Perhaps God Is Mad: Azathoth and the Madness of the Universe

There is a possibility that theology is reluctant to contemplate and that atheism sometimes dismisses too quickly. What if God were neither good nor evil? What if the problem were not His morality, but His very sanity? What if the world, with all its suffering, were the product not of an evil design, but of cosmic madness?

One evening, over dinner, I found myself thinking of Azathoth, the most unsettling deity in the literary universe of H. P. Lovecraft. Not Cthulhu, not the other Great Old Ones, but Azathoth himself: the blind idiot god, the primordial chaos that babbles and raves at the center of infinity, indifferent to everything human beings call good, evil, justice, and love.

Azathoth does not need to be evil. It is enough that he does not know what he is doing.

THE QUESTION IS NOT WHETHER GOD IS GOOD

For millennia, humanity has tried to explain evil. Religions have imagined benevolent deities, destructive powers, and cosmic wars between opposing principles. In the ancient Iranian world, Zoroastrianism developed a vision in which the beneficent principle of Ahura Mazda stands in opposition to the destructive spirit known as Angra Mainyu, later identified in tradition with Ahriman.

It is a powerful solution: evil is not attributed entirely to the principle of goodness, but traced to an opposing force. The world becomes the theater of a conflict.

Yet this explanation leaves other questions unanswered. Why does such a conflict exist in the first place? Why does suffering strike even those who have done nothing to deserve it? And why does cruelty so often seem to achieve what righteousness cannot?

Christian tradition answers that God is love. Other believers argue that the human mind cannot comprehend the divine plan. Atheists may conclude that a universe so indifferent has no need for a creator.

And yet, when we look at the world, all these positions collide with a reality that refuses to be tamed.

THE TEARS OF THE INNOCENT

Think of the children in cancer wards. Of the people who die beneath the bombs without ever having chosen a war. Of those who devote their lives to others and are repaid with ingratitude, while those who manipulate, humiliate, and destroy manage to build successful lives.

Think of the victims of sadists, predators, and violent people. Of those who suffer injustice without ever obtaining redress, while those responsible carry on as though nothing happened.

No answer can give a dead child back their life. No philosophical formula can make suffering just simply because someone manages to fit it into a larger design.

This is the point at which the problem of evil ceases to be an intellectual exercise and becomes a wound.

To say that God is evil would be presumptuous: it would mean attributing intentions to Him that we cannot know. But declaring Him good, all-powerful, and perfectly loving while the world produces immeasurable suffering also requires an act of faith that not everyone can make.

What if both alternatives were wrong?

AZATHOTH, THE GOD WHO DOES NOT KNOW

The great insight of Lovecraft's cosmic horror is that the universe may not be organized around humanity, its hopes, or its morality. Reality may be vastly greater than our categories and utterly indifferent to our expectations.

Azathoth takes this idea to its most disturbing imaginative extreme. He is not the ruler of a hellish kingdom who punishes the good and rewards the wicked. He is not a tyrant who persecutes human beings to achieve some purpose. He is an embodiment of blind chaos, a force that offers not even the comfort of a recognizable intention.

An evil God, after all, would still be a God we could understand. His cruelty would have a meaning, however terrible. We could hate Him, rebel against Him, fight Him.

But how do you rebel against something that cannot even distinguish between what it creates and what it destroys?

Perhaps our tragedy lies precisely here: we are creatures who search for moral meaning in a reality that may contain none.

We would not necessarily be punished. We would not necessarily be tested. Nor would we necessarily be abandoned.

We might simply be here.

WHY DO THE BAD GUYS WIN?

Reality does not always confirm our belief that goodness should be rewarded. Ruthless people can exploit trust, ignore their scruples, and shift the cost of their decisions onto others. Those who possess empathy may hesitate in the face of suffering that a cynic does not even consider.

Of course, not all wicked people win, and not all good people lose. Solidarity exists. So do courage, hard-won justice, and lives saved. But there is no universal law guaranteeing that every victim will be compensated or every perpetrator punished.

Children's stories need endings in which the good prevail. Real life, however, is under no obligation to follow the narrative structure of a fairy tale.

Perhaps this is why the idea of a universe governed by a perfectly benevolent will becomes so difficult to sustain: not because goodness does not exist, but because its victory is not guaranteed.

What if madness were a metaphor for this absence of guarantees? What if what we call evil were not always the expression of malicious intent, but also the result of a world with no overarching moral direction?

PERHAPS GOD IS MAD

I am not claiming that God is mad. I have no evidence to support such a claim. And perhaps no one can know whether there is a consciousness behind the universe, a will, an impersonal principle, or nothing at all.

But the hypothesis deserves to be articulated, at least as a philosophical provocation.

Perhaps God is not the judge we imagined. Perhaps He is not the loving father we were promised. Perhaps He is not even the demon we would like to blame in order to give our suffering a face.

Perhaps, if He exists, He cannot comprehend what is happening. Or perhaps the question itself is misguided, because we attribute a mind and a personality to something that has nothing human about it.

From this perspective, the tears of the innocent would not be the price of a lesson, a test of faith, or a necessary step toward some greater good. They would simply be tears. Suffering without any justification we can know. An injustice that remains an injustice even when no one can make it right.

And so the question changes. No longer: Why does God allow evil? But rather: Why do we keep expecting the universe to be just?

Perhaps we need to believe that someone, somewhere, is keeping score. That every wrong will be made right, every victim redeemed, every perpetrator judged. Because the alternative is unbearable: some people suffer for no reason, some injustices are never remedied, and the universe owes no one an explanation.

And yet, even if the cosmos were blind, we are not obliged to become blind ourselves. If there is no justice guaranteed from above, human justice becomes all the more necessary. If the world does not spontaneously distinguish between victims and perpetrators, we must do so.

