Month: December 2023

I was watching A Charlie Brown Christmas, and I realized how much our generation is defined by nostalgia. Go on Instagram and watch some of the reels that people in their twenties are making. The music, the photography, the darkness of nostalgia seeping through all the little scenes from old films and animations such as Charlie Brown, or ones with such dark themes as Mr. Robot. Watch this clip and tell me, why would an age be defined by having so little real lives, and so much daydreaming, imagination, and hopelessness?

Perhaps we are the generation that truly lives and realizes the horrors of technology. Perhaps we are the ones who will shun social media and return to the embrace of nature. Perhaps we will even manage to destroy capitalism and all things commercials, as Charlie Brown would like it. If a new world comes out of this, I hope it will be a communal one. And I hope we survive the nostalgia of a better past.

Tiny spoiler alert.

How can you accept what happens at the end of AoT? How can you justify living in the aftermath of, or worse, during a continuous disaster? How can you ever make peace with the fact that there has always been so much history, so much death, so many terrible, terrible things? How can you see the leaf of a tree amongst all the bloodshed?

Life, I believe, for many of us since forever, and for many others perhaps since the pandemic, has become a grim, dark affair. There are wars causing suffering that we can see so closely, and we have to be so cruel to live in joy. Who else can ignore everything in the name of happiness?

For years people have preached the ways of happiness and success. Now, we are beginning to realize again: life is an affair of suffering on a grand scale. Your grandmother suffered in her last years. Your neighbor has been lonely for so long, with not even you to visit him. There is a cat two streets down from you, being abused by her owner. And there’s heartbreak, pain, and grief all around us. What is the point of happiness, when there is so much to feel?

We must try, perhaps, to gather a group of people who will come, willingly and lovingly, to visit our grave. But that is all there is to us. And it should make us cry.