). From there, we’re much more responsive to the concept of power. Of Course definition of that power varies quite a bit from culture to culture but also from individual to individual. But I’m here to claim those definitions are mostly very harmful, if they’re not abandoned when it’s time.
At the time of writing, I’m in my very late twenties (29). One thing I can confidently say is, your twenties are full of disappointments. You’ll achieve things that once seemed like very distant dreams. You’ll get your dream job, you’ll obtain high value skills, you’ll travel and start a new life in foreign country (probably multiple times) all by yourself. But soon you’ll find out that everything you achieve won’t make you feel the way you thought they would. In my humble opinion, that’s a very clear sign of you having a misleading definition of success (otherwise power). Life will force you to ask yourself; why do I keep getting things I’ve craved for my whole adult life and not feel good about them?
I strongly believe that if you keep turning a blind eye to the question, you are actually keeping digging a grave for yourself (and others, collectively). Naturally, the further you dig, the harder the climb is getting. Most people would agree life is what you make it. But still it is so hard to recognize store bought goals and criterias will age it like milk and make you resentful, because of that traumatic transition we all experience during puberty. Your twenties are your perfect chance to redefine what life will be like for you, what your stance will be. But for most of us, fear of social exclusion still holds quite power over our actions.
It’s only fair, it's the way it is. Extensive loneliness is one of the hardest experiences one can go through. Believe me when I say I speak from experience. So it’s a natural response to try to avoid it as much as we can. But I believe, we’re simultaneously running from our true selves we haven’t discovered yet by digging harder and harder and encouraging others to do the same by playing another role in setting a standard.
No, this is not yet another rant about escaping the matrix. If anything, I would encourage you to question why you would even be afraid of the matrix. If you’re afraid of spiders, you’re not afraid of the word, you’re afraid of getting bitten by a black widow and experiencing excruciating pain for a long period of time. If you’re afraid of living in a matrix, what are you even afraid of? At the risk of sounding Wittgensteinesque (love the guy, just hits a bit too close to home), I would argue you’re afraid of a word. You’re letting a bunch of other people define a concept that you constantly try to evade. That’s outright, imprisoning yourself.
It’s no coincidence we have an epidemic of young people indulging in crimes, even violent ones. The youth lost complete trust in older generations and values they either do have or claim to have. Every action has a reaction. We had a very crooked definition of success for a long time now. That created an imbalance and now the younger generation has a crooked definition of success in a different way. If you hop on a bus heading downtown, you’ll end up downtown. You wouldn’t be surprised that you're not in the countryside. If we have a corrupted definition of success, why are we even surprised we’re not swimming in heavenly waters. We have played survival of the fittest for a long, long time and now wondering why life is a wonderful experience for the %1 and hellish nightmare for the %99.
Most probably it’s quite hard to believe but I actually have tried not to sound preachy writing this. Maybe it’s just the lack of linguistic skills, or maybe it’s the lack of emotional maturity. Either way, here’s my message; we should stop praising man childs (or woman childs? I have no idea what’s the term). Reality is; if your toilet or whole infrastructure broke down, your house would be flooded with feces. If they stopped collecting garbage, you would catch an infection within a week. You probably don’t know how to grow any vegetables & fruit or take care of a farm animal, and have no knowledge of sericiculture. Honestly, the list of examples I could give is so long, it’s just pointless to continue.
Few months ago I had a conversation with a friend. She was praising Steve Jobs for “make this thinner” bit (if you don’t know, it’s about him demanding the original ipod to be thinner before release). It’s just not her, I kept hearing many, many people repeating the same thing; “It requires a visionary to realize it has to be thinner”. As long as we value discourses like this over actual hard work of engineers, we’re destined to have more dum-dum tech gurus (yeah, him, you know the guy).
So here’s my tl;dr. The 2020s so far have been about things sucking so bad. Movies suck, TV sucks, music sucks, hardware sucks, software sucks, diseases suck, health control sucks, celebrities sucks, politicians sucks, rich sucks, food sucks… Everything sucks! Because we aimed to do so. Because suggesting we did, got looked down upon. We despised and exploited people that kept us alive. We encouraged newer generations to be like man childs we saw on TV (or internet for that matter, at this age it’s pretty much the same thing). What if we moved on though? At the risk of becoming quite lonely at least for a while, what if we stop playing the popularity contest to form a better definition of success for ourselves? At worst, we would climb out of the graves we once dug. I believe we would all appreciate deepened horizons over sky sights washed with light pollution.
It’s okay to feel lost. Because not being aware of it would be much, much more painful after all.