Oh no, not yet another to sell ‘his’ meaning of life... but what about we stop for a second; what gives a meaning to your life? Many suggest living every day as if it was going to be the last one. Sure, our priorities would change, but I find the suggestion has a flaw and might lead some to extreme choices. After all, if this were your last day, tomorrow would no more be ‘your’ problem, “who cares then.”
What instead if today was the last day of 99.99% of the population? Then, tomorrow would be ‘your’ big problem; and the day after tomorrow, and the next one, and the next one... What would keep you going? What would keep you from committing suicide? What values would give meaning to your life when everybody else is no more?
This is the situation faced by Dan Amenta in “Daimones” Vol.1 of the “Daimones Trilogy.” As many of us in our societies, we are distracted by ephemeral things; a promotion, a new car, the latest fashion apparel, whether or not we wear a Rolex at 40, and we forget what makes our lives meaningful. What if you had to walk alone in your city, where every house, every apartment has become a tomb? Would you feel like Dan?
“The window displays were magnificent as ever, but there was no one to attract anymore. Business shut down for lack of customers. I had the impression of walking onto a movie set, all perfectly staged down to the smallest details, yet deserted as the actors and crew had not arrived. The parallel streets of Rue du Rhone and Rue du Marché, becoming Rue du Rive further east and Rue de la Conféderation to the west, made up Geneva’s most famous shopping area.
Designer retail stores and world-famous watchmakers lined the streets that used to be packed with window shoppers. The entire district resembled a fashion runway, perfect and beautiful. The resemblance though was loathsome, as if fashionable jewels and clothing brands had finally admitted they did not care whether customers liked them or not. They reclaimed a reason to exist for themselves, becoming altars and shrines to vanity and vacuity.”
– “Daimones” Vol.1 of the “Daimones Trilogy”
If we were to ask children what are the most important things in their lives, the adults would smile and think how banal, how trivial those answer are; children know nothing and need to grow to ‘understand’ what life really is... Really?
Dan discovers what keeps him alive, and it’s not easy for him to think again as children. It’s those banal, those trivial, and those precious things that are unrelated to what life ‘really’ is. Dan discovers what our world is: we focus on money, career, we show-off our ‘social status’, and we live to fine tune the image we want to project to the rest of the world while we couldn’t care less of this last.
We’re not looking at what happens around us, we lack empathy; we live already in a spiritual apocalypse. Our world, though, tells us we have a spiritual-death apocalypse already in place.
Massimo Marino
Science fiction author
www.massimomarinoauthor.com
The “Daimones Trilogy” by MASSIMO MARINO explores the apocalypse and its consequences: the physical death of humankind, the rebirth of the society, dystopian or utopian, and the moral and ethical tensions of the survivors.
Visit Massimo’s website: www.massimomarinoauthor.com
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