In her columns, our collaborator Nathalie Plaat calls on your stories. Recently, she briefly switched to “you” to ask you this: “Tell me, how is your pain? Baptized “News from you”, this section offers you a selected extract.
I cry sometimes, because I feel that a humanity is lost in us as a community. Through my personal experiences and my experiences as activists, I have the impression of having observed this phenomenon too closely to now deny it. So I have this pain that has followed me for several years, because I feel powerless in the face of a society that no longer makes sense to me.
Like Rousseau did long before me, I wonder about human nature, the good man, the institutions that corrupt him. In an era where everything seems to point to the human stupidity of overexploitation and overconsumption, I have the impression of seeing a collective narcissistic wound where the mass is bogged down in pride.
I also cry sometimes because I feel dissatisfied with my human relationships. The expression “relational disillusionment” resonates with me. That’s exactly what I’m going through right now. I turn to my friends for deep and authentic discussions that may hurt and confront, but which I believe are necessary to the search for meaning. Unfortunately, I am often disappointed and unable to fill this need for authenticity.
My mother once told me that she felt like she was floating between heaven and earth, not anchored to either. An image that ultimately refers to an automated existence and its human mechanics, as proposed by the empiricists of the Enlightenment. I feel that we are more and more in this paradigm of existence, that is to say kinds of automatons which function according to profit margins and levels of performance.
I cry sometimes, because I have already lived too much in my opinion, from the height of my 30 years and I wonder when I will be able to drop off. I want to dedicate my life to a cause greater than myself. I feel that this is how I will be able to connect most to my humanity and give meaning to my life. What I find difficult is that there are no manuals or training to tell me how to do this. Thus, I have been sailing for a year in search of an answer to my question: where to start?
In the past year, I have thought a lot about my contribution to the world. I have come to one of the following conclusions: I make the choice every morning to be a hypocrite, because if I were not a hypocrite, I would spend my day crying for the misfortune I cause as a white living in the West. My reflection starts from the fact that in the West, our way of life is based on a hierarchy of the world whose line is traced somewhere at the Equator: the rich northern countries; those of the poor south to enrich the countries of the north.
Thus, my person, without doing it with conscious intentions, participates in this growing inequality which ends, sometimes, in the death of thousands of people. In this huge abstract mass of unequal distribution of power, am I therefore a murderer? If I wake up in the morning and answer yes to this question using these last lines as a syllogism, I am doomed to a life of unhappiness.
Conclusion ? To live and enjoy happiness, I have to make the choice, every morning, to enter into a denial of the inhuman conditions in which people are immersed miles from my home. But, in doing this, I certainly deviate from my humanity. Ultimately, we may be caught between two unattractive choices. Either we dehumanize ourselves to experience less pain, or we face reality, and it makes us experience pain that sometimes hits us so hard that we have to hold on to not fall.
How is my pain, then? Honest, I believe so.