If we had to describe our era with one word, it would be: running.
And not running for fun, but running faster than everyone else.
Globalized communication constantly throws unattainable comparisons in our faces.
There are child prodigies who, by twenty, already have two degrees; teenage Olympic athletes with mind-blowing performances.
If you’re twenty-five and want to learn to play guitar, your screen shows you an eight-year-old who already plays like a pro. And suddenly, you feel “too old” to start learning anything from scratch.
Sure, these kinds of excellence have always existed. But the problem now is: we see them every single day, with every scroll.
And we start believing they’re the norm.
In reality, those talents represent just a tiny minority of the population, so they’re totally unrealistic as points of comparison.
And as if that weren’t enough, the internet is overflowing with motivational priests, people even more clueless than you, telling you online that if you really want it, you can.
That all it takes is waking up at five in the morning, running ten kilometers, meditating, doing yoga, reading three books a month, working twenty hours a day, and magically: success will be yours.
But this massive lie dressed up as inspiration doesn’t consider reality.
It ignores your personal inclinations, mental health, the fact that humans aren’t performance machines.
They tell you “you have no excuses,” but really, it’s just another capitalist trick to sell you a new kind of guilt.
As if tiredness, exhaustion, and failure weren’t human experiences, but laziness.
So you start running faster again, not realizing that the goal you’ve set isn’t truly yours, it’s just a standard.
And that standard doesn’t care about you at all.
But behind all this lies a deeper reflection, one I believe is tied to how we’ve come to perceive life through a capitalist lens:
Capitalism isn’t just an economic system. It’s a mindset.
It’s soaked into our brains, convincing us that the more skills we have, the better people we are.
So having has completely replaced being, like Fromm once wrote.
We’ve forgotten that we were born with nothing, and we’ll leave this world without taking anything with us.
We’ve forgotten that learning to do something shouldn’t just be about making money, but about becoming better people, growing as individuals.
Even our free time has become disguised productivity.
We should play guitar for ourselves, but instead, we play it for others, to be better than someone else.
The other day, I was listening to a famous psychiatrist quoting David Bowie:
“Never play for the audience.”
When you apply that to everything in life, I realize I know very few people who don’t play for the audience, and honestly, those few are usually far more content than the rest.
Performance is always put above joy, above slowness, above doing just for the sake of doing.
But are we really meant to always be achieving more?
