Sacrifice in the era of the adultchild
This is an essay from my journal. It is a commentary on the prevailing norms in my culture and, probably, that of other cultures around the world.
Strong cold winds this evening. Apparent temperatures are hovering slightly above zero degrees Celsius. The days remain cloudy. We have gotten plenty of rainfall, with much more to come. It has been an exceptionally dark five months since early November. Once October is over, the days get noticeably shorter until the winter solstice. After that we gain roughly a minute of sunlight each day. Though it does not feel that way until around the spring equinox because winter coincides with the rainy season.
Dark days and brights days are practically the same here. It is not like those busy places where people congregate some square to enjoy the sunshine. I live outside any built-up area. Though, generally, there are few residents in the Cypriot hinterlands. Three of them died recently of old age. Many more will follow soon. Nobody is taking their stead. The local communities are vanishing. I cannot remember the last time I met a local who is younger than me.
I am part of the problem. I do not have a family. Never got the chance. Nor do most of my relatives. Not even any of my friends back in Greece. Were it just me, I would blithely admit to my shortcomings. I do not have a fragile ego, anyway, and have no problem acknowledging that I am a loser. Such is the world. Not all can be winners. I am sure I could be doing things differently and trying to be an even better version of myself. Though I refuse to accept that everyone I know well is just defective. There are systemic issues at play.
The economic situation is the obvious explanation, though I find it wanting. The generations of my grandparents and their grandparents had 5+ children each. They were dirt pour, dealt with wars at home, while they had to work long hours for every sort of activity we now take for granted. Try to wash the clothes by hand, for example. Make your own bread for the family. Prepare sausages, cheese, pickles, jams, et cetera to understand how it is to not throw anything away. Carry the harvest with the donkeys under the beating sun. Work the fields with limited equipment while it is raining. Mend your shoes and patch your own clothes, as you will not get new ones. And so on. Every task was labour intensive and punishing. Their diet was strictly seasonal. They would eat whatever was available at the given time of the year. They could not afford to be picky: a life of austerity beats any capricious wants out of you.
Their communities were thriving though. There was vitality all around. The village closest to my house used to have a few thousand residents only a few decades ago. Most of them were young. Today there are only tens of them registered with the local authorities and none of them is brimming with zest. Nobody is curious to learn something new or try new experiences. Although they are still around, they have effectively checked out, waiting for their inevitable demise.
There is a trend among men to blame women for this state of affairs. I do not share that worldview, even though I acknowledge the excesses of toxic expressions of feminism. To me, what we are experiencing is a crisis of values; a crisis of perspective. We have forgotten how to make sacrifices. We have been conditioned by a brief period of relative affluence and its attendant technological arrangements to operate like children, as we demand immediate gratification in increasingly more areas of life. This is the era of the person who ages without growing mentally: the manchild or womanchild, else the adultchild.
Fundamentally, our culture has lost respect, indeed awareness, for magnitudes beyond one’s ego. The individual’s outlook is self-centred and self-aggrandising: to get what one desires instantly and in quantities that cannot possibly be exhausted, to prioritise one’s wants above everything else, and to treat personal feelings as the ironclad truth that the world must not assail.
From art to food, everything we experience as a stimulus is optimised to keep us hooked. There is no more watching a movie: you binge watch an entire series. You do not read the news, you doomscroll in search for the next ragebait or lewd material. What we eat is turbocharged in being salty, creamy, greasy, sugary, spicy, often most of those at once. Fine art is abandoning its finesse and subtlety in pursuit of intense colours and sharp sounds. Perhaps the want for gore is a matter of necessity to catch the attention of those whose baseline of stimulation is intensity as such.
This is a crisis of character. It cannot be addressed with a mere edict from the government. People need to change their ways to rediscover what always worked reasonably well. At the heart of such a pivot to sustainability is sacrifice. To give up something you want dearly. Sacrifice need not be bloody or, indeed, all that costly. It can consist of virtually inconsequential rituals and practices that introduce delayed gratification in everyday life. The goal is to depose the child within from the throne it should never be occupying. In other words, to train oneself to seek ever fewer of those easy-to-get-easy-to-lose rushes of excitement.
