An Open Letter to Somebody

You were just a kid. 

Society told you you were smart. You were good at the mathy stuff. The grownups liked it when they told you two numbers and you could add them really fast. They subtly encouraged you, to study more. Feed the machine. 

Or maybe you were not smart. You realized that the world goes around smart kids. They compared you, with your siblings, your classmates your relatives. They gave you examples of striking personalities, feeding the tendrils of ambition in your tender mind. I want to be like X when I grow up. I will grow up and become successful. They never defined successful for you. You were implicitly promised that you would be loved and everyone would be nice to you when you finally became "someone". 

Maybe like many of us, you fell into their trap. You worked on being good at something you didn't enjoy so that you could be better off than others, and finally they could give you some love. Respect comes with money, status and power they told you. If you aren't an important person you just don't deserve to be treated like a decent human being. If you stuck out of the crowd by being "excellent" maybe the stranger in your everyday commute would not just zone out and be completely insensitive to your existence. 

You did well in society, You got through with sleepless nights, struggling through everything. You got a job and all along the way drunk copious amounts of coffee and stimulants, or numbed yourself in multiple ways, to cope with the pain of the insensitivity you had to muster. But now maybe, once you finally have that bank account, you lead an empty and dull life. You envy others who "followed their passion" yet your facetiousness cannot hide itself as you say "It was the safe choice" and quote Frost in your reading group with implicit superiority over the artist. If you kill yourself slowly enough, no one notices, and so on you continue everyday, numbing yourself with work or otherwise. You play along with their standards and judge others into conformity. You intellectualize on "the meaning of life" and "economic organization" to run away from the emptiness inside you and the fact that humanity as a whole has never been able to offer people 3 square meals a day. You reduce works which can wake you up from the spectacle to naive anger or romanticized pieces of art. Society hails you and you shall continue creating more people like you. Good for you. 

Or maybe you couldn't do well in school. Somewhere along the way you realised the insanity of it all. If we do not do well in the constricted context of education defined by people who want to train us to use our skills, we are collectively shunned and forever left picking up the pieces of our self worth. Am I really that dumb? I just never understood math you say, to cope with the fact that you were too scared to fully explore your true talents. And that society put that fear into you. They made you fear not being able to make your own living much more than your own death. Or maybe in the gentle reverie of the coping mechanisms they sold you (for your soul) you have found an oasis from reality which threatens to drive you insane if you live on the edge and seek to explore your potential. 

 Or maybe you are the fallen hero. Someone who used to have a "lot of potential" but slowly as disillusionment kept hitting, you couldn't keep up the facade. Maybe you saw a lot of pain at your house or in your surroundings and you could not bring yourself to accept the ease with which all the grownups around you could pretend it did not exist. Maybe you could not bring yourself to accept how everyone around everyone had just been reduced to what they could be used to accomplish in that person's model of the world. Well tough luck buddy, everyone needs to cope they tell you. Find healthy coping mechanisms, develop a healthy amount of envy and call it ambition they tell you. 

Or maybe you gave your all to something larger than you. A party, a leader, a religion, or an organization. Fanaticism was your drug of choice. You claimed someone or something had all the answers and devoted yourself to it. Desperately working so that you could make-believe what deep down, you knew to be a lie. The hate it engendered in you was proof to you about how sacred the thing you revered was.

Or maybe you gave your all to a 'lover'. Felt that they were the one for you, and would always be there with you. Every song you heard struck their chord in your heart. But the fire which was supposed to be your love revealed the ugliness of your own being. Your attachment or your codependance. Your narcissism, your self hatred. Your inability to connect and reciprocate as you had become psychologically numb. Your constant desire to objectify the other. Nowhere did you find repreive from the suffering. 

Or maybe you are none of these and you don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. You are someone who never had square meals in a day. You felt the harrowing pain of a lack of money in your parent's or friend's eyes. You have seen the desperation it drives people to as a child. You have seen brutal aspects of life as a child that you were never meant to see. A drunken or negligent parent, or domestic abuse, stealing, cheating, othering in the most gruesome forms, the masterpiece of human hatred. You feel repulsed by the very privilege from which I speak these words and the ones on even higher rungs than mine, preaching to feel better about the emptiness in themselves in their pretty, deceitful words. Maybe you are sick and tired of the lies in every civilized interaction and the darkness it hides. You have seen the violence in human beings and feel broken by it. 

Why do we continue like this?

Why do we hurt our children?
What are we doing here?

Why are we so empty?
Why do we lack love?

What are you going to do with your life?

I hope you think about these things friend, without bullshitting yourself.