Per aspera ad astra
a prisoner escaping through the wall
Your ego is dragging you down when you aspire to reach for the stars. If you’re an average modern man, you are obsessed about being liked and choosing the correct mask for every social situation. You spend a monumental amount of energy on fitting in, instead of pursuing your own interests. That’s not human life. This is MO of an automaton operated by the hivemind, and possibly the most effective way to waste your life and die in obscurity. Can I offer a solution? Maybe.
“In the workshop“ by Vladimir Kovenatsky
Stop worshipping your personal story. No persona can transmit your true self fully, it’s only good for certain times, people, situations. You are a hero in your own echo-chamber, then you post something crypto-racist on Twitter and become a villain. But then they elect Trump so you are in vogue again and you can officially hate Indians. For how long? There’s no winning the mask-switching game, some people are professional rats who pre-emptively switch sides and claim they have always disliked the old status quo. You cannot beat them at their game.
That said, you don’t need to win at their game. To the contrary, there is a tremendous amount of joy and freedom in opting out of the game and realizing that you are not your persona. In fact, you are the one who’s created it to fulfill a purpose only you know of. You are larger than the total sum of your social masks, since you are the source of them all. You exist - this is the only true fact about your life. The truth cannot change, because when you start putting conditions on truth, it becomes relative. Truth cannot be relative, truth IS. You are the truth.
Whereas every mask is malleable and subject to change. The story of every “normal person’s” ego-theater looks the same. Something happened against his will, despite his plans, and most likely he recognized the change with a huge delay if ever. Then a narrative based on the past spawns in his brain. He starts living inside the narrative, almost never looking at it from the outside. He calls this "himself", his "inner world", but all it is - is his internal TikTok sporadically playing him clips from Reddit posts, random meme slop and screams of a homeless person from behind the garbage pail.
Sometimes things go wrong, though, and we go about fixing things. When an average guy needs to fix his life, he either goes along with the knee-jerk reaction or waits for decades, placing the image of his desired future in a dark room, like an undeveloped photo. What he calls "life" happens without his knowledge. He either does what his reptilian brain tells him to do on autopilot, or does nothing at all. He will either normalize his internal struggle quietly, letting his creative impulse die down, or post a sad meme somewhere, catching a glimpse of emotional self-awareness. Behold man, pinnacle of evolution shitposting on Reddit or picking fights with strangers on 4chan over whose tits on OnlyFans are better.
You’re not better than that guy on 4chan, neither am I. We all are crazy monkeys who happen to be mortal. It’s our destiny to fizz out like a pill in a glass of water, we are just a brief distant comet shining away in an eternal universe. The only thing we can do is choose the way how we do it. So why not choose, since our modern civilization is helping us so much by making the alternative quite harrowing…
Our civilization’s principal achievement is that people finally start to notice the emptiness of our day-to-day. We cannot expand inter-globally if we are stuck in our old ways, so it’s great we keep discrediting our old habits. After all, it’s better to admit your life is vapid and meaningless rather than perpetually cope with the harsh truth. Modern culture is acid, it will dissolve your cumbersome body of lies that you call yourself, and furnish the real you with the opportunity to travel light per aspera ad astra.
What more could you ask for?