Perhaps God is mad.

Or perhaps we are so desperately human that we cannot accept a universe that owes us no explanation.

But one question remains, suspended above all the others: if the world is not governed by justice, if suffering follows no design, and if goodness guarantees no victory, what prevents us from becoming like those who make us suffer?

Perhaps it is with this question, rather than with the certainty that God is good, that our humanity can begin.

What Is God, Really? When Human Beings Try to Define the Absolute

A few evenings ago, while talking with a friend, we arrived at a question that seems to have accompanied humanity from the very beginning and that, precisely because of this, we tend to take for granted: what is God, really? Not who God is according to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any of the countless religious traditions human beings have developed over thousands of years, but what God actually is, beyond our representations, our symbols, our doctrines, and even our words.

The distinction is enormous, because when we ask, “Who is God?” we are already operating within a relationship, a narrative, a tradition. We can answer that He is the Father, the Creator, the Supreme Being, the One, the Absolute, Love, the Trinity, the God of Abraham, or the God proclaimed by Jesus. But when we ask what God is, the question changes completely, because we are immediately confronted with the limits of human knowledge itself. We are finite beings trying to understand the infinite; we are immersed in time and attempting to think about what is supposed to exist beyond time; we are part of the universe and yet try to understand what, according to our own definitions, would be its origin and foundation.

So I find myself wondering: are we really sure that the categories through which we think about God are adequate to God?

The problem is not only God, but man

Perhaps the question of God cannot be approached without first passing through an even more difficult question: what is a human being?

It sounds like a simpler question because we have direct experience of ourselves. Yet it only takes a moment of reflection to realize how difficult it is to answer. We can say that a human being is what he thinks, what he does, what he desires, what he loves, what he creates, what he remembers, what he dreams. We can define humanity through reason, consciousness, language, or the ability to create culture and art. But every definition inevitably captures only a part.

We might say, for example, that a human being is what he does. It is an attractive definition and, to some extent, a convincing one. We reveal ourselves through our works: music, literature, science, technology, religion, war, architecture, politics, love. But is that enough to define us? Obviously not. Human beings build cathedrals and atomic bombs; they write love poems and organize wars; they save lives and can, at the same time, destroy other human lives. If we define humanity through what human beings do, we obtain an image of humanity, but not necessarily its essence.

And this is where a word that may seem unnecessarily technical becomes useful: synecdoche. We take a part and use it to represent the whole. The problem is that when we speak about humanity and then use humanity as a means of speaking about God, we risk constructing what might be called a synecdoche of synecdoches: one part of the human being becomes the whole human being, and that partial image of humanity then becomes, in turn, our image of God.

At that point, we may have the impression that we have found an answer, when perhaps all we have done is multiply our representations.

Is the God we name really God?

This, to me, is one of the fundamental problems of every religion.

We cannot speak about God except through human language. We call Him Father because we know what it means to be a father; we call Him Creator because we know what it means to create; we call Him Judge because we know what judgment is; we call Him Love because we have experienced love. Even when we use apparently more abstract terms such as Absolute, Infinite, or Being, we are still using concepts created by the human mind.

That does not necessarily mean they are false. It means they are ours.

And I think that distinction is crucial.

When someone says, “God is love,” are they necessarily telling us something about God, or are they telling us something about their own understanding of love and, through that understanding, attempting to approach God? When we call God Father, are we describing a reality we know directly, or are we using a human metaphor to indicate something we cannot otherwise define?

I do not think these questions destroy faith. On the contrary, they might make faith much more conscious, because they force believers to distinguish between God and the image of God they have constructed.

And the same distinction applies to those who do not believe.

Because even an atheist, when saying that he does not believe in God, must first establish which God he is rejecting. The personal God of a particular religion? The Creator God of classical metaphysics? An anthropomorphic God who intervenes in history? The Absolute of philosophers? The God of Christian tradition? Rejecting one representation of God does not necessarily demonstrate the nonexistence of everything that the word “God” has attempted, throughout history, to indicate.

And what about Jesus?

The issue becomes even more delicate when we arrive at Jesus, because we are no longer dealing merely with a philosophical concept, but with a historical person around whom one of the greatest religious experiences in human history developed.

My friend reminded me of something that I consider far from insignificant: Jesus speaks of the Father, speaks of unity, speaks about the relationship between human beings and God, and, above all, makes statements that Christianity has come to regard as extraordinary. But precisely here, I think, we need to distinguish the historical Jesus from the theological development that subsequently grew around his figure.

I am not saying that Christian theology is false. I am saying that it is something different from simply recording the words of a man who lived two thousand years ago.

When we read the New Testament, after all, we are not listening to a recording of every word Jesus ever spoke. We are reading texts that emerged within the earliest Christian communities, were transmitted and interpreted within those communities, and eventually became part of the tradition of the Church. Paul of Tarsus played an enormous role in the spread of Christianity and in its theological development, but he did not know Jesus during Jesus' earthly life. The councils of the following centuries then formulated fundamental doctrines concerning the nature of Christ and the relationship between his human and divine natures.

All of this belongs to the history of Christianity and cannot simply be erased. But precisely because it belongs to history, it should remind us that there is a historical process between Jesus and the theological image of Jesus, and that this process deserves to be studied and understood.

In the Gospels, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” That is an immense statement, but it is not the same thing as literally saying, “I am God.” Christianity has interpreted this and other statements in light of the whole story of Jesus, his death, the resurrection believed in by his disciples, and the subsequent reflection of Christian communities. The divinity of Christ is therefore not simply the result of one isolated sentence, but of an entire theological construction based on the interpretation of his person and his life.

And here, personally, I find the question more interesting than the answer.

What did his first disciples see in that man that led them to recognize in him something beyond a man?

