“If you want to turn a man into a nobody, all you have to do is just consider his work as useless”
-Fëdor Dostoevskij
Already in the 19th Century, as the Russian writer Dostoevsky’s words prove, the idea that an individual was worth more or less than another depending on the job they did, and thus, on the basis of their own socio-economic situation, resulted to be preeminent and deeply rooted within the materialistic perspective of the time.
Nowadays nothing has changed, and there is perhaps rather an accentuation of such phenomenon, despite being disguised within comforting palliative-images of a sparkling present, in which everything seems possible. A world not so far from the one created by Fitzgerald within The Great Gatsby’s novel, where as inside a big party [people] came and went, like moths, among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars ( The Great Gatsby, Chap. III).
Today’s reality appears to us likewise, for it is always so much blurred by the blinding colours of social media, which tends to show us only the positive and halcyon facets of our existences, by completely, or nearly, eclipsing the instead more painful and miserable ones. Furthermore, it contributes to the creation of standards of various types, from the esthetic ones to the purely economic ones, which result to be highly dangerous to the mental health, especially of youngsters and teenagers.
How many times were you told: Are you good enough?
The point is: who is to determine how good you need to be in order to actually be good enough? And who decided that a good enough standard must exist? Why should everything be necessarily compared with something else? Why if you don’t conform with standards, are you to be seen as a loser?
Hence my conundrum!
I say ENOUGH!
I reckon that it is essential instead, that all our energies and our time are both steered towards something that could not only provide us useful stimuli to become better people, but also that could make us happy.
Loving yourselves is no crime at all, but rather, taking care of yourselves is the greatest act of love that each one of us can do both in our regards and towards the others.
We should perhaps listen to the words uttered by the beloved American First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, as she were to respond to some critics: no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Never ever let anyone make you feel less of what you are. Know your value. Each one of us has their own. Beauty resides within these diverse shades that make each one of us unique and unrepeatable.
Lorenzo Tarchi
