The pain of living for trivial reasons

Marcello Veneziani

Now look upon Covid tyranny continuing to inject. With impunity. Look upon the blood lust of Israel richly rewarded by USA and USA set loose on the world as blood hungry ogre and look on the majestic indifference to elevating ideology as the reason of the best to butcher indifferently. America is dead. Though no one can say precisely where the grave exists or who is mourning.

xxx

There are those who kill because someone stepped on their foot or dirtied their shoe, there are those who kill because they are a soccer fan, there are those who kill because of an overtaking or because of a rudeness in the condominium, there are those who kill because of a joke they didn't tolerate, there are those who kill to test out a new car and speed it, there are those who kill because of an unpaid debt of a few euros and those who kill because of a joke to their girlfriend, there are those who kill because of an argument in a disco. There are perhaps more victims for trivial reasons than victims at work or for so-called feminicides. We condemn with disdain those who killed for honor, for their country or for their faith, but isn't it much worse to kill for so little, or rather for nothing? Those could have been reasons for living, even if exasperated and made grim, bloody by fanaticism; but what kind of humanity do these motives without motivation describe? Who kills for so little instead of shrugging his shoulders or responding appropriately, what kind of idea does he have of himself, of others, of life?

Who kills for trivial reasons kills not once but twice and also kills himself. He kills twice because in addition to having taken someone's life, he considers that life less important than a shoe, two pennies, a drink. And he also kills himself because whoever kills someone for such a trivial reason, also throws away his life for the same trivial reason. He ruins his life for a trivial thing.
But the real underlying problem is not that someone kills for trivial reasons but that many hang their life on trivial reasons. Living for trivial reasons is the real problem; killing for trivial reasons is only an extreme consequence. The issue is upstream: you give so little value to life, everyone's life, not just his and yours, that a trivial thing is enough to throw it away. Homicide for trivial reasons is on the rise but it is still a matter of cases, although the number of cases is increasing dramatically. However, life lived for trivial reasons does not concern individual cases but crowds, entire generational stocks of young people and old people, masses of loners. It is an epochal trend. Too many people are attracted by the force of emptiness that becomes heavier and more imperative than the force of gravity: the force of gravity brings you to the ground, the force of emptiness makes you sink into the abyss of nothingness.
I find the sermons and solemn oaths after a crime unbearable: no more victims at work, in love, in the family, for speed, for intolerance, they cry. What sense does it make to say such a foolish thing, and to fire it off at the end of the sermon, as if it were a severe threat against evil and a confident announcement of good? We know that the next day it will be back to square one, other crimes will still happen, as long as humanity exists... Evil cannot be cured with the good intentions of those who censure bad actions with that hypocritical and vain moralism that announces redemptions and epochal changes. We must punish when it happens, prevent where possible, educate from the first steps, but without any illusions of erasing evil.Many of the crimes that afflict us come from that profound inattention towards life, that having no feeling of living and no vision of life; that inability to cultivate life, to see the context, to understand precedents and consequences; that inability to distinguish the essential from the accessory, the fundamental from the secondary. All this loss of the meaning of life comes from the progressive fading of every faith, of every religious sense, but also of every thought about life and every mission. What is called insensitivity, or worse cynicism, is a consequence of all this. So what makes us continue to live once we have lost, forgotten or never had this attention to the important things that make life worth living? Small desires and obsessions, fleeting vanities and venalties, banal consumer objects, mood swings, momentary alterations. This living for so little in the most aggressive, impulsive and least controlled translates into violent reactions, to the point of killing "for trivial reasons", as soon as that little that substantiates their life is threatened or called into question. So what goes through your head at that moment encounters no brakes, obstacles, pauses for reflection, it goes straight to your hands, to action, it feeds on hatred and contempt towards the person in front of you and who you experience as an obstacle to your life, to your desires, to your freedom to do what you like, without being accountable to anything or anyone.
If we want to go up a level in the diagnosis, living for futile reasons is the mass consequence, the pop translation, of what is called nihilism. There is no need to have read and understood Leopardi or Schopenhauer, Stirner or Nietzsche, Turgenev or Dostoevsky, to live within nihilism and behave accordingly. What acute and prophetic minds intuited a couple of centuries ago, becomes a custom, a tide, an epochal condition for millions of people today. Side effects of this practical mass nihilism are closure in one's own individualism, mass cynicism, the refusal of any true connection with the past and the future, desperation and depression, even if combined with a spasmodic search for distractions and entertainment. In short, for every crime committed for futile reasons, there are a thousand individuals who waste their lives for futile reasons. If you want to eradicate the former, you have to change the latter. A difficult undertaking.

(Panorama, n.21).

https://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/il-male-di-vivere-per-futili-motivi/