Joachim Bessing: Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?

The confusing, sometimes even tiring, thing about our days is the constant question of how on earth something oddly specific could have been meant. Someone sends you a photo? Just look at it! Or don’t. Do what you want with it, or let it do what it wants to you.

The ego determines the meaning. If you are filthy rich, rising prices may mean very little. It is a favorite form of tabloid journalism to have rich people guess the prices in the supermarket. For the most part, their guesses suggest that their egos are in a sphere removed from everyday worries. Those who are still loitering in the waiting room for Arcadia, those who feel the gravity of everyday life, must do something to avoid being further removed. Revolutions are never made from within Arcadia. They always aim straight for the heart of Arcadia.

After a turbulent century, the 20th since Christ, which was loaded to the brim with constant upheavals – two world wars! World economic crisis! TV! Atomic bombs! Color film! Porn! Moon landing! War against jungle peoples living in tunnels! Birth control pill! Student revolution! Oil crisis! Feminism! War against mountain peoples living in caves! War for oil against desert peoples living in deserts! – we have now ended up in one of the constant reruns. Or is YouTube something different from TV? Is TikTok not YouTube, just faster? And therefore better? And, apart from the platform: Aren’t we all secretly dreading the Charles Manson of our generation? Won’t we also experience something a bit gruesome, but at the same time awesome, because it creates thrill? And become contemporary witnesses because we were there in the flesh when it happened.

On the one hand, there is the cozy feeling of living the best life possible. When you have the opportunity to board a plane for a small price and after a two-hour flight, you are sitting beneath a pine tree in the pleasantly wafting evening breeze just in time for sunset, sipping an ice-cold Negroni, scrolling a little on the internet, watching the Italian children fighting each other with their bubble guns and then later stroll into your temporary residence, which didn’t cost the world either, but has wall to wall terrazzo floors which are all the rage on IG, to have some truly exciting sexual intercourse with a spontaneously booked partner (AIDS is history, because now there are drugs). Not only is it not so bad from a 20th century perspective, it’s Arcadia already. The promised life.

On the other hand, there is the bad conscience. Interestingly enough, because your life is so great. And the stream of bad news from other parts of the world is so constant. It’s like a force feed.

There hasn’t been a single world war in your lifetime. You didn’t lose your job because you protested against the prevailing politics, nor were your parents in a concentration camp. Are they still alive? They even live in a similar way to you. They’re like-minded people. But, from your place in Arcadia, whether in Rome or in Copenhagen, whether in Skopje or elsewhere (post-communist countries are way more fun!), you can very well recognize the others who are in the waiting room. Still. Because even if there is a sticker on your laptop next to the one with “Queers For Palestine” which reads, slightly worn (because vintage!), “Leave No One,” you also realize that this remains lip service. A phrase like “Et in arcadia ego”…

We can’t take everyone with us to Arcadia. Eight billion, soon to be ten. And, basically, all it takes is a study of recent history, or a few hours of Adam Curtis on YouTube, if necessary, to realize that all current conflicts, from Palestine to Kiev, exist primarily because your Arcadia is based on their foundations. That is unjust. But, at the same time, it is also one of the achievements of the 20th century that the hope of a repeat performance in the afterlife – whether you want to call it Arcadia or Paradise or Eternal Life – is nothing but fiction. Not gonna happen.

So, think carefully, spend your time wisely, for when you want to throw your meager two cents onto the scale. All these big conflicts are elsewhere. They concern us and yet they do not. That is the truly confusing, sometimes tiring, thing about our time. In Arcadia, we live in equidistance to a suffering that can no longer be saved. The Viet Cong in the tunnels and the great revolutionaries we know from T-shirts and Sharepics probably believed they had the hope of reaching Arcadia through their insane uprisings. All that remains for us, who have been living there for a long time, is confusion, or tiredness, at times. At least we have the means to keep it at bay from our egos.