People who perform roles are not actually considered to be performing if they are not performing the fact that they are performing.
People who perform roles are not actually considered to be performing if they are not performing the fact that they are performing.
―
Atrona Grizel
The purest thing
is that which does not exist at all, because existence itself means
contamination. And yet, even within contamination, purity can still be found.
As age increases, purity decreases, and as it decreases, it increases, almost
automatically. If the goal were truly to do children a kindness by keeping them
pure, the issue would have to be solved at the root by killing them before they
grow up.
―
Atrona Grizel
I have rarely
experienced an innocent silence or a peaceful solitude. Silence was generally
something imposed through pressure, and solitude usually occurred amid the
suffocating proximity of others. I have never even tasted what real silence or
real solitude are like, and I might feel deep sorrow about that.
―
Atrona Grizel
I dislike public
transportation because my autonomy is transferred to someone else. The driver
could lose their mind in a fit of rage and, on an impulsive urge, steer the bus
off a cliff and kill everyone inside. You cannot be certain that this will not happen,
because most people are reactive animals who can be provoked by the slightest
things. Official documents always state that such people are “healthy,” because
of course it cannot be written that they are “problematic”; if that were the
case, they would be in an asylum, and no one wants that. Consequently, such
behaviors somehow always come from the “most unexpected” people, because they
suppress themselves until they finally explode. I do not like that someone
random can possess the luxury of being able to take my life in this way.
―
Atrona Grizel
When I look at
people, I do not see a soul; I see bones, skin, and a brain. This makes me feel
extremely lonely at times, because it seems as though there is no one in the
world other than these biological machines, and, in fact, that is precisely how
it is. I am one of them too. If so, then there is literally no “living being”
in existence.
―
Atrona Grizel
I cannot
understand people by looking at myself, because I am different and people are
different. This feeling has always been inside me. For this reason, I never
dared to project any of the insights I gained from analyzing myself onto
others, because I clearly had nothing to do with them. What was right for me
was wrong for them, and what was wrong for them was right for me. You can only
understand people by examining yourself if you are someone embedded in society.
For an independent spirit, self-analysis can at most provide an idea about
society, because a slave society and a free spirit are incompatible. As a
result, I have never had an external mentor throughout my life. Structurally,
this could not happen, because I have an inner world that no one could mirror.
It feels as if everyone is destined to go in one direction and I alone am fated
to go somewhere else, and naturally those who are going toward that single
destination cannot guide me on my path. Memories resurface from my early
adolescence of watching “self-help” videos on the internet. The people in those
videos spoke about what is “strong,” what looks “ugly,” what “should” be done,
and so on, as if they were prophets who knew me personally. At that time,
because I did not yet have an intensely society-detached sense of self, I
genuinely swallowed these as serious truths. When I failed to live up to them,
I felt worthless, because I had tied my value to being “excellent.” But this is
unsustainable in the long term. Not because I tied my value to things that
would make me feel worthless, but because those things clearly had nothing to
do with me at all. As the years passed, I set aside any sense of participation
and began watching those videos again, not in order to “watch” them, but to
observe them from a distance, almost like an alien. And then I understood that
they had never actually been speaking to me at all. Not too much later, I
abandoned and forgot all those so-called wise figures I had once idolized.
―
Atrona Grizel
Engaging in deep
existential questioning due to dissatisfaction with life usually occurs at an
advanced age. Consider the doctor who devotes their entire life to their
career, only to become convinced in old age that it was all meaningless, and
then decisively throws their diploma into the fireplace and burns it. Why does
this realization arrive so late? Why is it so rare in youth? The answer is
simple: youth means being occupied. It means being kept busy, and therefore not
genuinely thinking. The disgraceful aspect of civilization-level cynicism
emerging only at the end of life is that it reveals how uniformly people think.
If such a disillusioned person had encountered, earlier on, a sharp and
uncompromising mind capable of independent thought, relentless criticism, and
judgment, this “late-age questioning” could have occurred in youth and settled
into one’s identity back then. But because they never met such a person, or
because they failed to take them seriously even if they did, and because they
themselves were not such a person, meaning they could not think beyond
prescribed boundaries, all awareness is postponed to the period when the
importance of awareness has already faded: just before death. Life might still
try to comfort them desperately, but existence never forgives those who are too
late.
―
Atrona Grizel
The reason states
punish those they deem criminals is not the danger that has befallen or might
befall a human life, but the fact that they have assumed the title of
“protector of public order” and do not wish to act in a way that would openly
betray it. Because if they did, this would lead only to their own collapse into
anarchy. In short, it is again solely because they care about maintaining their
own power. For example, they may even execute an arsonist, but they will feel
no pain at all for the people that person burned, nor for the family of the
person they execute, because bureaucracy does not care. The only thing that
matters is that the spectacle continues.
