As we grow up, we make a pact with our environment — the people surrounding us. We obey their rules and expectations in return for a sense of belonging and a permission to be. This is why we feel so uncomfortable among people. And this is why getting away from them feels so good. Why going into the countryside feels so good — finally, we allow ourrselves to be who we actually are and take off the mask, the role we’ve been forced into.
But I am not convinced that permission to be part of our societies is actually safety. I think it is lifelong self-erasure. Unfortunately for me, this is not what the absolute majority of people in the world think. Which means we live in societies where crushing yourself daily is normal and expected.
The majority of people are lucky — if luck is even the right word in relation to social structures — they have a country. I don’t. I belong to nothing. AI keeps telling me that, at the very least, I have ‘integrity.’ But I find myself thinking: had I known how lonely honesty with myself — the inability to lie — would make me, I might have chosen blindness, numbness instead. At least then I would have a place, a town, a group of people who would accept me, talk to me — not only when I am buying something. But I discovered that once you have seen, you can’t un-see.
In Montenegro, Meg and I feel like we are the only people on this planet. What are the rest? I am not sure. The women look like me, but they hate my guts for who I am. Because to them I am a mirror they refuse to look into. If they did, they wouldn’t be able to unsee the lives they missed, the options they ignored, what they could have been but refused to explore.
So the choice we are forced to make in order to live among others is between safety (conformity) and honesty (being considered a danger to society). It makes my blood boil. If this is the choice required just to exist, it is inhuman. If the only way to live in society is self-erasure I don’t want it.
Nowadays, being part of society is a choice between letting ourselves be who we are and total erasure. Only, we were never warned. And by choosing self-erasure, we believe we made that choice wilingly and that we are perfectly content with it. Our lives become one massive lie. And every day only adds more layers of lie — until there is nothing original left of a person.
How does one go on, knowing this? How will I go on? I don’t know. I only know that I have to. But that concept of ‘trading just a bit of yourself’ for safety — I no longer believe in it. The same way I don’t believe in belonging when it comes with conditions.
My primary guide – the image I always return to when I need steadiness – is how humans once lived: before massive countries and societies appeared, before people were surrounded by overwhelming numbers of others. When we lived in tribes. When we had trees around us. When we shared shelter with people whose survival depended on treating us with dignity, supporting us, not eroding us.
Society tells us that the reason we feel uneasy living within it lies in ourselves – that we are the ones who are wrong and need to be corrected. But have you considered that it might be the other way around? That society is not a structure that supports us, but one that destroys us and drains the joy from life? I have. And I don’t know where to go with that.
2026