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, putting everything to the test, never settling for knowing what I think I know. That's how I formed an authentic criterion, I watered my personality until it became the ombú that it is today, surrounded by Pampa, by Peace. Therefore, I have much and of value to offer, hence my frustration when I come up against the sad current reality: at least I have not had the luck to meet the few who could benefit from my gift, who are surely scattered around the globe, personally. Because, when I talk to the friends and acquaintances I mentioned before, besides feeling like I'm "throwing daisies to pigs," as we say in my country, I suffer more and more of the same from each and every one of them since their minds, totally emptied, function exclusively as a news relay node. Not only do they not take advantage of or value what I offer them, but in exchange they make me swallow the junk propaganda that I have 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 (therefore what they are going to 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 that of his relay subnode Milei in the case of my friends from Argentina), etcetera, etcetera and more etcetera. About this, about the weather, now about being old and having some illness, and that's where the repertoire ends.
I know there have been others like me, I have met some in books, in the media, especially philosophers and artists, some from other times, some contemporary who, with their words, reached conclusions similar to those that I and anyone who stops to think reaches, which is no surprise because the fundamental questions (the ones that most people ignore) obey and depend on the same parameters for a person, a rabbit or an amoeba. 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 thought or at least alleviating their loneliness because, as I already suggested, those who are my age and have stopped to think will not find revelation in my words.
©2024 - Walter Alejandro Iglesias