―
Atrona Grizel
Living within a
society necessarily requires everyone to give up an original life for the sake
of “order and harmony.” As the simplest example: I work at the hours the state
wants me to work and do not work at the hours it does not want; I am forced to
go to places it wants me to go, and I am not allowed into places it does not
want me to enter. What I mean here is the association of weekdays with work and
weekends with rest, and the compulsory bureaucratic education imposed on every
child and young person, and the exclusion of individuals from certain places
due to the non-acceptance of certain traits they possess. What emerges here is
simply that a person is born into an already established order and therefore
cannot establish their own order, because they are already trapped within that
external order. Because if a person thinks deeply enough and manages to strip
away all pleasures and entertainments even for a moment, the state is present
in every second of their life; they are on land ruled by a state and are thus
within a larger external life they do not own, and for this reason it is hardly
possible for them to live their own life. This life is not mine. Because I was
born into humanity. Even going to the market stems from a consumer-based social
structure designed to make me dependent on the outside, and therefore it does
not even contain free will. Even when I sit or stand is in fact determined by
the state, because the hours and the curricula are in its hands. I did not want
to be part of any of this. And yes… there is compulsory taxation. It’s as if I
supposedly love these things so much that the state forces me to give it money
so they can continue and become “even more effective.” And if I refuse to pay,
since I’m already trapped inside its own system, it can punish me however it
wants. The real drama is not being born itself, but being born into society.
―
Atrona Grizel
Educational
institutions train minds not to ask questions but to give answers to questions,
and in this way they “close” them. An entire society thinks in the same way:
there is a “problem,” and this problem must be “solved” immediately, and if it
is not, this is maddening. The constant search for purpose and meaning is also
the product of the same conditioned mentality, because minds assimilated into
society always want to close what is open, because they do not have the
capacity to tolerate complexity and uncertainty. If meaninglessness leads to
crises in someone, this is only because the person is trying both to cope with
meaninglessness and at the same time to sustain their social nature, because a
non-social soul will not fear meaninglessness; it will simply accept it as fundamental.
But being within society and trying to look existence straight in the eye
without flinching is hardly possible, because to do that one must first
separate from society, since society will always label this as a “problem,” and
because the person is still within society, they will not be sure about it and
will therefore complain about loneliness or being misunderstood and so on, go
to therapy, and there be told that “thinking this much is harmful,” and thus be
sucked back into society like a vacuum, extinguishing this spark before it even
has a chance to burn. Yet it is society itself that claims existential despair
is an issue. There is never anything that is spontaneously a problem.
Everything that is cursed is declared so because of someone’s irritability, not
because it truly is so, because nothing can be cursed in essence, since both
everything depends on perspective and there is not even anything there to begin
with, and when these two things are taken into account, questions always become
more effective than answers, because there is not even an answer. Civilization
is the childish, stubborn attempt to find answers to what cannot be answered,
and sincerely believing in the little game it has constructed in its own narrow
world.
―
Atrona Grizel
I learned that
loneliness is considered a “bad” thing simply by observing people. In my
natural state, I did not feel discomfort about it, largely because I did not
even notice it. It was simply my default condition. I did not feel bored,
suffocated, or diminished by being alone. Later, I entered among people and
listened to their conversations. For example, I heard this remark: “Don’t be
ashamed to go out alone, because maybe they’ll think you’re independent, not a
loser.” When I first heard this, I could not understand it, because I had never
felt that way. Did they really see solitude as a form of “loserhood”? That idea
had never occurred to me. To me, solitude clearly signified originality and
independence. Yet the very existence of such a sentence, full of invisible
cultural traps, reveals that society internally believes the opposite. In this
way, I discovered that solitariness was considered “loneliness” by people.
Before encountering them, solitude did not mean “being lonely” in my mind at a
conceptual level. Because there was no narrative attached to it. No moral
weight. No implied deficiency. Once I encountered people, however, I inherited
their interpretive framework. Society handed me a label and said, “This is what
your state means.” “This is how it should feel.” “This is what it signals about
your worth.” I never internalized this framework, because I was never truly
pulled down into society’s logic in the first place. Had I absorbed it, I would
have experienced loneliness as “being lonely” from the beginning. Instead, my
core remained untouched by these projections, uncontaminated by sociocultural
toxins.
― Atrona Grizel