It is a fascinating question even if, for a moment, we put faith aside.

Perhaps art knows something reason cannot express

Art also came up in our conversation, and I don't think that was incidental.

Art has a peculiar quality: it can often suggest what it cannot explain. Music can communicate something that cannot be translated into a definition; a painting can make us perceive a dimension of existence that no description could completely reproduce; poetry can connect experiences that ordinary language would otherwise keep apart.

Perhaps this is also why religions have always needed art. When reason reaches something it can no longer contain through precise concepts, symbols, parables, rituals, images, and songs appear.

Not necessarily because the symbol is more truthful than reason, but because sometimes a symbol can point toward something that reason cannot fully circumscribe.

An arrow is not the thing toward which it points.

Perhaps much of religious language works in precisely this way: it does not necessarily claim to be the object itself; it attempts to point toward it.

The problem begins when we forget the distinction and turn the arrow into the target.

The temptation of dogma

This is where, paradoxically, I think both traditional religion and certain forms of esotericism and Gnosticism can fail.

Historically, Gnosticism emerged through many different movements and experiences, and it would be simplistic to reduce it to a single system. Yet whenever the idea of a higher knowledge becomes the conviction that one finally possesses the key to the Absolute, the risk is that one dogma is simply being replaced by another.

The priest says, “The truth is this.”

The initiate answers, “No, the true knowledge is this.”

But if both believe they have definitively possessed something that no finite being should be able to possess in its entirety, the distance between them may be much smaller than they imagine.

The words change, the symbols change, the hierarchies change, the sacred books change, but the temptation remains the same: to turn a possible path toward the Absolute into the Absolute itself.

And this is where, in my view, humility should enter the picture.

Not the humility of someone who gives up searching, but the humility of someone who continues searching while knowing that every answer may contain only a fragment of the truth.

Perhaps the problem lies in our very concept of “existence”

There is an even more radical question.

We ask whether God “exists,” but what does it mean to exist?

A tree exists. A person exists. A galaxy exists. An atom exists. These are realities that we can, at least to some degree, place within space and time and subject to different forms of observation.

But if God is truly what some philosophical traditions call the Absolute, the foundation of being itself, can we use the same concept of existence for God that we use for things that are part of the universe?

Perhaps the question itself is badly framed.

It is somewhat like asking where the origin of space is located. The question appears meaningful because we are accustomed to thinking that everything must be “somewhere.” But if we are speaking about space as a whole, that “where” no longer has its ordinary meaning.

Likewise, if God were that upon which being itself depends, asking whether God “exists” in the same sense in which a thing exists might mean applying a category to something for which that category was never designed.

This is not a proof of God's existence.

But neither is it a proof of His nonexistence.

It is simply an acknowledgment of a conceptual limit.

Perhaps the most honest answer is a question

In the end, perhaps the real issue is not finding a better definition of God, but understanding why human beings have always felt the need to ask the question in the first place.

Why have human beings, in every civilization we know, looked beyond themselves?

Why have they built temples, prayed, sacrificed, painted gods on cave walls, written prayers, developed cosmologies, invented myths, and searched for a meaning that extended beyond their individual existence?

We could explain all of this as fear of death, the need for order, the desire for consolation, social construction, or psychological illusion. Some of these explanations may certainly capture part of the phenomenon. But even then we return to the original problem: we have explained one manifestation of humanity, not necessarily its essence.

And so we are back where we started.

What is a human being?

And through the human being, what can we really know about God?

Perhaps not much.

Perhaps far more than we imagine.

But certainly not everything.

That is why I am less interested in deciding which religion has “won” the contest for truth and more interested in observing the mechanism through which human beings construct their certainties, because that may be where the greatest error is hidden: confusing what we have understood with what actually exists.

The word “God” is ours. The symbols are ours. The theologies are ours. The philosophies are ours. Even the concept of the Absolute is formulated by our minds.

And so the question remains, apparently simple and perhaps impossible:

What is God, really, once we remove everything human beings have said about God?

I do not know whether there is an answer.

But perhaps that is precisely the point.

As long as we continue searching without turning every intuition into a dogma, we remain within the search.

The moment we believe we have finally possessed the Absolute, perhaps we have stopped searching for God and simply begun worshiping one of our own representations of Him.

Survival Is Not Enough

I don't believe we can make survival the sole purpose of our lives. And I don't believe that living as long as possible can be the ultimate goal either.

If that had been my purpose, I probably would have lived very differently. I would have focused primarily on security, protection, and comfort. I would have avoided many difficult questions, and perhaps I would never have studied as much as I did. Above all, I would not have spent so many years trying to answer the most uncomfortable question of all:

Why are we here?

Because survival is necessary, but it is not enough.

There are millions of people in the world for whom survival is already an achievement. People who do not have enough to eat, who live through war, who have been forced from their homes, who struggle every day to give their children what others take for granted. They do not necessarily have the luxury of constantly asking what life means. Under those circumstances, survival is already a tremendous goal.

But once survival itself is no longer in question, the question comes back.

Now that I'm alive, what am I supposed to do with my life?

Because wanting to keep living is one thing. Knowing why you want to live is another.

Survival Is a Condition, Not a Direction

Making survival your only project means, in a sense, navigating by sight alone. You react to whatever happens, chase whatever demands your attention, avoid danger, look for the next small gratification, and keep postponing the fundamental question.

You can live that way for years without ever seriously asking where you are going.

And this is where I think we make a fundamental mistake: we confuse goals with purpose.

We can have a house to buy, a salary to increase, a promotion to earn, a trip to take, a body to improve, a bank account to build, a relationship to find, or a social position to achieve. All of these are legitimate goals.

But how much of what we pursue actually represents our direction in life, and how much is simply the desire of the moment?

