Apocalypse

an essay about self-destruction, inner hatred, self-deception, and the courage to break

Most people do not destroy themselves.

They allow themselves to slowly disappear. They save themselves up, fold by fold, year after year, for a version of themselves that never arrives.

Most people do not collapse in a single dramatic moment. They fall apart gradually, postponed into “later.” They say: When I’m ready. When it fits. When I’m better. Until nothing of the present remains except waiting.

Most people do not die from their mistakes, but from all the decisions they never make, because they believe that one day they will finally become the perfect version of themselves.

And while they save themselves for this someday, they miss the only thing that truly belongs to them: the present moment.

It is not the future that betrays them, but the lie that they must become someone else before they are allowed to live. This lie eats quietly. It calls itself reason, patience, self-control but in truth, it is fear with a good reputation.

Self-destruction rarely looks like fire. It looks like postponement. Like the gentle suffocation of one’s own desires under the weight of later and eventually. Like an inner hatred that remains polite and mistakes itself for maturity.

This is what people look like who have lived too long out of sync with time.

The man who no longer loses emotions, but time. He functions punctually, reliably, empty. This is called stability. Often, it is simply absence.

The woman who loses control because she can no longer stay still. Because something inside her refuses to be managed any longer. She is called difficult. Or irrational. Often, she is simply honest in a world that cannot tolerate honesty.

This is how a world of living bodies and absent people emerges. They move. They work. They claim to love. But they are no longer temporally present.

Like the undead with calendars. Like hearts in standby mode. Like lives reduced to administration.

The courage to break is not a desire for pain. It is the refusal to continue lying to oneself intact. Because whoever breaks recognizes at least this: that they were real. That there was something that could no longer be folded away, saved up, or postponed.

Perhaps the apocalypse is not the end of everything. Perhaps it is the end of self-deception. The moment one stops waiting for a perfect version and instead chooses the imperfect one now, breathing, contradictory, alive.

Because what truly destroys us is not failure.

It is the unlived life.

Samu