To see is to be unseen.
To see is to be unseen.
― Atrona Grizel
Happiness, it turns out, meant unhappiness. It was never a constant companion. In the end, it drove me away, cast me off from its side. I was left utterly alone in the cold. I was hungry and thirsty. And then unhappiness embraced me. It wrapped itself around me, held me close… and made me find a strange kind of happiness within itself. My new friend would never leave me alone.
― Atrona Grizel
The light cast by the USA, the world’s “beacon of freedom,” is not sunlight but the light of hell.
― Atrona Grizel
A person’s level of originality can even be correlated with how little they use social media, because the internet means an uncontrolled environment where anything can be done, and this creates an excessive web of perspectives that constantly forces a person to compare their life with others, which rarely leads to good outcomes. Very few people use the internet consciously, because most use it to “clear their head” after a tiring day, and thus, lacking a deliberate mental filter, they consume content until their inner world is filled with nothing but it. If you say something to such people, an internet meme comes to their mind. If they have a thought, a trending video appears. If they hum something randomly, they immediately try to compare it to a live-streamed music performance. Because they are already dead in a sense. They have turned into “internetized” creatures and now perceive everything through a digital lens. Even their social relationships are shaped by this: in order not to “fall behind,” they imitate the friends they follow on social media, going to the same places and wearing the same clothes, while trying to disguise it by making slight variations, but underneath it all is the fear of being alone, and this produces a kind of total social conformity. An entire youth becomes unable to communicate without internet slang and American street profanity, because that constitutes their entire vocabulary. Adults, similarly, adapt in order to “keep up with the times,” and even 50-year-old men contort their faces and voices to perform “entertainment” and gain millions of likes. Seeing this, they feel “loved,” and so they continue to humiliate themselves further, because the society they are in demands exactly that. I watch adults eating. Grown, matured people. After every spoonful they put in their mouths, they scroll the screen of the phone they’re holding in front of them. They burst into laughter. They swallow their bites accompanied by laughter. They don’t even look around them. Their entire world is made up of this. Like a baby watching a cartoon on television with full attention and laughing, not caring about anything else at that moment, because it knows nothing beyond that context and is happy with this. The 21st century will be a completely empty world dominated by such zombies.
― Atrona Grizel
The best way to understand that a civilization has become “zombified”—meaning that on the surface everything functions, daily life continues, stability appears intact, etc., but internally it is homogeneous, spiritually dead, and existentially enslaved—is to develop a distant perspective that strips away people’s faces, behaviors, and words and reaches the underlying core beneath them, which requires the abandonment of ordinary social scripts.
― Atrona Grizel
The true face of a person or a community reveals itself only when they are placed in the torture chamber. Apart from that raw state of physical pain, everything else is a kind of role born of comfort.
― Atrona Grizel
Despite all the innovativeness of the one who thinks differently, the thing they must never think—at the very least, never believe—is that they are “mad” in the socially defined sense of the word.
― Atrona Grizel
Freedom of thought in democracies is distributed carelessly, as if it were something very abundant. Thus, even the most reactionary person begins to shout endlessly, because they assume they are capable of thinking. Yet the masses simply do not possess the faculty of thought. They never did. Granting societies the right to thought is like granting a fish the right to fly; even if a fish can believe it can fly, the reality remains that it cannot.
― Atrona Grizel
The primary way a state unleashes terror is by forcing police and soldiers—whose purpose in usual circumstances, at least in theory, is to provide security—into violence and cruelty. For if those who are responsible for upholding the law begin to violate it, how will people protect their rights?
― Atrona Grizel
The "successful" ones are not those who receive numerous awards, who are CEOs of companies, or who are monetary billionaires; they are those who deliberately choose homelessness, because they are able to.
― Atrona Grizel
We have been continuously instilled, including myself, with materialist values because most of us naturally exist in average environments, and in such places one’s worth has been defined by “how much money one makes.” Beings who in childhood knew nothing of evil, once they grow up, begin to engage in all kinds of illegal activities by developing their imagination for dirty work purely in order to earn money, because upon entering adulthood they are released into a kind of wilderness where money is the main currency. Arms trafficking, kidnapping, drug trade, and similar things are fundamentally rooted in this, because a person has learned that without money they cannot even survive, as that they will not be allowed to live by the materialist society. No one cares about anyone else in such a place. Everyone is on their own. The strong impose dominance, the attractive secure partners, and those who are “neither” are pushed outside the herd. Adult culture is a savanna. Friendships formed in adulthood resemble pragmatic alliances in the wild precisely for this reason; here, everyone is with others only to better withstand something specific. Forming friendships out of pure desire is something unique to childhood. In adulthood, however, conflicts of interest enter the picture, and this is where the foundation of all relationship games is laid. And what is striking is how rarely anything other than material wealth is considered important, and how this has always been the case throughout history, because material wealth is the foundation of economies and therefore serves the interests of states, which in turn promote consumerism and even present the measurement of one’s own spiritual worth in a few dollars as a virtue. If the world were not materialist—if all those luxuries, halls, limousines disappeared; if all aristocrats and oligarchs vanished—that would mean the collapse of these states, because economies cannot survive without consumerism. Thus, there exists a society that forces the individual into excessive extroversion, and those who are introverted are simply ignored in the midst of this constant rush. I remember watching videos containing quotes from millionaires during my adolescence, because this sick social world had partially managed to assimilate me as well, and as a result I hated myself, thinking that if I couldn’t become materially rich, I would be “a failure” and deserving of being crushed or even killed. What is striking, however, is that as I questioned this more, I moved away from it, and as I became capable of being happy without money, I gradually started to value it less, and consequently, I distanced myself from all those capitalist and bourgeois distortions who sold me “wise quote” videos just to fill their own pockets, which in reality was itself part of the “game” they play “according to its rules” anyway.
― Atrona Grizel
The phrase “the past is in the past” is, in fact, a sign of social unconsciousness that spreads under the polite mask of civility, woven as a defense against awareness. People have ceased to think about their past because, in their understanding, the past “does not exist.” Thus, they live only in the present moment and call it life. They may fail to remember even what happened the day before because, frankly, thinking causes them such pain that they have sworn an oath against it, and as a result they have become unable to recall any detail. I live in a society where people openly say, “Thinking is exhausting,” and “I’m not going to become a philosopher for no reason,” and then laugh at this as if it were a joke. In such a society, just as the past is not remembered, the future, too, cannot be imagined—because of the neglect of the mental dimension beyond the excessively concrete. Yet a person ought to descend into the past. If necessary, one should even become lost within the inner whirlpools one has created—almost for the sake of a strange, deliberate pleasure. But if those whirlpools are not under one’s control, then it means the person does not even know how to think about the past, and consequently even the pain that arises from this remains pitiable.
― Atrona Grizel