We can spend our entire lives achieving goals without ever having had a real purpose.

Because a desire is not necessarily a purpose.

And even when we finally get what we wanted, we may discover that it was never what we were truly looking for.

The Difference Between a Goal and a Purpose

Perhaps purpose is something deeper than a destination.

A goal says: I want to get there.

Purpose says: I want to move in this direction.

The difference is not trivial. A goal can be reached and immediately lose its meaning. A purpose, on the other hand, can accompany us throughout our lives without ever being reduced to a final achievement.

I believe there is something deeper than the goals we consciously set for ourselves: a kind of underlying matrix, a fundamental premise upon which we build our existence, often without even realizing it.

It is the direction we give our lives before we formulate specific goals. It is what guides our choices even when we cannot fully explain why we make them.

We can change jobs, cities, relationships, projects, and desires. We can even change our minds about what we once thought we wanted. Yet beneath all of this, there may remain a deeper direction.

The question, then, is not simply:

“What do I want to achieve?”

It is:

“What direction am I giving my life?”

What Thinkers Have Tried to Tell Us

It is a question human beings have been asking forever.

Viktor Frankl took it to its most extreme consequences. His experience in the Nazi concentration camps led him to reflect on the relationship between suffering, inner freedom, and meaning. His fundamental insight was that human beings do not live merely by seeking pleasure or avoiding pain. We need a meaning toward which we can orient ourselves.

That does not mean that having a purpose makes life easy.

It means something more radical: even in the midst of suffering, a person can have a reason to keep moving forward.

Albert Camus, too, began with one of the most uncomfortable questions of all: what does it mean to live in a universe that does not necessarily provide us with a ready-made meaning?

His reflection on the absurd does not simply lead to resignation. On the contrary, it places human beings before the responsibility of living even when the world does not necessarily hand us an answer.

Perhaps the meaning of life is not something we discover, already packaged and waiting for us.

Perhaps, at least in part, it is something we create through the direction we choose to give our existence.

These are precisely the kinds of ideas that have always interested me—not because they can give us a definitive formula, but because they prevent us from settling for the easiest answer.

You are alive because you are still alive.

But that is not an answer.

It is merely a fact.

The False Goals I Gave Myself

I can see this when I look back at my own life.

For years, I gave myself goals that I now recognize as false goals—or at least as goals that belonged more to the image I had constructed of myself than to who I actually was.

The first was to become some kind of new Paulo Coelho of world literature.

I imagined myself as a writer, a thinker, an author capable of reaching millions of people through books. It was an appealing image, but today I have to be honest with myself: I did not have the drive necessary for it, and more importantly, I did not have the genuine literary inspiration that allows a writer to devote an entire life to writing.

Perhaps I wanted the image of what I could become more than I wanted the work required to become it.

My own blog has helped me see that.

I write a great deal, but what I produce no longer feels like a literary vocation in the traditional sense. I no longer feel the need to become a great writer, publish the book that conquers the world, or turn myself into a figure in literature.

Literature simply doesn't attract me that much anymore.

And admitting that does not necessarily mean I failed.

Perhaps it means I finally stopped pursuing an image of myself that never truly belonged to me.

The Political Dream

The second false goal was completely different: politics.

For a while, I imagined that a political career could allow me to escape what I call the swamp of local government and take me somewhere else—perhaps all the way to Parliament.

I had the example of Luigi Di Maio in front of me: a young man from an ordinary background, catapulted from the anonymity of an apartment building in Pomigliano d'Arco to the seats of the Italian Parliament.

The idea was powerful: escape the narrow dimensions of everyday administrative life, skip several rungs of the ladder, and arrive where, at least apparently, the great decisions are made.

But today, looking at it with greater clarity, that goal feels less and less like mine.

Italian politics no longer excites me.

Part of the reason is that I find it difficult to regard Italy as fully sovereign in the way the word sovereignty might suggest. Italy is deeply embedded in the Western alliance system and in its relationship with the United States, and that makes it difficult for me to see national politics as the place where all of the country's fundamental choices can truly be decided.

But even here, the real issue is not whether my political interpretation is right or wrong.

The real issue is that I no longer want that career the way I once did.

The Paradox of Power

Of course, there is also a very practical side of politics that can be attractive: parliamentary salaries, benefits, privileges, and above all the possibility of building a financially comfortable life that is far removed from the circumstances of many ordinary citizens.

I once knew a former member of Parliament who seemed to regard his political career almost as an investment: five years in Parliament, followed by the opportunity to enjoy his pension benefits for the rest of his life.

From that perspective, it might seem like a remarkably convenient way to live.

But there is one thing that separates me profoundly from that idea.

I am not a parasite.

I don't say that to claim moral superiority. I say it because, to me, the real issue with politics is not simply how much a politician earns.

The real issue is what he or she can actually decide.

A politician who does not truly make decisions, who does not genuinely exercise the power entrusted to him, who simply occupies a position, collects a salary, and waits for the benefits to accumulate may be acting entirely within the rules.

But from my perspective, that person is still a parasite.

Because power without the ability—or the willingness—to change reality is nothing more than a rent.

When False Goals Fall Away

Perhaps this is what I am learning.

A goal can seem enormously important for years and then suddenly lose its appeal. Not because we have become incapable of achieving it, but because we finally realize that it was never really our goal.

Sometimes what we call failure is actually liberation.

I pursued the idea of becoming a famous writer. I imagined a political career that would take me far beyond the administrative world in which I found myself.

Today, both of those images have lost much of their power over me.

And perhaps that is a good thing.

Because when false goals fall away, there is finally room to search for the real one.

But that leaves me with a question I can no longer escape.

If I take politics away and take literature away, who am I?

So Who Am I?

That question puts me face-to-face with something much more difficult than choosing a career.

