We Live in a Rotten World...

Forgive me if you don´t see it that way. it's so rotten that, after the very first sentence, I already feel the need to apologize for saying it. It wouldn't be this way if we hand't bought into this absurd idea that we need pieces of colored paper or numbers on a screen, endlessly traded for pieces of our lives.

So rotten that we make ourselves sick.

So rotten that, day after day, we are forced to give our time and energy to people we don't like, people we don't know, people we never wanted to spend our lives around

—and who are just as rotten as we are...

I can already imagine you thinking, "But I'm not like that..."

Then perhaps your circumstances never gave you a reason to think this way.

Chances are, you have plenty of numbers on a screen or plenty of colored pieces of paper, and your faith in this rotten world is still firmly intact.

There are beggars everywhere, sleeping beneath bridges. Children are dying in wars.
And we still believe that some political party is going to come along and fix something.

Just another rotten thought.

Do you think we can ever get out of this?

Forgive me again.

It only gets worse, and it probably will keep getting worse.

We destroyed something we call humanity, yet so many people believe that this very cruelty is simply part of what it means to be human.

And today I woke up believing that we live in a rotten world.

Soon enough, the concrete blocks that tore my fingers apart will be back.

After all, where are you supposed to get those pieces of colored paper? those numbers on a screen?

From knowledge?

From studying at some institution that will also demand a piece of your soul, so you can learn something that, quite possibly, will soon be taken from you by artificial intelligence and machines?

And then I go back to the to the concrete blocks, carrying nothing but a little more wisdom.

What good is it?

I don't know.

If even a piece of writing that tears open your chest and comes from somewhere deep inside your soul only has value when someone reads it—and then immediately turns it into numbers on a screen—then what are we in front of a machine that can disguise the truth so perfectly?

Maybe you should understand this text as a poem about pain, full of metaphors.

Or as the foundation of a song.

Because if you understand it for what it really is, perhaps it should never have existed in the first place.

And yet it is this very rotten world that created it.

Damn those who buried the pursuit of thought and understanding, who took what once belonged to philosophers owned slaves...

Did slavery really end?

Did it?

Or do we simply live inside an illusion, having forgotten that we are going to die—and that it could happen at any moment?

Forgive me again for this darker side of myself.

It exists.

And perhaps it creates more freely, more honestly, and more creatively than anything else ever could... 

And yet here I am, turning to artificial intelligence to translate my words into something natural enough for you to understand—because I never had the chance to learn what I needed to learn at the right moment in my life.

Not while my fingers where being crushed beneath blocks of concrete, building some palace just so I could have something to eat the next day.

And the rot always begins again.