The Sorrows of Young Werther: May 22.

My fun day, my 'I-don't-have-to-run' day.

Have you ever felt like your life isn’t real but a very long, very detailed lucid dream? Because that feeling keeps haunting me everywhere I go, and I suspect that I’m not the only one. Because people keep stressing how everything is possible for us, that we just need to roll out of bed and GET STARTED NOW, but in reality the outside keeps boxing us in. Instead we’re forced to spend most of our money and energy on work & bills, which honestly doesn’t do anything besides making our lives last longer.

Burning curiosity about how the world works becomes a mild „I see“ after doomscrolling all day, and we keep painting our prison-walls with bright figures and brilliant landscapes. While typing all this, my friend, I’m still speechless. I turn my insides out and find there a world, but a world rather of imagination and dim desires, than of distinctness and living power. Then everything swims before my eyes, and I smile and dream while pursuing my way through the world.

Some academics who probably haven’t opened a psychology book in the last 250 years would agree that children are totally clueless about their desires. Honestly, adults wander around like kids sometimes too, without knowing where they’re from or where to go next. And what drives them? Greed & fear. Screw anything beyond the need for even more stuff to grab and hoard. I feel this unspoken rule is all around us in the air we breathe.

I see you now leaning against the kitchen sink and shaking your head at me. You’d tell me that simple joys are nothing to make fun of, and I should admit (to myself too) that going out with your friends or buying new shoes & forcing all your flatmates to tell you how awesome you look in them is a form of happiness too. Maybe those who broadcast all their hobbies and passions online in order to connect with people are fulfilled by that too and really live a more purposeful life in the process. We’re all honestly just figuring out how to live on this planet.

But there’s a certain kind of peace in admitting to yourself that we’re living a good portion of our lives so others will get jealous of what we have. No matter what we do though, whether we’re trying to build a palace out of what we have or whether we keep going through the daily motions even though our knees keep buckling because of all that stress, everyone just wants to keep basking in the sunlight for just a little while longer.

Behind all those worried faces, behind yours and mine too, there’s a world to explore, a world that could make us all happy on its own, which doesn’t ask for anything else in return. And even though it’s just a tiny world, there’s a certain freedom in it. We know we can throw that prison door wide open and strut outside whenever we like.

Love, W.