I can tell myself that my purpose is to provide for my family. And that is certainly a noble purpose. I can be a good husband, a good father, care for the people I love, work, pay my bills, and try to build a peaceful old age.

But something inside me tells me that this cannot be everything.

Because even that, if reduced to its purely material dimension, could become another form of survival.

I work to support my family. I support my family to protect the well-being of the people I love. I keep working so I can eventually retire. I retire so that I can finally have time to live.

And then what?

I do not want to spend my life waiting for the moment when life will finally begin.

Perhaps the real problem is that I have spent too much time looking for a destination.

A successful book. Parliament. A position. Recognition.

Perhaps I kept asking myself where I wanted to arrive, when I should have been asking what I want to leave behind along the way.

The Blog and the Desire Not to Speak Into a Void

My blog is helping me see something I could not see before.

It has not become what I once imagined. It has not turned its author into a famous writer. It has not created the large community of readers I may have unconsciously wanted.

And yet I keep writing.

Why?

Perhaps because writing allows me to do something very simple:

to keep someone company.

A friend. Someone I know. But also a stranger who happens to come across one of my articles.

And if that person finishes reading and feels a little less alone, discovers a question they had never put into words, or simply spends ten minutes in the company of a thought that does them some good, then perhaps what I have done was not pointless.

It is not literature in the way I once imagined it.

It is not politics.

It is not power.

It is presence.

And perhaps this also explains my long-standing, often frustrated desire to have people around me.

Maybe I do not simply want followers.

Maybe I want to reach someone.

Real People on the Other Side

Of course, I mean real people.

Not the numbers in the statistics. Not automated traffic coming from China, Singapore, or anywhere else in the world.

A bot can inflate a counter, but it cannot listen to me.

I am looking for the human being on the other side.

The person who actually reads. The person who may never leave a comment, never click “like,” never write to me, and simply return to his or her life.

I will never know who that person is.

But that person will know that, for a few minutes, somewhere, someone put into words a thought that perhaps belonged to them as well.

And then perhaps I am not simply surviving.

Perhaps I am creating a small space where two lives that will never meet can still come into contact.

Is that enough?

Maybe not.

But perhaps the problem is that we have learned to consider only what is large, visible, profitable, or recognized to be meaningful.

A person in Parliament seems to have a purpose.

A bestselling writer seems to have a purpose.

A successful entrepreneur seems to have a purpose.

But why should there be less value in someone who manages simply to leave a thought in another person's mind?

What I Wish for Others

Whatever I wish for other people, I have to wish for myself first.

I cannot tell others that they need to find a purpose while I am content merely to survive.

I cannot point toward a direction if I am unwilling to search for it in my own life.

That is why this reflection is not meant to be a lesson for anyone else.

It is, first and foremost, a question I am asking myself.

What is the underlying matrix of my existence?

What fundamental premise, consciously or unconsciously, is guiding my choices?

What direction remains when I strip away all the temporary goals, the passing desires, and all the little things that seem essential today but may mean nothing tomorrow?

Perhaps that is where true purpose begins.

I Haven't Found the Answer Yet

The truth is, I still do not know what my purpose is.

And perhaps that is the most honest thing I can write.

I do not want to invent one simply because I need to feel important.

I want to find something that is true.

Something that remains after all the false images I have built of myself have fallen away.

Perhaps my purpose will not be to become somebody.

Perhaps it will be to be somebody for someone.

Perhaps I do not need to build an audience. Perhaps I simply need to reach a real person every once in a while.

Perhaps I do not need to change the world.

Perhaps I need only to leave some trace of my passing through it.

And perhaps even keeping someone company—a friend, a lonely person, a stranger who opens an article on an ordinary evening—can be a form of purpose, if we do it not to fill the emptiness inside ourselves, but because we have something authentic to share.

I still do not know whether that will be enough for me.

But I know it is far more real than the false goals I pursued in the past.

Because in the end, the question is not simply:

“How long will I manage to stay alive?”

Nor is it:

“What will I manage to achieve?”

The question is much harder:

“What makes life worth living?”

Perhaps I will never find a definitive answer.

But as long as I keep searching for one—as long as I keep questioning, writing, thinking, and perhaps keeping someone company on the other side of a screen—then maybe, at least for now, I am doing more than simply surviving.

Happiness Passes in Silence

What if some of the happiest moments of our lives have already happened—and we didn't recognize them?

The other day, I was looking at photographs of my daughters when they were very young. I stared at those little faces and found it almost impossible to believe they had really been them. And the younger man standing beside them—somehow, impossibly—was me.

Those days were real.

Those little voices once filled the rooms. Those tiny hands reached for mine. Those ordinary afternoons actually happened.

And now they are gone.

Not because they were ruined. Not because something terrible happened. They simply passed.

Looking at those photographs, I realized something that was both beautiful and painful: happiness had already been in my life many times. I just hadn't known what I was looking at.

Maybe that's one of the cruelest things about being alive.

Happiness rarely announces itself.

It doesn't knock on the door and say, Pay attention. This is going to be one of the days you miss.

It doesn't tell you that the person sitting across from you won't always be there. It doesn't tell you that your children will grow up. It doesn't tell you that one day you'll look back at an ordinary afternoon and give anything to have it back.

Happiness is usually disguised as ordinary life.

A child running through the house.

A voice calling from another room.

A table set for dinner.

Someone sitting beside you.

A completely unremarkable day.

And because nothing extraordinary seems to be happening, you don't realize that something extraordinary is happening at all.

Life is giving you a moment you will never get back.

I think I spent too much of my life worrying about tomorrow.

Anxiety has a strange power. It can make something that hasn't happened yet feel more real than what is happening right now.

