At this moment (November 26, 2024), I have just turned fifty-seven. Sometimes I get in touch with old friends and acquaintances only to be disappointed that I only manage to sink deeper into my anguish and loneliness. It sounds like a tearjerker, but there is no other way to say it. I have known more than one of them for decades, and by reconnecting with them from time to time, I have witnessed how the system has gradually emptied them until only the shell, the façade of what they were is left. It should be noted that when I say “system” I am not only blaming the powerful, be they multinationals or rulers, but people in general, especially the ordinary citizen, whom I consider the brick, the cell of the mess in which we live immersed. I am witness to how some of them had some value that was erased by the system, replaced by the monovalue of the number, how their potential personality withered away as a sapling. I am a witness to how they seemed more mature, lucid (even wise in life although it may seem contradictory,) and above all, “human”, when they were teenagers than now entering old age.
My story, on the other hand, was very different. I couldn't say what initially motivated my choice, my approach: to go through life thinking and choosing for myself, learning from everything and everyone, wise and ignorant, intelligent and stupid, and putting everything to the test, never settling for knowing what I think I know. That's how I formed a genuine criterion, I watered my personality until it became the ombú that it is today, surrounded by Pampa, by Peace. Therefore I have much of value to offer, hence my frustration when I collide with the sad current reality: to the few who could benefit from my gift, who surely have been scattered around the globe, at least I've not had the luck to meet them personally. I did meet some in books or in the media, especially philosophers and artists, some from other times, some contemporary ones who, with their words, came to conclusions similar to those that I and anyone who stops to think arrives at, which is no surprise because the fundamental questions (those that most people leave aside) obey and depend on the same parameters for a person, a rabbit or an amoeba.
When talking to these friends and acquaintances, besides feeling like I am, as we say in my country, “throwing daisies to the pigs”, their totally emptied mind only works as a news relay node, so not only do they not take advantage of or value what I offer them, but in exchange they make me swallow all the junk propaganda that I've been avoiding since I eliminated television, radio, newspapers and news websites from my daily life. I generally know what the news is going to say (hence what they will tell me,) with the goldfish memory of human beings, their history is unfailingly a merry-go-round. In these times, for example, they cannot avoid mentioning and reselling Zuckenberg’s Meta, artificial intelligence, Trump’s anti-socialist speech (or his relay subnode, Milei, in the case of my friends from Argentina), etc. About this, about the weather, now being old from some illness, and there their repertoire ends.
In fact, I write because I have no one to talk to and I have published what I have published on this website and my novels, only in the hope of reaching the few capable of understanding and benefiting from my thoughts or at least alleviating their loneliness, because as I have suggested, those who are my age and have stopped to think will not find revelation in my words.
©2024 - Walter Alejandro Iglesias