For most people, saying “I love you” actually means, "You don’t cause too many problems, so I’ll smile at you to keep you being like that.”
For most people, saying “I love you” actually means, "You don’t cause too many problems, so I’ll smile at you to keep you being like that.”
― Atrona Grizel
At school, especially in the final term before it ended, very few people would show up to class. Those who did had brains that equated noise with happiness, but since the noise had naturally diminished as people disappeared, they began to feel an unbearable boredom. They would fiddle with objects in their hands, pick at their nails, shake their legs, stroke their hair, because they simply couldn’t sit still. They always had to be doing something with their bodies, because their minds were actually doing nothing. In that same silence, I was at my most productive. My inner world would bloom. I could finally be myself, and my lungs would expand as I breathed more deeply. Naturally, I read and wrote with a level of focus I had never reached before, because the human scum constantly creating “performance” and “positivity” pressure around me were gone. I was like this because my identity came from myself, not from what others reflected onto me. But the people around me couldn’t function without mirrors. So for them, every minute of this silence, which felt sacred to me, passed like torture. To find even a small stimulus—since school was nothing but a concrete prison with little else to do—they would have given anything. Eventually, they kept bothering the teachers, begging to go home. The only reason for this was that they couldn’t create stimulation through thought or imagination on their own. They were nothing but pure bodies. I watched them with pleasure, like watching a fish flailing on land, laughing to myself with a sense of joy. Watching them suffer pleased me, because the roles had reversed: in their superficial world, they made me endure every kind of torment, but now, in the world of solitude—my world—they couldn’t survive. And they have so little moral empathy for those outside their social circles, they think so little about them, that they do not even notice there are people who endure a year-long empty school noise where every second feels like hell, compared to a few days of silence whose mere minutes feel like torture to them.
― Atrona Grizel
The country that has descended to earth from hell does not exist on any map, book, or anything in my room. If I see its name written somewhere, I cross it out. If I see its flag, I step on it. If I see its map, I feel the urge to scribble over it. This state supposedly exists to represent me—me and tens of millions of others thrown into the same ethnic herd. It is supposedly there to protect me, to keep me alive. At least the constitution says so. In practical reality, I receive the treatment of a concentration camp inmate within my own country. In this place filled with every kind of refugee and foreigner filth, I am alienated from my own flag and made to work like a slave all day. When I read the opposition intellectuals of this country, they all initially appear “enlightened”: the “great founder” did take steps for independence at first, but after his death, everything degenerated. Doesn’t that alone show he lacked foresight, since after his death the country rapidly went downhill, and therefore he wasn’t as intelligent as believed? I don’t know, maybe he could have established a high-quality monarchy descended from his own noble bloodline instead of a stupid republic. I am not very sure what he would say if he saw the current state of the country now, almost a century later, but I cannot help placing all the blame on that idol-like figure who created this stain on the world.
― Atrona Grizel
When I read books, the treatment I received was this: "You are educated and knowledgeable, so you must respect me and obey what I say.” In other words, obedience. Admiration? No. Just an emotionless expectation. Those whose intelligence is widely acknowledged are praised as “humble” simply because they don’t openly say “I am intelligent,” even though they clearly enjoy it internally. But I went beyond hiding my intelligence and taking an insidious pleasure in it since the media always surrounds them—no one even noticed my inner worth at all.
― Atrona Grizel
There is no therapy in psychological therapy, no coaching in life coaching, no development in personal development, no motivation in motivational speeches, and no meditation in meditation clubs. Because it is obvious that the capitalist system, which has weaponized these things and turned them into money, cares about nothing except profit. It thinks of nothing beyond “optimization,” and certainly does not take the individual’s happiness into account. Even if it does, it is only for one reason: so that the person can “contribute” to society, meaning better feeding that creature’s insatiable stomach. In other words, the countless things focused on “mental health” do not arise from a desire for solidarity but from a fetishization of performance. In capitalist societies, the individual has no value beyond being an economic unit in the eyes of the market and bureaucracy. As a result, such practices focus on adaptation to society. If someone feels even slightly tired, sad, or angry, they are immediately viewed negatively and considered in need of “treatment.” And if they go through it, the goal becomes preventing them from questioning society further, because if they detach from it, that would mean the loss of a customer. So the focus is on reintegrating them back into society, to make them unable to exist without it. I suppose no psychologist, speaker, or coach would ever say “stay alone forever,” and that alone is proof that, regardless of whether it is right or wrong, they all share the identical kind of over-socialized mindset. Because their profession is not to isolate individuals, who are no more than prisoners, as guards in a concentration camp would, but to “fix the problems” of those who cause disruption and send them back into forced labor. During all this, it should be noted that the person is not seen as a human being with a soul. A guard in a concentration camp does not care about the happiness of a random, insignificant slave stuck in the societal machinery beyond their function. The only thing that matters is cleaning and repairing the parts of a machine that occasionally malfunction or rust, so it can continue running without stopping. This is what liberalism does. And for it, pain is truly a danger, because it is no different from “inefficiency.” This explains why the modern world, under the dictatorship of “happiness,” has even lost the ability to suffer and, with it, its spiritual depth. People go to therapy as if taking drugs, and as a result, masses emerge who laugh at everything, take everything lightly, and appear as if they have had their sense of anger removed—forming toxically overpositive, infantile crowds.
