It is difficult to say how it began. Because “it” was always there. I was born into a world that was not only built on consumption, but that was designed to turn every child into a good consumer. It is futile to speculate what and who I might have become without the constant hypnosis telling me what I would have to buy in order to be happy or whole. Was it not the case that marketing strategists taught me from early childhood that I could never be whole? Without the next product? Advertising manipulation was everywhere. Even though I grew up in a village and my parents constantly rescued me into mountains and forests, where I was not bombarded with advertising, I cannot imagine who I would be today if advertising strategists had not inoculated me with lack and consumption-based solutions.
Of course, I could just as well ask who I would be today if I had learned a different language, or grown up in a different culture. I could say “it was what it was”, draw a line under it, and be done with it. If it were not for something that has happened in recent years that I would not have thought possible: the slow resurfacing from hypnosis, and the incredulous shaking of my head at how deeply I had been entangled in illusions.
It is normal in all societies that children are stuffed with whatever whoever considers right and meaningful. This is as diverse as the bipeds themselves. Would you be surprised to learn that it does not matter what intentions lie behind it? That it makes absolutely no difference whether someone wants to give you tools or abuse you as a child? It sounds like a wild theory. One that is instantly confirmed when you consider that nobody knows where a child will grow. Which is why every single person who encounters a child feels entitled to pass on a few of their own ideas. Children are told that this is “learning”, and adults vainly believe themselves to be teachers. Even though they never have to pass a single test that would confirm their suitability or the sense of their supposed teachings. In other words: every child is an experiment at the expense of the child.
Can anyone today still say what a healthy child would look like? There are countless theories about what health is, in a society that for centuries, or longer, has been rotten to the core and trapped in illusions. I dare to write this because one thing has become completely unthinkable in society: a child who would be allowed to find out for itself who it is and what it wants to be. Which is understandable. Where would the fun be for parents, in a society of important vanities, if they were not allowed to leave their marks on the child? It is not enough for them to reproduce themselves; the child is supposed to become a small clone of mom and dad. And of every single person the child unfortunately crosses paths with. What is not desired, planned, or allowed: a child that, similar to a wolf child, roams freely and teaches itself its own tactics for survival. Which would reduce parents to the role of observers who intervene only if the child were about to fall off a cliff.
I grew up, like probably all children of my generation, in Western, modern society, with countless expectations placed upon me. Like all children, I could hardly distinguish what were meaningful tools to train myself in survival, and what were clever tricks to manipulate me in certain directions. Relatively early, the small child realized that there were pleasant and less pleasant phenomena. There were phenomena that cost strength, and others that were practically placed in my lap. What connected them was the promise that they would help me live and make me happy. Which was easier to believe with the sweet drugs of society than when it came to the necessity of body hygiene, tidying up the children’s room, or learning to read and write.
Reading and writing are considered cultural assets. They serve communication, the acquisition of knowledge, and of course to allow bipeds to imagine themselves superior within the animal kingdom. I noticed quite early that it might be a sign of wisdom not to read and not to write. In which case every worm would be superior to the biped. Which again is a futile thought, because I think in words, and cannot help but try to decode symbols and extract some kind of meaning whenever one appears anywhere. There would be nothing wrong with that at first. Language and writing are not bad per se, right? Or are they direct expressions of the loss of paradise?
In any case, I grew up with words and writing. Before I was ten years old, I devoured hundreds of books. Entirely following the example of my mother, who read everything that was printed between book covers. That was not bad per se, right? Books largely came without advertising, and therefore they could not be harmful, right? At least my parents had no ambition to curb my urge to devour books. They did not censor me, and so I gained insights into worlds that were withheld from many other children. At the same time, I gained an impression of the world that did not concretely reflect my own world. In almost all books there were atrocities, violence, heroic adventures, and of course almost always the woman as a reward for tasks completed. When I write “woman as a reward”, I am of course talking about sex, and the woman is given roughly the role of a sex slave with occasional advisory and comforting functions. What was not described were the real abysses that yawned between woman and man, and that even sex might show signs of wear.
Strange, really, how many words bipeds made and still make, so that libraries were filled with words, and the Internet wallows in word tsunamis, yet an astonishing amount remains unsaid. I had to turn 20 years old before the first usable hints reached me about how large the illusion might actually be. And how fascinating it truly is that these hints were not conveyed in kindergarten and school. The suspicion of manipulation may be raised here.
While reading and writing still required certain cognitive abilities, there were other media that were much easier to enjoy. As a child, I could sit down in a cinema, and it was like a portal into another dimension. I could make myself comfortable and let myself be carried away by moving images and moving sounds. I could listen to distant voices and sounds on the radio. And then, of course, there was the magic box that my parents once placed in our living room. The altar in almost all modern living rooms. Even as a child, I was aware that this magic box was somehow strange. It did not look like other furniture and was different from everything that surrounded me. Without electricity it was a bulky thing that stood around black. That is to say, the first screens were not black at all. They had an indefinable color. A dirty gray that was only brought to life by electricity. And at first not even in color, but black and white. Which did not diminish the magic. On the contrary. Seeing a world reduced to black and white made many things clearer.
Every evening, my parents and I followed the ritual of worshiping the magic box. All one had to do was lounge around in comfortable furniture and let oneself be washed over. A little more with each year. Then in color. Then in stereo. Then late into the night, then without a broadcast shutdown, then 500 channels instead of the three I had as a child. The magic boxes became technically better and better, and so did the hypnosis with which products and ideas were pressed into brains.