You can be sitting at the dinner table while your mind is already in tomorrow's problems. You can be with someone you love while thinking about the phone call you need to make, the bill you need to pay, the problem you need to solve.

Part of you is always somewhere else.

Always preparing.

Always anticipating.

Always trying to protect yourself from a future that may never arrive.

And while you're busy preparing for tomorrow, today quietly disappears.

Then, one day, tomorrow becomes yesterday.

And you realize what you lost without ever knowing you were losing it.

You look at an old photograph and wonder why you didn't look longer.

Why didn't I listen more carefully?

Why didn't I stay at that table another ten minutes?

Why didn't I understand?

But how could we have known?

No one tells us when we are living something for the last time.

There is no announcement.

No final bell.

Things simply change.

Children grow up. Parents grow old. Houses change. Familiar routines disappear. People leave. And we keep moving forward as if tomorrow will look roughly like today.

Until it doesn't.

I feel this most deeply when I look at photographs of my father.

He is gone now.

And because he is gone, memories that once seemed ordinary have become precious. A photograph that might once have been just another picture now feels almost sacred.

I look at his face and know that I can no longer meet that man in the physical world.

I can meet him only in memory.

A gesture I saw a thousand times becomes precious.

A familiar voice becomes something I would give almost anything to hear again.

Even an ordinary day becomes valuable simply because it belongs to a world in which my father was still alive.

Perhaps that is what death teaches us most painfully:

how fragile the ordinary really is.

As long as someone is still here, we assume they will remain here.

Tomorrow.

Next week.

Next month.

We have to believe that. If we spent every waking moment thinking about the possibility of losing the people we love, we would never be able to live.

So we trust in continuity.

We assume that things will keep going more or less as they are.

But life never made that promise.

We spend so much of our lives searching for stability.

We look for it in our jobs, our money, our relationships, our homes, our routines. We want to find that one solid piece of ground where we can finally stop worrying and say: Now I'm safe. Now nothing is going to change.

But maybe that place doesn't exist.

Everything alive is exposed to change. To loss. To time.

The only absolute permanence may be death.

It's a dark thought.

But there is something strangely liberating about it, too.

As long as we are alive, we are vulnerable. We can lose. We can fail. We can be disappointed. The people we love can change or grow sick. We can change ourselves without even realizing it.

We can hold something precious in our hands today and discover, years later, that it is gone.

And perhaps that is why happiness was never meant to last forever.

Maybe happiness is a reprieve.

A brief moment when life stops asking anything from us.

Sometimes it's something enormous.

Sometimes it's almost absurdly simple.

A laugh.

An embrace.

A conversation that goes on longer than expected.

The feeling of finally being home.

Even a slice of homemade cake at the end of a long meal.

You've eaten. You're tired. There is nowhere else you need to be. Nothing urgent is waiting for you.

For a few minutes, you don't want anything else.

You simply eat the cake.

And it is enough.

There is something similar about physical pleasure. Desire builds. Tension rises. There is anticipation, effort, exhaustion—and then, for a brief instant, release.

And then it is over.

There is sweat. Fatigue. Silence.

But for that one moment, it felt like everything was there.

Maybe life works the same way.

We want. We pursue. We struggle. We finally reach something we thought would make us whole.

And for a moment, it does.

Then the moment passes.

The restlessness returns.

The desire returns.

The search begins again.

Not necessarily because something is wrong with us, but because perhaps being alive means never being completely finished, never permanently arriving.

What I regret most when I look at those photographs is how often I was worried about tomorrow while today was already giving me something I would never have again.

I cannot go back.

I cannot step inside those photographs and live those days again with the awareness I have now.

The past doesn't listen.

And it doesn't give anything back.

All I can do is look at it.

And learn.

Maybe we don't need to be happy all the time.

Maybe that was never the point.

Maybe the point is to recognize the moments when life is already enough.

To notice them before they become memories.

Because perhaps right now, today, we are living through something that ten or twenty years from now we will look back on and think:

I was so happy then.

And I didn't even know it.

There may be no sadder sentence.

But perhaps it can become a promise.

Look a little more carefully.

Stay at the table a little longer.

Listen to someone's voice without immediately planning your response.

Sit still for a few minutes without feeling guilty for doing nothing.

Eat the cake without thinking about what comes next.

Look at the person you love and remember that one day you may desperately wish you could see this exact moment again.

We cannot stop time.

We cannot keep the people we love from growing old.

We cannot preserve our lives exactly as they are.

But we can try not to sleepwalk through them.

Because perhaps the real tragedy isn't that happiness is brief.

It's that we so often recognize happiness only after it has become memory.

And then we look at the photographs.

We search the faces for something that remains.

My father is in one photograph.

My daughters are in another.

I am in both.

And one day, inevitably, we will become that for someone else, too.

A face from the past.

A memory.

A photograph.

Proof that, for a brief stretch of time, we were here together.

Maybe that's why, while we are still here, we should look at one another a little more carefully.

A little longer.

Before the present becomes a photograph.

Before someone, many years from now, looks at it and thinks:

“I didn't know I was happy.”

Happiness Comes from Within, Not from What We Own

We live in an age where happiness is often confused with financial success, material possessions, or social recognition. Advertising, social media, and consumer culture constantly send us the same message: we are always missing something. A bigger house, a better car, an exclusive vacation, the latest smartphone, the perfect relationship. The promise never changes: once you have these things, you'll finally be happy.

Reality, however, tells a very different story.

Happiness is, above all, an inner state of being. It is a daily choice rooted in the way we decide to experience life, not in the circumstances that surround us. The people in our lives can enrich our journey or make it more challenging, but they cannot be the foundation of our inner peace. Likewise, the things we own may make life more comfortable, but they can never fill an emotional or spiritual void.

This is not to dismiss the importance of money. That would be unrealistic.

