The Future Before and After the Advertising
My father’s voice
“Philosophers have interpreted the world in different ways, but what matters to me is believing that I might transform it.”
To interpret is to recognise that the existing order was neither born complete nor made permanent. To transform is to remove ideas from the comfort of commentary and submit them to the risk of consequence. The Brazil of my fifteenth year, in 1990, called change progress, precarity flexibility, and consumption citizenship. Inflation receded, credit emerged, and the future arrived in imported packaging. Music, however, moved to a different pulse: abrasive guitars, urban drums, pop refrains, samba and blues reminded us that modernisation does not distribute dignity by contagion.
“What does not kill me makes me stronger.” I used to hear that from my father, and only later discovered that Nietzsche had popularised the phrase.
“Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well.” To think that the old man was also a disciple of Lord Chesterfield.
The first maxim described a possibility, not a law. Suffering may enlarge perception, but it may also diminish trust, health and one’s sense of horizon. Its glorification suits structures that depend upon silent endurance. By fifty, one has learnt that bearing pain is not the same as prevailing. We ought to resist the Rocky Balboa syndrome. Some experiences teach; others merely hurt. The cult of resilience turns damage into curriculum and demands gratitude for the blow. Maturity begins when pain no longer requires moral justification.
“Language is the house of Being.”
Words do not merely name the world; they distribute blame, prestige and permission. Whoever controls the vocabulary governs perception. Dismissal becomes restructuring, surveillance becomes monitoring, exhaustion is renamed high performance. Euphemism preserves the civilised appearance of violence. In popular song, a single word may expose an entire life; in corporate discourse, dozens may serve to prevent the fact itself from appearing. To think rigorously is to restore weight to names.
“Where there is power, there is resistance.”
Contemporary power prefers inducement, which is far more efficient than mere prohibition — I am reminded of the Leonardo DiCaprio film Inception. It organises desire, establishes standards and turns comparison into discipline. When I was fifteen, television, radio and, above all, the record player dictated the common repertoire; today, each screen offers a selection and calls it freedom. Old censorship removed content; the new abundance dissolves relevance. Resistance does not simply mean confronting authority. It also means preserving what will not be monetised, refusing permanent availability and keeping parts of life beyond public judgement. Silence may be less passive than exposure.
“The achievement society is a society of self-exploitation.”
Exploitation became more efficient once it dispensed with the overseer. The slave lost the foreman and gained a desk and a mirror. The individual measures steps, sleep, productivity, image and recognition, then calls this surveillance autonomy. The device that promised to liberate time turned every interval into an opportunity for work, consumption or display. The old working day ended; the present one follows the body. The subject is employee, manager and debt collector of the self. Failure appears personal because the system conceals the conditions and displays only the results. Whoever does more than is possible, yet fails to accomplish the impossible in full, is flogged by conscience.
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The world is collectively constructed, and suffering does not legitimise it; language organises its appearance; power shapes conduct; and performance transfers coercion into the individual. To think at fifty requires neither nostalgia nor allegiance to the present. It requires distinguishing choice from conditioning, strength from submission, and freedom from availability. The invitation is to observe which habits still belong to us and which have merely learnt to speak in our voice.
I would also suggest that we refrain from infecting younger generations with this outlook, for if after fifty it appears to me as lucidity, before then it may look rather like depression.
