A reflection on culture, loss, and the broken promise of meritocracy.
I am an IT professional with twenty years of experience, a man raised in a home where books were so numerous they acted as insulation between the rooms. My mother was a professor of mathematics, my father an electrical engineer.
Those books were the symbol of our promise: the idea that culture would elevate us, emancipate us, and guarantee us the respect of the world. I built my identity upon this pillar, convinced that logic and study were my passport to freedom.
Instead, for twenty years, I have witnessed the failure of that pact. I have watched "daddy’s boys" build enterprises without the slightest rational capability, occupying spaces by mere birthright while I, despite my expertise, had to struggle every single day just to make ends meet.
I watched my family nucleus shatter and my mother fade away, betrayed by frontotemporal dementia and abandoned by a State that preferred to devour her pension to pay for a nursing home rather than honoring her life. In these past months—she passed away recently—I had to throw away her books, weeping over every volume that ended up in a trash bag, feeling as though I were disposing of the remains of an illusion.
But today, I walked into a library.
And unexpectedly, among those shelves, I felt at home again. I became a child once more, enveloped by that scent of paper that once protected me. Working from there, surrounded by that ancient silence, the noise of the outside world finally went quiet. For the first time in a long while, I rediscovered the serenity of creating and designing for the pure sake of doing it. Without asking why, without the weight of injustice, without the shadow of the privileged trampling over me.
In my gut, my parents' rage still lingers, but today, among these books, I took my code back into my own hands. I stopped looking for logic in the system's betrayal and started building again, simply because it is who I am. Beyond the rubble, beyond the abandonment, my mind is still my home.
I wish I could cry all the tears of seeing us like this—where we never expected to be despite everything—yet I know that the only solution is surrender, acceptance, a quiet looking-away to avoid self-inflicted pain.
And I wonder: is a truly evolved family one that spurs its children to make money and achieve economic success, or one that wants them to be scholars and heralds of human progress, placing the "having" in the shadow of the "being"?
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