Money undeniably improves quality of life. In countries where public healthcare is inefficient or burdened by long waiting lists, being able to afford private medical treatment can make a tremendous difference. The same is true for buying healthier, higher-quality food, living in a larger home, enjoying more free time thanks to financial security, wearing better clothes, traveling, discovering new cultures, and experiencing opportunities that many people simply cannot afford.

Wealth creates opportunities.

But opportunities are not the same as happiness.

History is filled with extraordinarily wealthy individuals who lived with anxiety, depression, loneliness, or despair. At the same time, countless people with modest means wake up each morning with gratitude, peace of mind, and the remarkable ability to appreciate life's simplest pleasures.

The ancient philosophers understood this long ago. The Stoics, from Seneca to Epictetus, argued that true serenity depends only on what lies within our control: our judgments, our choices, and our character. Everything else is external, uncertain, and ultimately temporary.

Epicurus, often misunderstood as a philosopher of indulgence, taught something very different. Genuine happiness comes from simplicity, friendship, freedom from fear, and the ability to limit unnecessary desires. The more desires we accumulate, the more opportunities we create for dissatisfaction.

In the twentieth century, Erich Fromm drew a distinction between having and being. A society built primarily around possession inevitably turns people into dissatisfied consumers. Every new purchase offers only temporary satisfaction before giving way to the next desire. It is an endless cycle.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps, observed that even under the most horrific circumstances, human beings retain one essential freedom: the freedom to choose their attitude toward life's events. It remains one of the most profound lessons of modern philosophy and psychology. If happiness depended solely on external conditions, no one could have preserved hope, dignity, or meaning in such unimaginable suffering.

Of course, we should avoid swinging to the opposite extreme. Poverty is not a virtue, nor does hardship automatically make people wiser or better. Financial insecurity creates stress, limits opportunities, and can seriously affect emotional well-being. It is perfectly reasonable to seek greater financial stability and a better quality of life.

Yet there comes a point where additional wealth contributes less and less to genuine happiness. Beyond that threshold, what truly matters is how we choose to live, the meaning we give to our days, the quality of our relationships, our capacity for gratitude, and the inner balance we cultivate.

Happiness is not a destination we reach after accumulating enough money, enough success, or enough possessions.

It is a way of living.

Those who place their happiness in what they own will inevitably live in fear of losing it. Those who build their peace upon inner values, self-awareness, personal growth, and freedom from endless desires discover that happiness is not something to acquire, but something to nurture every single day.

True wealth is not measured by what we possess, but by our ability to live fully even when life does not unfold according to our plans. That kind of inner freedom is something no financial crisis, broken relationship, or material loss can ever take away.

Does Consumerism Really Make Us Happy? The True Meaning of Success Is Not Having, but Being

A bigger house. A bigger car. The latest smartphone. Closets overflowing with clothes. Garages packed with things we use once a year—if ever. We live in the age of accumulation. Owning things is no longer enough; we are expected to own more and more. Consumerism is no longer merely an American phenomenon. It has become the dominant cultural model across much of the world, a universal language that promises happiness through consumption.

But does it really deliver on that promise?

If we look closely at the wealthiest societies, we encounter a striking paradox. Never before in human history have people enjoyed such an abundance of material goods, yet never have anxiety, depression, loneliness, burnout, and existential emptiness been discussed so openly. Clearly, financial prosperity and genuine happiness are not the same thing.

Consumerism operates on a remarkably simple principle: it transforms every desire into a perceived necessity. It does not merely persuade us to buy a product; it convinces us that without it we will somehow be less complete, less attractive, less successful. Objects cease to serve practical purposes alone; they become symbols of our identity.

This is precisely the insight of Erich Fromm, who, in To Have or To Be?, distinguished between two fundamentally different ways of living. In the mode of having, people define themselves by what they own. In the mode of being, they discover their value through love, creativity, understanding, and authentic existence. Fromm argued that a society built exclusively around possession inevitably produces insecure individuals, because no material object can satisfy the profoundly human need for meaning.

Slowly but surely, we stop being people who own things and become people who are owned by them.

A car is no longer simply a means of transportation; it becomes a status symbol. A house is no longer just a place to live, but a measure of social success. A smartphone is no longer merely a communication device; it becomes an extension of our public image. Even leisure time is increasingly transformed into an opportunity to consume.

Zygmunt Bauman described this condition as liquid modernity. In a world where everything is temporary, objects are designed to be quickly replaced. Nothing is supposed to last. Products become obsolete, but so do relationships, ideas, and even identities. The ideal consumer is not someone who buys once, but someone who remains permanently dissatisfied. The market depends on dissatisfaction because satisfaction would bring consumption to an end.

Whenever we finally obtain what we wanted, the pleasure is short-lived. Almost immediately another object appears, another upgrade, another experience that promises fulfillment. It is a perfect system because it never allows us to feel complete.

In many ways, we resemble livestock in an industrial farm, continuously fed so that the system can continue operating. Or perhaps we are more like hamsters running endlessly inside a wheel, convinced we are moving forward while remaining exactly where we started.

Our lives risk becoming painfully predictable: study, work, consume, sleep, repeat. From birth to death we often follow a path designed by others, believing we are making independent choices while many of our decisions have already been shaped by advertising, social expectations, algorithms, and the culture in which we were raised.

Does this mean free will does not exist?

Not necessarily. It simply means that genuine freedom is far more difficult to achieve than we usually imagine. Freedom is not having one hundred brands to choose from in a supermarket. Freedom is the ability to distinguish between what we truly desire and what others have taught us to desire.

Here Martin Heidegger remains surprisingly relevant. He argued that human beings often live within the anonymous world of Das Man—"the They." We think what everyone thinks, desire what everyone desires, and live as everyone else lives. We believe we are making our own choices, while in reality we are unconsciously following collective expectations. Only by confronting our own existence—and ultimately our mortality—can we begin to live authentically.

