Is the world failing, or is my heart failing?

Last night, we talked about the 2024 Paris Olympics because some people were pessimistic about whether it could be successfully held. And I just realized that it is the Olympics, a world-renowned gathering that attracts worldwide attention.

However, regardless of whether it can be done, it has long been blurred from people's sight. The world is torn apart by war and swept by the wave of nostalgia. Almost no one has the energy to care about a world-renowned sporting event. And its significance is usually described as preventing war, using a simulated war to prevent a real war. Unfortunately, it failed to do so.

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics also took place quietly amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Apart from the lecture I attended on the possibilities of simple graphics, which showed the poster designs of various Olympic Games, almost no one mentioned it. No one remembered that such a grand event was held in Tokyo in 2020. People's memories were trapped in the COVID-19 and the fear of death, as well as the completely disabled society at that time. The world became bleak.

Is the world in decline? We generally hold this view and fall into sadness in the wave of nostalgia, but I dare not say that this is unprecedented. Perhaps our previous generation also missed their past era in this way.

In the cartoon "Rick and Morty", there is an episode where people live in the town they dreamed of ten or twenty years ago in their nostalgic memories. Then, every once in a while, the residents of the town, who finally moved here from the future, begin to repeat their nostalgic feelings and want to move to an earlier era. Nostalgia is a virus that cannot be eliminated. Everyone is haunted by the nightmare of their own era and fantasizes about a better way out, which is not in the future, but in the past.

But from a realistic perspective, I certainly know that the world is receding. The eras we are nostalgic for were brief periods of peace in history. We experienced the prophecy of the end of the world, and people's lives flourished so freely. What followed was economic crisis, war, hatred, conspiracy theories, and a complex and divided world that seemed unprecedented.

Sometimes I take refuge in art and find that it is not what it seems. It must have the shadow of the real world, casting a terrifying monster. In times of crisis, art has also lost its freedom and has been clamped, unable to move forward, or like reality, it has been caught in a nostalgic wave and is looking for the possibility of rising in the spiral.

My friend and I talked about how, even though it is nostalgia and how people recall the millennium with great fanfare, it can be said that most of the works created today are still not purely recording and restoring the millennium. People's aesthetics are still influenced by the time that is happening. We are just learning to wear the millennium again because it is so spiritual, grotesque to the point of making people cry, and most importantly, full of love.

It seems that the biggest problem in the world today is that we no longer love wantonly and ostentatiously. It is as if we have experienced an economic crisis in love. We become cautious and petty, because once we are committed and immersed in it, most of the results are difficult to resolve. There are catastrophic-level traumas, and then hundreds of pages of chat records on the Internet, which continue to trigger secondary disasters before the trauma is completely digested.

"Pig killing scam" has almost become a global issue and has even been added to the English dictionary. Although similar expressions existed before, "pig killing scam" still shocked the world like never before.

The power imbalance in intimate relationships was reflected in the literature of the past, such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Lolita. People just felt sorry for the suffering of a pure girl and the doomed failure of a man. Then we had The Garden of Idols.

But it was too late. A business that aims to deceive women into falling in love has emerged in the world. "Killing pigs" is the language they use. They know the dangers of this business better than anyone else, and they want to kill the women they are talking to. "Killing pigs" uses chat records to present their own scripts, and women's love and imagination are the stage for them to perform.

In order to counter this almost irrefutable accusation, the male group's attack on "gold diggers" and "gold diggers" is as fierce as ever - if there are no "gold diggers", they will create "gold diggers" and one of them will be burned at the stake. The war has begun, and both sides are looking forward to the outcome.

The irreversible division before us is like the curse that Queen Dido cried out in pain before committing suicide: "There is no friendship or alliance between our two tribes!"

How can we continue to love like this? Of course, the "love" I am talking about at this moment does not refer only to the love between heterosexuals, but the "love" in a broad sense, because human beings are still the same human beings, and we are experiencing the same waves.

Even friendship has been put to an unprecedented test. We say things on the Internet that are not really our own thoughts, and then forget that they will spread. They become gun barrels and cannonballs, shooting at each other without hesitation when we are "on the line".

May 13, 2024