What society calls “discipline” is, most of the time, nothing more than the individual’s obedience to it.
What society calls “discipline” is, most of the time, nothing more than the individual’s obedience to it.
― Atrona Grizel
Where there is no meaning or purpose, jokes and laughter fill the void.
― Atrona Grizel
The mature person is the one who resembles no one and nothing else.
― Atrona Grizel
When comparing the hedonistic, consumerist, and shallow universe of Huxley’s Brave New World with the modern world, the similarities make it seem as though this is no longer merely a work of fiction. I would even prefer living in Orwell’s 1984 to this happiness hell.
― Atrona Grizel
I look at young people: beneath almost all of their behavior lies a kind of imitation. Maybe they’re copying a line they heard in a film. Maybe they’re wearing the clothes of a character from a game. Or perhaps they’ve inherited the behaviors of a family member. They are never themselves. This madness called “the search for identity” only leads to identity being hollowed out, and that very emptiness is then inflated in such a way that it can never truly become something full. The way they drink water, the way they walk, even the way they look—everything appears so artificial that it almost provokes the urge to slap some sense into their faces. And frankly, because this has become the homogeneous culture of an entire generation—because even all those so-called subcultures are actually rooted in this same core nonsense—only those who have managed to detach themselves from all of it can see it; in other words, those whose souls are old. To those types who think they are “cool,” I sometimes feel like asking, with quiet contempt and without even expecting an answer: “Did your family push you to be overly social? Did you watch too many action films? Are you that enamored with the storylines in games?” And how will these teenagers see solitary and solemn individuals like me? In slang terms: “nerd,” “geek,” “try-hard,” “cringe,” “NPC.” This is the degenerate Western youth mindset. When someone can’t map you onto their tiny mental grid, they slap a word on you and move on. What else could this Americanized—indoctrinated and brain-washed—teenagers really “think” about those who simply don’t join the herd?
― Atrona Grizel
Children crammed into school buses… they look like packages shipped to factories. Products. Not one of them is there by their own will. They’re there because the state mandates it, and because their families, acting as extensions of that same machinery, have no real choice but to send them. Those vehicles are everywhere. Seeing them on the streets unsettles me, as if I’m living inside a dystopia. From the outside, everything looks innocent, of course. And for the children, school is probably even enjoyable most of the time. Because indoctrination can only survive when it presents itself as education.
― Atrona Grizel
There are two states whose destruction, total collapse, and being trampled underfoot I deeply long for—and if I were to witness it, I might even believe I was living in a dream and lose my sense of reality: one is the sticky spider and the little clown in North America; the other is a gossiping, noisy prison in the Middle East that executes not rapists but intellectuals.
― Atrona Grizel
The word “popular”… it’s everywhere. What did it originally mean? It meant “the people.” Populism. As in a “popular revolution.” It didn’t mean a "fashionable revolution," because its earlier sense referred directly to the people, not to fame. But the meanings are close enough that they can easily be distorted. And so “of the people” becomes “favored by the people,” and from there, a term once used for movements rooted in the masses ends up being applied to hollow modern celebrities who have no real connection to the people.
― Atrona Grizel
Loneliness doesn’t mean being alone; it means being unable to be together.
― Atrona Grizel
Being loved is easy; what’s difficult is feeling loved.
― Atrona Grizel
Pragmatism and youth are, in fact, closely intertwined, because both ask very simple questions and develop an interest in things solely based on the answers they receive. Pragmatists ask: “What use is it?” Teenagers ask: “What pleasure does it give?” Nothing can influence pragmatists if there is no “utility,” and nothing can influence the young if there is no “entertainment.”
― Atrona Grizel
I walk through grey streets.
Moonlight opens the road, softly.
The shop windows are dark—
their light belongs to nobody.
I step into the crowd.
I dissolve among them.
Then I leave them behind.
And I find my way.
Following the road,
I drift off the road.
And in that deviation
I come to understand where I am not going.
I follow the moonlight.
It pulls me inward,
like something remembered but never named.
Its brightness is calm,
its beauty silent.
I arrive at the edge of the cliff.
I stand above the endless sea
and watch that pale sphere
hovering over it all.
A magnet drawn to itself—
pulling itself endlessly into itself—
an I beyond myself.