― Atrona Grizel
I imagine the youth during Hitler’s era: a hollowed-out generation, admiring blond-haired thugs who beat others for not being “tough” enough, excluding those who were not “Aryan,” and casually asking new acquaintances, “Are you Jewish?” as if it were some kind of joke, while feeling important and superior inside. The disturbing thing is that I observe something very similar today, because the historical pattern never changes. The current regime is steadily drifting toward a theocratic and tribalistic prison, which ultimately means the exclusion of thought and science. If I were to go outside right now and openly declare that I am an atheist, I could genuinely risk being killed, because there is no respect for differing views. Even holding such an opinion among young people is enough to become an outcast, because people strangely love wrapping themselves in ideologies that are not even truly their own. That is the work of social engineers. Today’s youth judge people based on whether they are “properly religious” or not. They ask things like, “Why are you an atheist? Then who created these mountains?” And despite speaking so confidently, many of them cannot even say who developed the theory of evolution. When I see this, I conclude that the person leading the regime comes from the same psychological and ideological structure as Hitler. The extreme ignorance of the youth frightens me, because they know almost nothing, yet they are intensely emotional, which means enthusiasm alone is enough to mobilize them. And right now, there seems to be nothing in the public sphere except conflict and noise anyway. Here, young people grow up on mafia TV series. They treat sleeping around with anyone they can find as a form of “masculinity.” Even at night, they speed through the streets on loud motorcycles, firing guns into the air without even considering that there may be sick people trying to rest in nearby homes. Even though they are under the legal age for a driver’s license, they drive cars around with cigarettes in their hands. They idolize American gangsters who get drunk and commit robberies; find Western-inspired “school shootings” fascinating; and even admire racist and genocidal National Socialism as “coolness.” Yet somehow, they still manage to present themselves as defenders of a religion that supposedly forbids alcohol, smoking, vulgarity, promiscuity, violence, drugs, and similar things.
― Atrona Grizel
People who cannot understand how earlier generations managed to live without technological devices and without succumbing to boredom often forget something else as well: in the absence of those devices, people were not trapped in a constant obsession with comparison. There was no virtual world, and although that may indeed have produced a certain boredom and narrowness, it also meant the absence of those self-accusing thoughts that gnaw at a person in solitude, thoughts nourished by the poisons radiating from the screen. They were not perpetually contemplating the “perfect” lives they themselves could not live, because they only rarely encountered such lives in the first place, and even when they did, they were not displayed like commodities in a shop window. Nor did people transform their loneliness into a form of “self-improvement advice” or a “philosophical sport” through the endless posting of selfies and quotations on social media. As a result, even solitude itself could acquire an almost religious quality, a depth and inwardness that the modern world, with all its shallowness, competition, noise, which are the unavoidable side effects of advanced technology, could never truly provide. In the relatively calm era of the late 19th century, which allowed him to turn entirely inward, Nietzsche was able to write Thus Spoke Zarathustra almost in complete seclusion, because there was no other life constantly distracting his attention. If, however, he had remained continuously attached to a computer, or even tied himself to it so he would not stand up, and had begun scrolling through what is posted on any mainstream social media platform, he might even have started to despise and silence himself. Indeed, being forcibly exposed all day long to the self-exhibiting, happiness-fetishized, excessively social imagery of social media could function as a form of psychological torture technique to dismantle one’s own sense of identity.
― Atrona Grizel