CHRONICLE OF THE UNFORTUNATE ACCOMMODATED

 

Being happy is, more than a concept, a presumption. There is, for each one, the level that everyone talks about and that does not converge - thankfully - on the same points! This fact alone is already declining, and by a long shot, the scale of joy and happiness to which many aspire and few succeed in attaining. Being happy can, eventually, be a state, that of being - as (dis)continuous causality - but, above all, of being. And when we get there, the scale decreases dramatically, in terms of cash and quality. That this being is not something that can be acquired with paypal, nor with the barcode of a computer program subsidized by progress, to which you oblige. Being happy is not a one-way trip, because the human being, not only in his multiple interactions with the realities around him, corrects and transforms himself - it is one of the data to be analyzed. There are a lot of variables and variants, and it's a good thing that the world is a sphere in perpetual motion, but it's not enough to evaluate happiness rates. They are talking about Bhutan, in that small Asian country, where the human mass has been evaluated and studied, through some factors that positively denounce happy indices of being happy.

As long as the human being does not come across circumstances that challenge the security he believes he possesses, with the vicissitudes of the absence or predominance of other variables, he does not even know himself. In reality, most of us who know multiple factors that alter that assessment are different from everyone else. We are all at different levels, we all have platforms to access life that are similar or not, but living to be happy should undoubtedly be the most pertinent goal.  

To be happy and to make others happy, to the extent of our possibilities. It sounds simple, to the naked eye, and it is, but we are anything but simple, and our complexity invents labyrinthine routes and miraculous roundabouts so that there is no way to achieve, in a single life, this crucial goal. The unhappy subject is, therefore, the most common, who accommodates himself in the difficulties created to go smiling, from time to time, to make the other smile, from far to far. And life goes on. Man refuses to look into the mirror of the soul. Perhaps because man is hostage to his habits and routines, to his hypothetical security, to his provisionality. We have a limited term, in a more than limited edition. We are exclusive. That's a guarantee. Some in the peculiar maintenance of the comfort zone, others, oppositely, in the constant twists and turns of adrenaline that it gives to get out of the axes and live in a permanent state of adventure. 

The body, analysing in a shallow way, this human condition, is the vehicle we use to interact with platforms, but also with others, regardless of the realm to which they belong (and I don't mean monarchies). Life does not take pleasure in our delays and returns, and as much as in the rectification of mistakes, we can use time (which does not exist), as an elastic band that we stretch to the extent of these interactions, in the end, The Must and the Have are records that we mentally point out and are gnostically retained for a short period of time, during a short space of access and, as we live in this dawn of another time that we do not know, but we feel frightening, and it is, we have to eliminate data so that new ones can lead our lives.  Amnesia is the fateful mistake of permanence and competition with old and new mistakes.  Everything of immediate consumption - the media has vigorously imposed itself - we are pinwheels, antennas that contaminate the bodily vehicle with anxieties, with frivolities that we commit against this vehicle, hastening its outcome to an earlier deadline than scheduled, if we had taken better care of it. And from condition to condition, from coordinates and latitudes to beliefs and prejudices, we build a whole universe of of garbage. Recycling what is good for us and discarding what is bad for us is necessary and urgent. Being happy is not the urgent thing in us, but the permanent emptiness that inhabits us, and this invites us to analyze. Reflections that are already so urgent and belated, and yet we push this urgency from us with our belly. We owe it to ourselves. What makes us happy? What makes us comfortable about ourselves? What needs to be changed to respond to this urgency to know what we came for?

Many philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and many other thinkers without degrees or doctorates (and many winemakers, certainly) have come and still come to the same conclusion about this century: Man has kidnapped himself in the false social security, abdicating his interiority, abducting the intellect, preferring conductors and leaders of the masses who allow them not to think. Existential emptiness cries out, but man does not want to be heard. Because this would mean changing, deconstructing temples and centers of immediate consumption that are temporarily softening this temporary happiness that ends, even though the physical good has not worn out. Social demands, gadgets, artificial intelligence, gain power in this immense vulnerability of the man who does not know himself, who obeys primary and primate aspects, of subsistence and novelty, changing the poles, according to his dissatisfaction and hiatus. 

And it is here that the trap of power, strategically, is set against itself and its equals. How to combat this inhuman liquidity? Are we able to abandon the old carcass of uselessness and the monsters we have created that are just waiting for a proper timing to overcome us all? Are we prepared to give up the old and rescue values that have been inverted, depriving us of our humanity in a dangerous vulnerability? We will be mature enough to replace the competition for competence in favor of the whole? If so, when? Are we just another race preparing for its next extinction, via cataclysms and monstrosities sponsored by the whole? 

