Not long ago a young man said to me: “My generation will be the unhappiest in history”. Since he was an intelligent young man, well prepared, successful at work, loved and admired by everyone, the sentence surprised me. He explained: “If I look at Instagram for a week, I get depressed. I spend a week without looking at it and I feel good.” Because?
“On Instagram you only see scenes of happiness, good-looking people doing funny things; when you leave the screen and look around, everything is less attractive, and you feel like a failure.” And yet, the young man has not seen an imaginary world of princes and princesses: the inhabitants are people like him – sometimes his own friends – who seem to have, day after day, an infinitely better life than his . Hence the depression. When we know – the young man knew – that suicide is the leading cause of death among young and very young people, we will agree that it is a social disease and that it needs to be remedied.
The impulse to escape from the real world is not new: literature, cinema, radio and television have long offered possibilities of momentary evasion; but these vehicles had never been as numerous, never as aggressive as they are today; the world of fantasy had never been so close at hand, it had never seemed so real.
And – dare we say it? – since the end of the Second World War, our West has never presented, under a prosperous and bright exterior, such a bleak aspect. We talk endlessly about values, our values, but in reality they are family portraits hanging in our living rooms, because we do not practice the virtues that would give them life. Generosity, yes, but we are not committed to helping those in need; fraternity, of course, but we let die those who come to us in search of a better life; equality, no doubt, but let’s see how the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. And we play with fire by pretending that only victory will bring us peace. We live trapped in contradictions that necessarily have an effect on us. “We see the horror in the habits and customs of our young people […] but we are the ones who put in their hands all the raw horror of our society”, writes professor Andreu Navarra (El Ciervo no. 799 ). How can we serve as an example, of guidance if nothing else? On the contrary: young people have become the mirror of the elderly.
“Why should I live?”, a young woman asked the linguist Steven Pinker. He replied with a book of five hundred pages, which I don’t know if the young woman got around to reading. Faced with the teenager’s implacable gaze, what could be answered? “Daughter, do you go to the psychologist?”. Shouldn’t there be a kinder answer?
A veteran friend, no longer afraid of ridicule, risks giving it to me: the most important thing in life, he says, is to love and be loved. Affection, wherever it comes from and wherever it goes. If energy is the engine of the universe, affection is that of humanity. Let’s start with the easiest: to recover thoughts, looks, words and close contacts that the pandemic destroyed and that gave us life, and cultivate them as you cultivate a plant. In our environment, and in ourselves, we will find the answer without words to the question of why we should live. Hopefully the summer will serve you, dear reader, to find it.