― Atrona Grizel
When your family objects to you refusing to do something that is entirely up to you, for example when you refuse to have breakfast in the morning and they insist and even force you to eat, it doesn’t mean “you should start the day feeling energized.” It simply means this: “right now, you don’t have ownership over your own life.”
― Atrona Grizel
I haven’t experienced anything genuinely pleasant in a raw, lived sense. I never learned that such a thing could even exist. So I began to live intellectualized experiences instead. Sometimes even purely intellectual ones. Experiences that can hardly be called “experience” at all. Completely abstract, belonging only to the mind. Nothing bodily, nothing sensory, nothing of the heart. Why? Because love means chaos. And what is chaos? Nothing but pain. Of course, the chaos in underdeveloped societies and the chaos in advanced ones are different: one is hunger, war, and resentment; the other is creativity, innovation, and perhaps a kind of unity formed against that misery. I don’t come from an advanced society. So I’ve never tasted the latter. Even if they exist, I’ve never witnessed them. That’s why when I look at Jung’s statement, "Intellectualism is often a cover-up for fear of direct experience,” I feel slightly exposed, as if laid bare, because it reflects me as I am. But at the same time, I recognize that the person who said this was clearly not someone like me, and I believe he cannot reach my purely abstract sense of self.
― Atrona Grizel
When spring arrives, the valleys dress themselves in flowers.
Every kind of bloom reaches upward,
arms full of sun.
But we,
we who have misplaced our spring,
when are we meant to open?
Our hearts are flowers too,
fragile, unique things.
What are they supposed to embrace
in a season that forgot us?
The valleys shimmer with color,
air thick with unbearable perfume.
Yet we,
we who are the flower itself,
how are we to build such a paradise
from within our own ribs?
And when our beauty glimmers
through the indifferent snow,
should it not burn—a beauty so fierce
it wounds the cold itself?
― Atrona Grizel
Spending a long time in the same environment with someone can make that person seem more attractive due to an evolutionary mechanism. At their core, humans are organisms designed to socialize and reproduce; thus, if the person they are interacting with is of the same sex, they may grow more admiring, whereas if the person is of the opposite sex, they may find them increasingly attractive over time. In reality, the cause is the narrowing of the world. Perception contracts, and the person begins to focus only on this tiny cage, while everything else falls outside calculation. Through this absence of alternatives, the person forms a deeper closeness with a roommate, classmate, or coworker with whom they spend most of their time, because the brain has grown accustomed to them. The sense of “clarity” that comes after a relationship ends is rooted in this, because the person has now escaped the cage and gained the ability to view the relationship from the outside. However, a person who can always look from the outside, who refuses to diminish themselves, will never feel attraction toward those nearby, even if they accept them as familiar. Love does not mean seeing but blindness, and those who cannot become blind will drift away from bonding.
― Atrona Grizel
The secret of high-quality solitude feels less like absolute isolation and more like standing at the strange threshold of it. Because being completely alone, over time, leads to a kind of hunger and longing, while being surrounded all day by people one recoils from as if from the stench of dung—even if only at the edge of the social world—serves to make them curse connection and see solitude as a blessing. When I grow weary of loneliness, I simply spend a long time among people, and all that weariness disappears, only to be replaced by a weariness of people themselves.
― Atrona Grizel
After spending around ten continuous hours in the same environment, saturated with the constant noise of empty conversation, my mind inevitably begins to accept what those around me say as valid, just as everyone else there does. In this way, my objections to ideas like hair dye bringing happiness, muscles mattering more than intelligence, or people walking around absorbed in their phones being considered “part of the culture” begin to fade for a while, and I start to see these as things that might genuinely bring a kind of satisfaction. I find myself astonished at how people don’t seem troubled by any of this, how they somehow accept it as natural. And since I appear to be the only person, past or present, who reacts this way, I can’t even be sure whether my reaction is real. That uncertainty, in turn, allows me to manipulate it as needed in critical moments of survival. Because the environment I’m in functions as a complete echo chamber, where no one thinks otherwise and the same ideas are repeated relentlessly, my mind eventually yields. But even this “yielding” is not surrender; it is strategic. The moment I leave that environment, I immediately discard those adopted thoughts—taken on only to endure it more easily—and return to my original thoughts, my own. I recognize the “illusion” I carried there as a kind of wartime strategy, where tactics shift radically; once the cultural siege ends, I return to rejecting hair dyes, muscles, and phones, and, at last, to revering my own existence.
― Atrona Grizel