The Altar Of Oneself

One of the things that most drive me mad these days is the superficial, feel-good fluffy nonsense I see all around me. It is not only the stupidity in itself that grates me. It is, rather, the loss of religious feeling that it exposes.

Where I grew up, people were inserted in a system of values that was not decided by them. Faithful or atheist, leftist or right-wing, old or young, they all knew that …. they don’t make the rules; that they are not the arbiters of right and wrong; that it would be absurd to demand that they are “affirmed” in anything just because they have decided that this is the way they want it. Even Commies had a system of rules that they had to accept.

This is not the case anymore. Nowadays, it seems that everything is right because I say so. From purple metallic hair, to tattooes, to being 350 pounds heavy at 29, nobody can be criticised. The loss of religious feeling put an end to a socially accepted standard of norms.

People who don’t believe in God have no polar star in their lives. They also have no accepted, morally solid standard of goodness anymore. Therefore, everyone becomes his own little god,  and demands that everybody else worships at the altar of himself.

These new microreligions are childish, emotional and, more often than not, outright damaging. 300 pounds at 29 means a change of lifestyle or a likely early grave. A body covered with tattooes leaves marks that will be, one day, either regretted or even uglier to look at than in years past. Purple metallic hair out someone as immature and childishly rebellious, or childishly insecure, if not worse.

“Always be yourself”, stood on a coffee mug proudly exposed in a window shop.

Yourself is the new deity. Worship it at all times.

Obvioysly, “yourself” could be, and it actually is in most cases (yours truly included) a deeply flawed individual who should, like yours truly, actually think about how to become a better self, rather than bask in the feeling of his own unique snowflake greatness.

In past times, people thought “always strive to get better; always strive to get nearer to God; always strive to deny your flaws and to scalpel yourself into a person nearer to salvation”. Even when they weren’t religious, they would always understand the need to try to get nearer to that particular “religion” they had embraced. A coffee cup with “always be yourself” would have sounded, in those times, not only unbearably cheesy and superficial but, most of all, deeply wrong in the message it is obviously sending.

I miss that common  sense, that grounded feeling of being among responsible adults. It seems to me, increasingly more often, that I live among overweight, superficial, middle-aged children going through life with zero awareness of what is really important, but with a great, great opinion of themselves, at least officially.

I know that not everybody is like that. Still, there are enough of them to feed an entire business of cheesy mugs, cheesy pillows, and cheesy mottos put on the wall where a crucifix used to be.

So, irrespective of how sinful, superficial, godless, pink-haired, drug-addled, or donut-addled you are, remember that you are a unique snowflake, wonderful just as it is.

The only thing you have to do, is to always be yourself.