I had my first key moment at age 11 or 12, when I saw how unbearably intrusive the propagation of what mourning was supposed to look like was in a German soap opera. I felt repulsed by such obvious manipulation, without realizing that there was much more by which I was being manipulated. That the mere devotion to the magic box was a form of manipulation. Because the magic box was not essential to life. Because it was a machine without which life could be lived quite wonderfully, once one realized that one was born without it and would die without it. Relatively early, I realized that the hypnosis machines were no fun if one could not control them oneself. Control - the shared, sacred fetish of almost all bipeds.
To accommodate this, video recorders, CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and other storage media were invented.
So that one could have control over what one allowed oneself to be hypnotized by. Anyone who escaped the constant drizzle of TV advertising and news belief systems had not automatically escaped manipulation and hypnosis: every film carried further hypnosis into the brains of consumers. Not only product placement. It was the ideas themselves that today make so much appear questionable.
As a child and teenager, I loved being torn out of the banal routine of school life by stories. They gave me small escapes and visions of possibilities. The magical trick, however, could only work if one surrendered to the story and the medium. Here lies the problem: you only know what it is once you have let it into yourself. So you need tasters who assure you that the story is worth buying a ticket for. Or advertising strategists who make you believe it is worth a ticket. To this day, I feel surrounded by masses who truly believe certain cultural phenomena have some kind of value, even though that belief is built solely on the superlatives of advertising strategists. Trend rising.
In recent years, practically with the introduction of the Internot plague, the promises became ever more grandiose and the delivery ever more miserable. This can hardly be described more clearly than with the example of the “Avatar” hype. I was practically “forced” to watch this film (part one) because everyone around me was exclaiming “ooh” and “aah.” But when I left the cinema, I was disappointed. So much effort and technical marvels for a story that could hardly be more banal? And that was not the beginning of my end, but I was already right in the middle of it. In the process of creeping disillusionment and constant waking up.
Year after year, it became harder to find anything that excited or inspired me. A suffocating déjà vu feeling became an almost constant companion. Something in me did not want disillusionment and not even awakening; something in me loved the illusion and wanted it to go on.
First, music fell away. Identification with musical genres or star cults vanished first, and then enthusiasm for a frightening amount of music, since in far too much music one could hear above all the vanity and inappropriate illusion of the musicians’ own importance. As if they were circus performers who had to prove how many notes they could cram into a second. Virtuosos hurt my ears when they have to boast and impress with their sound acrobatics. Even less virtuosic musicians gladly fall into the illusion of their own greatness and thus became unpalatable to me. So I became increasingly selective and listened to less and less music.
Next, books dropped out of my life. Yes, I know that the widespread opinion in modern society is that reading books has something to do with intelligence. Which is a crude and inaccurate generalization. There are, now and then, a few intelligent books. Finding them amid the junk is almost as demanding as finding a single inspiration on the Internot amid self-satisfied garbage. I observed more and more often that I started books and then read page after page without finding anything other than vain chains of words. So that the author could prove how great they were at juggling words. Inspiration? Nowhere to be found. Whether novels or non-fiction: almost all authors seemed to believe that producing many words was some kind of distinction. I caught myself more and more often skimming chapters, searching for a line I did not already know, for an anecdote, for anything that would give me a new perspective. And when a foreign thought actually did appear, it was often only within the socially permitted frameworks, and thus uninteresting again.
Then films fell away. Something I would not have thought possible. It seems that more films are produced today than ever before. In recent years, I noticed more and more often an empty, hollow feeling after a film. While as a child and teenager I would think for days, weeks, sometimes months about aspects of a film I had seen, it happened more and more often that minutes after the end of a film I had forgotten all of its content. Because nothing, absolutely nothing, had touched my heart or my soul. A shame, really. Millions are poured into projects that no longer tell stories, that no longer take me on a journey, and no longer inspire me. How bad the big films have become can easily be verified by watching a film from before 2000. Even mediocre productions from that time appear like miracles of storytelling compared to the soulless spectacle nonsense that is sold today. Interesting in this context: people talk more and more about box office success than about the content of films. And what content is lacking is compensated for with lots of blood and CGI.
And then there was the Internot. This wet dream of all world-escapees. Oh, what was promised, and how little was actually delivered. Yes, the Internot has changed bipeds, and no, not for the better. For me, the Internot today has the character of a disease that cannot be easily sweated out. Ever new conveniences have created ever deeper dependencies. So that today I am allowed to recognize that these conveniences had nothing at all to do with my life, and that I never asked for any of what was sold to me as practical, convenient solutions.
I have now been through over ten years of simplifying my life. I may have taken it further than many who are driven by ecological awareness, and certainly further than the average consumer of the 21st century. A side effect of this simplicity was that much that is considered “normal” dropped completely out of my life. Nature itself contributed a lot to this. Not that I romantically idealize nature like the average city dweller. Far from it. Nature is a bitch. But at least it is astonishingly honest. It slams into my senses with whatever it happens to be at the moment. That can be sunset and storm in rapid succession. But honest. Direct. Without any sales intentions. Nature always seems to say: “Look, hear, smell, taste, and feel! This is what I am right now. What do you do with it?” Quite exciting, given the fact that nature continues stubbornly to elude the control mania of bipeds.
Perhaps the manipulations of the media became boring to me because I had tasted enough nature to fall for its harsh charm? Or perhaps because I am part of nature, but hypnosis machines in their artificiality are not part of me? From one day to the next, the Internot had become repulsive to me. I had despised the vanities associated with it early on. By now it has become impossible to stumble into the Internot without being sullied. Which forces me to keep away from the Internot. (As much as possible). For health reasons. Because there is nothing left there. No matter how great it may appear: in the end, reduced to the facts, it is nothing but illusions transported by pixels and electrical current.
Could the Internot have been or become more? Perhaps. If bipeds were less greedy, vain, and obsessed with control. Do I still need to care about that? Is it not entirely enough to enjoy my rediscovered freedom, and how many more hours per day I have at my disposal?