Thinking back to my grandparents, they knew how to incorporate sacrifice in their quotidian affairs. It empowered them to be patient throughout and to gracefully adapt to all the hardships. One ritual my grandmother, the matriarch of the family, would observe involved the slicing of the New Year’s cake. While everyone, including little boy me, was sitting at the table without making any noise, she would slowly create pieces out of the delicacy. Child me wanted the first piece and was being impatient. Grandma told me to remain silent and show respect. “The first piece belongs to God”, she said. “The second piece is for Jesus and the third for the Holy Spirit”. Then came all the relatives who were not with us and only then would we be assigned to a small piece of the cake.
Those two minutes of waiting were enough to teach me a valuable lesson for life. I could overcome my immediate urge to devour the dish. I had control over my self. I would do it for the common good. To recognise that there are others at the table who are also waiting patiently to be served. To further realise that I must extend my respect to potential participants, the relatives who were not present, and then the divine at-large. This was not a religious ceremony. My grandparents were secular people who held an amalgamation of beliefs drawing from the Greek religion, from Christianity, astrology, and all sorts of magic. Yet their routines were underpinned by wisdom, the kind of spirituality that one develops by dealing with the world, not by trying to escape from it.
Same principle for when I would ask my grandfather for a new toy. We would walk past a store and something flashy would capture my childish attention. Grandpa would calmly respond “sure, my child, I will buy it for you”, then he would pause for a second, “I will buy it on your birthday”. I knew that my birthday was months away and would protest. He taught me to wait and to measure my options. “A promise is a promise”, he pointed out. Ultimately, I learnt to know what I want, instead of falling for tricks and gimmicks. And I also developed the same attitude of treating my word as sacrosanct, which is why I do not talk big. When I state something, it is because I do it.
Those sacrifices were always small in scale. They did not constitute any kind of devastating loss. That cake was all ours in the end. We just had to go through that initial ritual. I now am at a point where I appreciate that dedicating the first pieces to the gods is of paramount importance. Not because the divine needs anything from us. No. Not even because I necessarily believe in it the way major religions preach. Again, no. God exists only when we act as if God exists. This is because the divine inspires us to pursue our highest as we think of the bigger picture. As such, our deeds will be of a better sort, to the extent possible. And, conversely, God does not exist when we behave as if God does not exist. For it is then that our affairs are defined by that which is most pernicious.
This is not a matter of religiosity. There are plenty of believers I have met who operate without respect for others or, indeed, themselves. Theirs is a godless modus operandi, in the aforementioned sense. It is religion in its tokenistic manifestation. Nothing but a series of rites without substance; idolatry in essence. Respect is towards all. It is inward and outward. And there are no exceptions to it: it happens at home, in the workplace, the temple, and the great outdoors. In short, it consists in recognising that there is a whole world out there that does not revolved around one’s volition.
Perhaps the most pernicious, albeit well-meaning, claim in the mainstream is how “God loves you the way you are”. While there is a kernel of hope there, it teaches us to be complacent, to indulge in our voracious wants, and then to maintain a transactional relationship with the cosmos. All because of how special and entitled we think we are.
In my world, the gods love nobody because they tend to the wellness of all. Theirs is a cosmic reach. There can be no exception therein, no special treatments, no shortcuts for the royalty, the parvenu middle class, and the modest workers. All are exposed to the vicissitudes that bring joy and grief. And all have to deal with the consequences of actions, whether it is their own or those of people in their milieu. There is no escape from the consequences, no matter how valuable you think you are, sweetheart.
As such, we have to persevere through the troubles and take what comes our way with grace. Only when we rediscover the spirit of sacrifice and its concomitant grit, will we start seeing vibrant communities again. Else we are moving towards our collective death. This is how nature gets rid of unsustainable arrangements, after all.
In the era of the adultchild, I am reminded of the Greek concept of «φυγοπονία» (feegoponia or feegopony), which literally means “flight from pain/hardship”. Feegopony is the defining quality of the adultchild and the midpoint of the modern society. It is up to each of us to put forward the best version of ourselves, to pursue excellence, and to do it with integrity. Maybe then we will remember how to appreciate the little things.
But I have no hope of this happening anytime soon. The mountains are being deserted because the adultchildren cannot tolerate the living conditions here. They have it all, yet complain about how much they are suffering. This is too cold, that is too dark, the other is too difficult, and so on. We get what we deserve. It saddens me to know that such an avoidable calamity seems inevitable.