Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker

Lately I've, fortunately, been watching a lot of films, again. Different stories, different settings, yet many circle the same two things: love and struggle. Perhaps because both are deeply human.

This weekend in particular, I binge-watched Beef Season 2. A country club in Montecito: manicured lawns, discreet wealth, the kind of place built to look like nothing is wrong. Underneath, everyone scamming their way through marriages and jobs they have already half-given-up on. At one point a character shrugs: "Babe, everyone is scamming." It is meant as justification. It lands as diagnosis.

I have been thinking about that line in the context of what we are seeing around us. In Indonesia and elsewhere, the present moment increasingly feels like authoritarianism, injustice, and violence driven by self-interest. People once seen as builders and reformers are now caught in messy, very public unravelings, sadly. The country club is everywhere. The lawns are very green.

In moments like this, I notice I reach for familiar ideas. Jensen Huang's "I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering." Ray Dalio's "Pain + Reflection = Progress." Nietzsche's older and harder line. There is something I want to believe in all of them.

But these are quotes from people whose stories worked out. Many of those now causing the chaos suffered too, reflected too, and concluded the only sensible response is to scam first. Adversity plus reflection does not reliably produce progress. It produces a sharpened theory of the world, and that theory can point anywhere.

Love gives meaning. Struggle gives shape. The shape it gives is not always the one we hoped for. This time, may the shape be one worth carrying.

~ "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus", by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, maybe.