‘Tato, why do you never smile?’, asks Bruno, my six year old. He’s lying on the ground for his evening exercises and he’s pulled me on him. With his adorable hands he’s trying to pull my face into a smile. Pain, alarm, love all course through me. This is the third time he’s asked this in about one month’s time. I ask: ‘Is somebody saying this about me or is this just you thinking that?’ I’ve been thinking that maybe the teachers at his kindergarten see me come and go and said something like ‘that guy never smiles’. Bruno says: ‘No, it’s me who says it.’ I tell him that I do smile whenever I see him. He says I don’t. I search in my recent memories. I don’t smile when I see him? That can’t be true, because I do know 100 percent for sure the only time I still feel happiness is when I see my son. Surely that automatically leads to a smile on my face? Or was that from earlier and have I not noticed that I even stopped smiling in those moments?

I have several sessions with clients. From 19.00 to 21.30. In a way that strikes me as too mature for his age he says: ‘I wish you a good working evening.’ At his age I would see my father leave for the night shift at a factory he hated with a vengeance and I would cry behind the couch. Not for me, but for him. Cause that man I loved and admired had to slave away all night, pulling 40 kg mysterious ‘sleeves’ out of industrial ovens in plus 40 degree Celcius heat. Not without danger either, because at least one time he came home with bandages all over his arms from burns. Same thing happened to an uncle who also worked there for a while.

Why am I mentioning that? Because my concern is double. My son is obviously noticing my sadness. But me feeling the sadness of my father my entire life until he killed himself just like his father, my grandfather, before him, makes it almost like a cursed cycle from some horror series.

Before I have to go work with clients I emphatically say that I am very happy with him, but yes, that there are aspects of my life that I very, very unhappy about. Am sure that this isn’t the perfect answer you’d ever see listed in a popular book on parenting.

It’s possibly an upgrade from what my father told me. How he wish to guillotine all the managers at the factory. How the factory’s real name should be Breendonk (an infamous Nazi concentration camp in Belgium) or that he wanted to see heads roll and still blink like under Robespierre. Or all possible details about which type of World War I machine gun he’d use if no guillotine was around.

Compared to that ‘am very, very unhappy about some aspects of my life’ sounds relatively benign and feeble.

Cause this is what I am fairly sure you CANNOT say to a six year old, even though an extremely stupidly fashionable clickbait article in the Guardian last week was titled ‘kids can handle everything.’

No, they can’t.

So I don’t say:

  • I see kids like you with their limbs torn off by American and Israeli bombs every day and nobody with any power does anything about it, because too many PROFIT from that revolting carnage
  • I live in a ‘culture’ that wastes human consciousness on status games, appearances, job promotions and a maddening obsession with holidays and restaurant experiences they don’t even seem to really enjoy or ever be satisfied with
  • I feel locked out of aliveness, because almost everyone I meet feels so hollow and dead inside
  • I fucking remember a time where things were different and people still saw people, not walking billboards for a mainstream life style that makes me physically sick
  • Scrolling for dopamine has largely replaced any drive for meaningful connection or space to be surprised by other human beings face to face
  • any mainstream music feels like a violation of my nervous system
  • any public space seems designed to go against what I find aesthetically appealing on purpose
  • all those cars people worship like they are divinity on wheels look to me like overpriced plastic lunch boxes, also on wheels
  • I don’t do this infuriating thing where people flex and pretend to be untouchable or superior or smarter or equipped with the better opinion, I do quite the opposite, I just say where I am bleeding. I am lonely, I feel misunderstood, apart from my utility, my function or what little value they can squeeze out of me, nobody desires me, sees me or wants to hang out with me, leading to the baffling paradox that people pay good money to talk to me, but find me intolerable to be around for free. I admit that when am being paid I am kinda like sunshine. No, seriously, you pay me, you get sunshine (unless in the rare case you’ve really pissed me off or are too representative of this culture that takes nothing sacred)
  • I could throw in that my libido hasn’t found any real peace in years because of the almost statistically impossibility that I keep running into women who do not ignite me and vice versa. This is even more taboo than to say you’re lonely
  • I could add that I always wake up in the middle of the night, go outside, do pull-ups at the local playground, count calories like a pro, read more than most people, not cause am so smart, but because I guard my focus way better and don’t get dopamine from scrolling (maybe mostly thanks to a long regime of very classic schooling the first quarter of my life)

How do you tell a child that you still derive some pride from being somewhat above average self-disciplined, imaginative and empathetic, but that you consistently fail extremely badly at having your most basic emotional needs as a human being met and that the only thing that still comes close to happiness is looking at that child and treating it to all kinds of nice experiences? And that you fear that in spite of all efforts to make that child happy the fact that he’s my almost only source of happiness may be putting some sort of burden on him?

You can’t.

You also can’t tell a child there is this one evil country that always gets away with the most sickening murders, but that any other violence is always magnified on the evening news and why that is the case.

I even can’t explain to most adults I meet why this hypocrisy that runs every western country and almost every institution, newspaper, tv network, politicial party bothers me so much. Even though it’s simple: we live in a world where mass murder is very much tolerated and encouraged as long as the most dominant power structures benefit, from the top players to the smaller beneficiaries down.

I often wonder if it’s some design flaw I run around with.

I could add that another few percentage points of unhappiness points come from living in a world that wants memes and short tweets and looks at the length of this post as an insult to the modern human brain. As if am asking people to read War and Peace just to torture them.

And so, even in my writing, as in 95 percent of the many ‘conversations’ I have during a typical week I cut myself short.

One reason behind my absence of smiles being:

If I don’t make myself smaller, more digestible, I fear I will be ignored and cut off from other human beings even more.

I have to teach a language class now.

Which in practice means: regulating someone else’s nervous system, picking up one someone else’s interests and hobbies and passions, so they feel more confident using a new language.

And that’s fine.

But when there is little else and there is no room for what you care about, you almost feel like…

a prostitute.

And that you definitely can’t explain to a six year old.