Do you feel it? Do you long for it? How much spacetime are you giving it?
There is a human impulse that predates all systems, institutions, and ideologies: the longing for depth. It emerges quietly, often in moments of pause, grief, awe, or exhaustion. We want our lives to mean something more than utility or survival - as pure capitalism suggests. We want to feel the pulse of something real beneath the noise. Not just information. Not even just feeling. But something deeper: resonance, contact. The sense that our experience touches some unfathomable order, that we are not just drifting through entropy, but participating in something that matters.
Philosophers have long reached for that. Nietzsche saw it in the tragic spirit, in the willingness to face the abyss and still affirm life. Simone Weil approached it through suffering, attention, and silence. Adorno, weary of capitalism's totalizing grasp, found depth only in negative space, in what remained unsaid, uncommodified. Each of them, in their own way, tried to carve a path to something beneath the surface. But they paid a price for it. The clearer they saw the machinery of the world, its power structures, its illusions, its repetitions, the harder it became to surrender to any form of “naïve” belief. They suffered not from ignorance but from vision. To see too clearly is to know too much. And to know too much is to find oneself outside the game, unable to pretend, unable to belong.
Simulation and the collapse of the Real
In our present time, the stakes are even stranger. We no longer merely confront ideologies or illusions. We live inside simulations. Jean Baudrillard, one of the most prescient thinkers of the late 20th century, diagnosed the shift: representation no longer represents anything. The image no longer refers back to reality but loops in on itself, becoming self-referential, hollow, and self-replicating. We live in a world where signs no longer point to things, but to other signs. Where spirituality is branded, where rebellion is merchandised, where authenticity is algorithmically boosted, then sold back to us as a product.
Baudrillard called this the era of the simulacrum. The sacred may be gone, but its costume remains. Our social feeds are filled with performance, our identities curated into consumable profiles, our existential hunger pacified by experiences designed to simulate depth. The result is a kind of psychic vertigo: we feel that everything is "there" and yet nothing is really here.
The rituals are intact, but the gods have left the temple – consider it an echo of Nietzsche’s pronouncement that “God is dead”.
In this world, the idea of becoming a "real self" grows more paradoxical. Because the self, too, is an accumulation of simulations. Like an onion, we are composed of layers: beliefs, fears, inherited scripts, borrowed gestures, cultural imprints. We peel back one only to find another. Some we chose – many we did not. Some are beautiful, protective, others suffocating. The modern subject is not a stable core, but a shifting composition of narratives, some lived, some absorbed.
To recognize this is not to despair, it is to become honest. Because the line between authenticity and simulation is not drawn between those who are "fake" and those who are "real," but between those who accept their layering and those who mistake their mask for their face. The task is not to find some mythical, untouched self beneath it all. It is to take responsibility for one's layering, to know which skins are inherited and which are chosen. And to begin, perhaps, to choose more deliberately.
The trap of Imitation and the power of origin
This is where imitation becomes dangerous. Throughout history, individuals have discovered paths to depth: mystics, philosophers, poets, rebels. Their insights often arise from intense solitude, suffering, or radical clarity. But as soon as they speak or write or act, they leave a trace. Others come along and try to follow that trace. They imitate the form, hoping to inherit the essence. But form without inner necessity is dead. A ritual performed without meaning becomes a performance. A path followed without questioning becomes a trap.
Religions, cults, spiritual movements, even artistic schools often begin as an individual's raw encounter with truth. But once codified, once institutionalized, they cease to be invitations and become impositions. What was once a flame becomes a rulebook. And worse, when people gather around borrowed truths, power enters. Some begin to manipulate, to control, to profit. The original insight, once alive and singular, becomes hollowed out by repetition.
The tragedy is not that people seek meaning through imitation. The tragedy is that they stop there. They mistake the map for the territory. But someone else's realization is not YOUR path. It cannot be. What gave their insight its power was not its content, but the fact that they had to find it themselves. Truth, if it is to be alive, must be forged. It cannot be downloaded.
So what does it mean to live honestly in this age of simulation? It does not mean rejecting all forms or traditions. It does not mean retreating into solipsism. But it does mean refusing to live secondhand. It means resisting the urge to outsource your depth to institutions, to algorithms, to influencers. It means cultivating a quiet suspicion toward anything that promises easy transcendence or rapid awakening. It means returning, again and again, to your own experience – not because it is pure, but because it is yours.
To live honestly is to embrace the process of layering consciously. To choose symbols, not because they are objectively true, but because they speak to your condition. To perform rituals, not because they guarantee results, but because they organize your attention. To think deeply, not to dominate, but to stay close to what unsettles you. To speak, not to convince, but to make contact.
This kind of life may not be flashy, it probably even resists spectacle. It cannot be packaged, it is quiet, slow and untransferable. But in a world where simulation reigns, such a life becomes a radical gesture. Because it refuses the theater, it listens instead of broadcasting, it knows that depth is not a mood or an aesthetic, but a form of presence, cultivated against the grain of times. To live without delusion is not to live without mystery. It is to stand in the middle of mystery and stop pretending to understand. It is to peel back the layers of the self and find not a final core, but a kind of honest silence. It is to begin where others end, not in imitation, but in origin.
And perhaps that is all we can ask for: not truth as system, but truth as gesture. A way of being that neither escapes the world nor submits to it, but meets it, fully, and remains awake. I hear, dancing works…
by mario
