LIFE IS NOT THAT

Oct. 2026

First, make life insufficient. Give the body a standard it cannot hold, achievement a rival it cannot overtake, security a threat it cannot finally eliminate. Then organize existence around the deficit. Whole industries will help us pursue requirements whose authority we were never invited to discuss. The machinery expands into the distance it opens between living and being adequate.

Artificial needs acquire real force. The anxiety is real, the expenditure is real, the hours surrendered are irrecoverable. “Artificial” concerns the production of the requirement: how an appearance becomes necessary for belonging, continuous advancement proof that a life is worth living. Marcuse examined needs that reproduce domination through the satisfactions they provide (1964). We can enjoy what keeps us dependent.

And desire alone is an unreliable employee. Fear helps supervise it. Improve because you might fall behind; remain visible because you might disappear; monitor yourself because something might already be wrong. Nothing has happened yet. Excellent: prevention has an unlimited future.

Real dangers give this ideology its purchase. Rent must be paid; illness can destroy a household. Material insecurity disciplines the possible. Be sensible. Think of the consequences. The consequences of continuing are already being endured.

Life is madness, with its chaos, its orders and disorders: navigation through unknown flows, an ongoing communication with infinite dimensions. We participate in movements whose origins escape us and whose consequences exceed us; what passes through us continues elsewhere, entering processes we will never perceive. No inventory of human faculties can contain this unfolding.

Economic order castrates this unfolding when only prescribed outcomes justify its continuation. A flow becomes a resource; an unknown becomes a risk. Life must account for where it is going before it is allowed to discover a direction. Even madness is welcome if it innovates. Disorder must deliver. What cannot explain its usefulness loses the conditions for existing, including possibilities extinguished before they become recognizable enough to be missed.

The machines of alienation capture both the pursuit of a better life and the fear of another one. Imagination keeps producing improvements while losing the capacity to alter the premises. Another self becomes conceivable before another society.

My hypothesis is that this narrowing changes suffering itself. Exhaustion calls for greater efficiency; anxiety demands more control. Distress becomes an instruction to intensify the practices that may sustain it.

“Life is not that” demands material room for purposes still forming, relations without guaranteed returns. The political difficulty is to sustain what we cannot yet name without making its survival depend on becoming useful.

Liviu Poenaru

Reference

Marcuse, H. 1964. One-Dimensional Man. Beacon Press.