The unfortunate wake up with a clock in mistime, rub their backs, teeth, feet and expectations in a shower or without it, push the machines, always running, for moments of relaxation and live hanging by their pockets, by their necks, by the emptiness of consumerism, in a daily heart attack, paying bills, inventing so many others, the masters of power thank them and continue to enslave them,  they buy them overtime, They addict us to the moments of free and pause and commit to increasing more gadgets to keep them that way. Captives and blind. Imprisoned by their weaknesses. In an apparent and tortuous freedom, between fictitious orgasms and splendours of cryptocracies, who will become happy, happier, perhaps more satisfied, perhaps more human, perhaps time will respond, and it will not be too late to do so. We are immature, stubborn, and unintelligent. Five minutes of fame and it's better to be funny than to be funny! Or in the occasion that the thief makes, or in the friends of friends who favor us in the slavery on which we have become dependent!

What do we possess, beyond our thoughts and our hearts, when we lie on our pillows and sink into insomnia or dependence on anxiolytics, so that we can forget that this is not the life we dream of for our descendants? What do we have to offer the children who are born now, if not a made-up world where they will get sick with no cure? Where did we get lost? And on the weekend, on the extended weekend, on vacation, or on sick leave, we'll peek at the supposedly "happy" ones in a field of golf, n a beach, on a terrace, in a corner bar and we realize that, after all, as long as there is a planet in wars and quarrels, in conflicts created in the name of peace and Christs, as long as there are pharmaceutical laboratories postponing our cure for the treatment and maintenance of our diseases, that as long as there is the famous ten percent of the population with the liquidity produced by the ninety percent of sick slaves,  We will be part of the problem and never the solution.

Yes, in the equation we are the greatest common divider of non-thinking beings that promises to postpone the use of the brain to the next life or, ultimately, to the exclusive use of the boss to whom we sell ourselves, that we are the stupidest species that guarantees continuity via sperm and eggs, but does not guarantee equality of circumstances to all,   not health and the promotion of well-being, not the inversion of values and change of paradigms, not happiness, but the emptiness that impregnates us with control and manipulation and competition against others just like us!

The unfortunate compete with each other, but not with themselves, to become better people, the sad envy their equal, but do not try to exterminate what makes them feel at war! Flour from the same bag in the hands of predators is what we are! And we swear, out of laziness, frivolity, and boasting as such, to honor the maintenance of this same state of things! And that's what's really sad and unhappy. 

Observe on Sundays, with tenderness and candor, with innocence and virginity, the slaves who are dazzled by two hours on the terrace, in conversations of sameness, exchanging miseries as if they were pennants and they are! Of atrocious stupidity! And they run home, to the restaurant, to their friend's café, to supermarkets, to tasteless billboards, to drink one more súrbia, eat one more pizza, wear the bitterness with their jaws and count the seconds, to, the next day, Monday in the world, return to the usual slavery, speak ill of Paulo, Pedro, Teresa and Inês who went to live in a distant community, among mountains, live in an itinerant little house on wheels and enjoy the half dozen years they have been here! And no, it's not supposed to be different, as if being different is something to be prejudiced against! It is to feel that you live, that more than existing and being a slave to time and to the hypothetically happy and certain Rich, life can be a sunset and a piece of land, where we work for ourselves, where the neighbor doesn't want to compete with us, but share, and where dreams are bigger than any plasma or Ferrari. And they know better than the more of the same that the whole aspires to.

And they see foreigners immigrants and Portuguese emigrants, all over the world, in search of a better world, but "oh what a good god" would send them to steal from us the servitude that is ours and is guaranteed to us? 

We are and always will be itinerant here! Being born in this or that land is an "accident" of course, but as Portuguese, what is the morality of entering the usual boot-down of immigrants who seek better living conditions for their own, if we, in 1500, ventured to tear the seas in hulls that sank and many others that reached good ports, where do they come from now, with what morality do we dare to be prejudiced against others like us, that Portugal is spread around the world, not only as ex-colonizers (and this is not a great pennant, for the abuses caused in territories where we arrived) but also as a nation of people who adapt and try to improve their living conditions? I have never met worse emigrants than the Portuguese, who try in other people's lands to detonate their own countrymen, who persecute and try to annihilate the reputation of their equals, who compete and detonate the lives of Portuguese like themselves, in a totally gratuitous way, in the absence of values of solidarity and empathy!?

The herds of unfortunates are worrying! What are we to do with them? Exporting them to Mars, sounds good to you? 

I dream of seeing more Peters and Pauls, more Teresas and Agnes leave without a territorial destination, but with a concrete and reliable internal destiny: to change social life, to combat affective precariousness and, certainly, to refuse flocks of apathy and self-indulgence!