Cheyenne Isa ₿

The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns us of the danger of the single story. A literary review that reaches peripheral places is a powerful antidote: it multiplies stories, shatters stereotypes, and restores dignity to the complex humanity of every community.

The Breathing Void: Chronicles of Human Mechanicity He wakes up at six thirty-seven. Not at six thirty-six, not at six thirty-eight. The body, ahead of consciousness, has already performed the banal miracle of interrupting the dream. The hand emerges from the sheets to hit the button of an instrument that does not play, but silences another sound. It is the first act of a liturgy. The bathroom is white, the water is warm, the breakfast cup has a striped pattern. The train passes at seven twelve. The office seat is the third on the left after the fake plants. The work consists of inserting figures into tables that generate other tables. The lunch break is one hour. They talk about the weather, a TV show, a generalized, weak discontent that dares not name itself. They return home. They turn on a screen. They sleep. They repeat. This is not a description of despair. It is the photograph of a perfect equilibrium. The biological clock is no longer biological; it is a cog synchronized with larger cogs. The wonder lies not in the missing rebellion, but in the precision of the adaptation. The average human being—an atrocious expression for its statistical truth—builds his cage with the patience of a spider, and then settles into it calling it *the world*. The question is not «why does he not rebel?». The question is: **with what material should he do so?** He has been given a vocabulary to describe time, not eternity. A scheme to measure success, not happiness. A series of buttons to express consent or dissent, but no tool to listen to the silence between one thought and the next. > «Normality is the violent stage of an illness one does not wish to diagnose. One prefers to anesthetize the symptom than to listen to the message of the foreign body, which is the soul.» The first real shock does not come with tragedy. It arrives on an ordinary Tuesday, perhaps while standing in line at a supermarket checkout, under the neon light that makes everything identical to itself. A moment of fracture. A hiatus. In that millisecond pause between a stimulus and your habitual response, a nothingness gapes open. There you see it: the mechanism. You see your hand picking up the discounted product, your mouth smiling at the cashier for no reason, your brain already projecting the empty evening. And you understand you are *executing*. It’s a glacial epiphany. You don’t feel pain, you feel the absence of pain. Like a phantom limb trying to move. That void is the space where choice should dwell. And it is deserted. ### The Economy of Sleep and the Dividend of Obedience Robert Kiyosaki would look at this system and enunciate its founding principle: **the most precious asset is not money, it is attention.** The entire social and economic architecture is a machine to capture and mortgage attention. A man who does not question himself is a predictable cash flow. He works, consumes, produces data, generates emotional and financial surplus value without requiring costly maintenance. His mechanical nature is an oil that lubricates the great engine. If he began to think—truly to think—he would become friction. He would stop buying things to fill a void he has just discovered he has. He would question debts, hierarchies, the very idea of time sold by the hour. Advertising does not sell products. It sells *anesthetics*. It promises a fragment of identity, a shortcut to being. «Buy this, and *be* someone.» It is a perfect surrogate for the self-generation of spirit. Because the real work, that of forging oneself, is laborious, painful, and does not produce a measurable GDP. Joan Didion would observe the details, the signs, the catalogs, and read in them not desire, but its ghost. «We tell ourselves stories in order to live,» she would write. But here the stories have already been written. Pre-packaged. The subject wears them like a jumpsuit, and believes he is the character. And yet, in this desolation, there is a form of peace. A toxic peace, perhaps. The harmony of the hive. The calm rhythm of repetition is hypnotic, reassuring. It removes the terror of freedom. Hannah Arendt spoke of the «banality of evil» as a mechanism of execution without thought. But there also exists a **banality of living**, equally dangerous because self-inflicted and socially celebrated. Extreme evil requires perverse thought; mechanical living does not. It requires only absence. It is an energy saving. The nervous system sings a lullaby: *do not think, do not feel, just proceed*. And the body obeys, because the fatigue of consciousness is greater than the fatigue of physical work. `The variable "free will" in the source code of modern society is often a boolean value: TRUE when choosing between A and B (where B is a slightly different A), FALSE when seeking option C which is not on the menu.` The tragedy, therefore, is not the condition itself. It is the enthusiastic adherence to it. The pursuit of comfort as the supreme good has sterilized the inner conflict, that conflict from which art, philosophy, true love are born—all things dysfunctional for a machine that must produce. The heartbeat has been swapped for the ticking of a metronome. And the most ingenious thing is that the system rewards its best automata. Promotions, social recognition, an orderly family. The dream is a self-replicating algorithm. Those who dare to question it are not punished with violence, but with something subtler: irrelevance. They are isolated, diagnosed («you have a syndrome», «you are a misfit»), or simply ignored. Their awakening becomes background noise in a world that has turned the volume of distraction to maximum. What remains, then? Recognizing one's own mechanical nature is only the first, agonizing step. It is like looking at your own hands for the first time and seeing, instead of flesh, a filigree of metallic wires. It is frightening. But in that gaze—in the shock, in the void—there is already a germ of life. Because only a *malfunctioning* machine can realize it is a machine. That short circuit, that fracture in the flow, is proof that inside something has not been completely switched off. Perhaps it is not a soul in the theological sense. Perhaps it is just a residue of rebellious biology, a quantum of indeterminacy that escapes programming. It is little. But it is enough to start jamming the system. - Do not change your routine for revolution. Change an infinitesimal fragment of it. Take a different route. Listen to a type of music that confuses you. Break a single link of the chain, and observe the vibration that propagates. - Replace consumption with creation, even if what you create is shapeless and ugly. Create silence. Create questions without answers. - Seek out other automata who have jammed. You will recognize them. They will not talk about optimization or trends. They will have a slightly unfocused gaze, as if listening to distant music. Awakening is not an epic event. It is a slow reappropriation of one's own conditioned reflexes. It is learning to breathe again, when for years an artificial ventilator inflating your lungs was enough. It does not promise happiness. It promises authenticity, which is a much more bitter and real thing. The world that wants you to sleep is immensely powerful. But it has one phobic fear: that you, for a single instant, stop reacting and start to *act*. That you trade the peace of oblivion for the turbulent, wonderful, and dangerous peace of one who looks in the mirror and, finally, sees a void that breathes. #Awakening #MechanicalLife #SocialAutomata #FreeWill #Consciousness #ModernSlavery #SpiritualPoverty #ExistentialInquiry #Nostr #PhilosophyOfMind

**Ezra Pound** "Today the name 'democrazia' has remained with the usurocracies, or the daneistocracies... which means: the dominion of money lenders."

As Octavio Paz writes, the poetic word is an act of resistance against imposed silence. Bringing literature to distant places means creating spaces for authentic speech, where reality can be named outside of the languages consumed by power.