Around the turn of the millennium, as a promising final-year philosophy student, I was asked by the journal Korunk to write an essay. I don’t remember the specific topic, but I do remember the circumstances of writing it. What does a promising final-year philosophy student do? Drinks like a fish. At least in Cluj-Napoca, we drank a lot. The pub was our marketplace, our agora. We went there to decipher the world, to pick up girls, or just to drink ourselves to be the smartest person in the room. During the day, we were at the library, from there a quick shower to the pub (if there was hot water in the dorm), and by dawn, we always found a bed somewhere.
We already had access to email, but smartphones didn’t yet rule over us. I managed my correspondence from the university editorial office of the philosophical journal Kellék, so I only read the editor’s urgent message in the afternoon. We must have been a day past the deadline because I was given 24 hours. That’s how it happened that I was sitting in the pub early in the afternoon, terribly hungover, staring at the smoky walls alone, wondering what the hell to write about. Like all final-year students, my head was full of knowledge, but it just wouldn’t come together. I had a quote to retort anything, but a worldview can’t be made up of just citations. Or if it can, it will be just so, I thought, and quickly threw together something about the essay-man.
Nowadays I don’t go to pubs anymore because you can’t smoke inside, and the quotes have also worn out of my mind. Only those remain that served and serve as crutches for life in some sense. I haven’t become smarter in the past two decades, perhaps wiser. That is, if it’s a sign of wisdom that I don’t necessarily want to speak my mind twice a day, and it’s much more important to me these days where I write/speak than what.
There’s a very simple reason for this: I want to break out of my bubble. Being a like-man is comfortable, instant positive feedback reinforces one’s belief in their own greatness; I share views that rhyme with other like-minded acquaintances and the #parté goes on.
But this is a trap. Around the turn of the millennium, I started from Hamvas, here’s a little remix: “The human Self is nothing more than an attempt and a fragment. This is what’s true and real in us. We are unfinished, open, reckless, fragmentary, questionable, and the essay-like nature of our fate is the truest in us.” Let’s replace the key concept at the end: “… the social media-like nature of our fate is the truest in us”. Well, this is what terrifies me.
I don’t want a Meta-fate for myself. That existence is truly unbearably light, one narrows in it until one truly becomes one-dimensional, a simple timeline sometimes bespangled with images. To post one last time in a falling airplane – well, don’t give me such a death, dear God.
Notes:
Cultural and geographical references:
Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár in Hungarian): A major city in Transylvania, Romania, with a significant Hungarian population and cultural importance.
Korunk: A Hungarian-language cultural magazine published in Cluj-Napoca since 1926.
Kellék: A Hungarian-language philosophical journal based in Transylvania.
Literary references:
Béla Hamvas: A Hungarian writer, philosopher, and librarian (1897-1968) quoted in the text.
The concept of “essay-man” (esszéember) is likely a reference to philosophical discussions about human nature and identity.
Linguistic notes:
“Like-man” (lájkember): A neologism combining the English word “like” (as used in social media) with the Hungarian word for “man,” reflecting on social media culture.
“Meta-fate” (Meta-sors): A play on words referring both to metaphysical concepts and the company Meta (formerly Facebook).
Homeland Dictionary 