Thinking independently is demanding. It requires silence, study, intellectual honesty, and the courage to question our deepest assumptions. It is far easier simply to follow the crowd.

Arthur Schopenhauer observed that human life constantly oscillates between desire and boredom. While we lack something, we suffer because we want it. Once we obtain it, excitement fades, boredom returns, and a new desire inevitably emerges. Consumerism is nothing more than the modern expression of this endless cycle of human willing—a cycle in which satisfaction is always temporary and desire endlessly renews itself.

Perhaps true freedom begins when we learn to need less.

The ancient philosophers understood this long before the modern marketplace existed. Epicurus, often misunderstood as a philosopher of indulgence, taught almost the exact opposite of consumerism. He distinguished between natural and necessary desires and those that are vain and unlimited. The first are easy to satisfy and lead to tranquility. The second—wealth without limits, luxury, prestige, and endless acquisition—condemn people to permanent dissatisfaction. According to Epicurus, the person who knows how to be content is infinitely richer than the one who never stops accumulating.

Seneca, one of the greatest Stoic philosophers, expressed a remarkably similar idea. Poverty, he argued, is not having little; it is endlessly craving more. True wealth lies in inner self-sufficiency. Whoever depends on possessions for happiness inevitably becomes a slave to external circumstances. The wise person carries within themselves something that cannot be taken away.

This reflection naturally raises another question: how should success be measured?

Modern society almost always gives the same answer: wealth, income, career, fame, followers, property, investments.

Yet this standard ignores the most important variable of all: where a person began.

Two individuals may reach the same destination by traveling entirely different roads. Someone born into privilege begins life with enormous advantages over someone raised in poverty, neglect, or social exclusion. Judging both solely by their achievements ignores the most significant part of their story.

Perhaps success should be measured not by the finish line alone, but by the distance each person has traveled.

There is, however, an even deeper measure.

The neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps, reached an extraordinary conclusion: human beings can endure almost any suffering if they find meaning within it. Happiness, he argued, cannot be pursued directly. It emerges as the by-product of a life devoted to purpose. If our identity depends exclusively on consumption, then an economic crisis, illness, or old age may be enough to bring our entire sense of self crashing down.

Authentic success, therefore, is not measured by what we accumulate but by the degree to which we become masters of ourselves.

A person may own millions, luxury homes, expensive cars, and successful businesses while remaining enslaved by ambition, fear of loss, and an endless need for approval. Another individual may live modestly while possessing something infinitely more valuable: inner peace, intellectual independence, the ability to love, the pursuit of knowledge, and the freedom to live according to deeply held values.

Ultimately, true wealth is not found in accumulating more, but in needing less.

Consumerism teaches us to fill our homes. Philosophy teaches us to cultivate our minds.

Perhaps success is not about impressing other people, but about being able to look into the mirror without feeling like a stranger to ourselves.

The essential question is not how much we own.

The essential question is how much of our life truly belongs to us.

If the answer is "very little," then even the largest house, the most expensive car, and the biggest bank account may be nothing more than the furnishings of a prison we have built with our own hands.

Perhaps freedom does not begin when we can afford everything we desire.

Perhaps it begins the moment we stop desiring everything the marketplace has taught us to want.

The Little Bird on the Terrace and the Things Beyond Our Control

Years ago, I found a small wild bird on the terrace of my home. It could no longer fly; it seemed either injured or simply too weak to continue its journey. My family and I tried to help it: we gave it water and food, and we took care of it, hoping that it would regain its strength and return to freedom.

But the next day, we found it dead.

That simple episode has remained with me as a small but profound lesson about life. There are situations, people, projects, and paths in which we can invest all our commitment, our goodwill, and our energy, yet despite everything we do, the final outcome does not entirely depend on us.

We can try to save a little bird, but we cannot always give it back its life. We can try to help a person, but we cannot always change their destiny. We can build a project with passion and dedication, but we cannot force the world to embrace it.

Life constantly places us before this limit: the distance between what depends on our will and what belongs instead to forces greater than ourselves.

Accepting this does not mean giving up or becoming indifferent. On the contrary, it means recognizing the value of the attempt itself. The meaning of our actions is not determined only by the final result, because there is also value in the journey, in the effort, and in the inner transformation that every experience creates.

I often think about this reflection also in relation to this blog.

I have devoted time, study, and passion to writing these articles. I have tried to explore profound questions: the meaning of life and death, contemporary society, history, politics, religion, anthropology, and the nature of human beings. Every article has been a journey of research and discovery for me.

Of course, the success of a blog does not depend only on the person who writes it. It also depends on the historical moment in which an idea emerges, on algorithms, on people's attention, on the dynamics of contemporary communication, and on circumstances that are completely beyond an author's control.

I can only do my part: write with honesty, investigate, share ideas, and leave a trace.

The rest will follow its own course.

If this blog reaches many readers, I will be happy. If some ideas manage to reach distant minds and inspire reflection, it will be a great satisfaction. But even if the final result is different from my expectations, I would not consider this journey a failure.

Because the true value of an experience is not measured only by external recognition, but also by what it leaves within us.

This blog, before being an attempt to communicate with others, has been an exercise in knowledge and awareness. It has forced me to ask questions, to challenge my own beliefs, and to look at the world through different eyes.

Perhaps the little bird on the terrace taught me exactly this: we cannot always change the destiny of things, but we can choose the attitude with which we face them.

We can do what is within our possibilities, offer our contribution, and take care of what we encounter along the way. Then we must accept that reality will follow its own course.

And in this acceptance — which is not resignation, but maturity — perhaps lies one of the deepest forms of human freedom.