Living Through the Eyes of Others

I’ve had a filthy habit stuck on me since childhood: observing people and the era, thinking about it, and making evaluations. I said “filthy” because thinking is often an act that brings distress. I would be insulting this trait bestowed upon me if I didn’t mention that I sometimes derive pleasure from it, and that, to me, the most precious pleasures are cognitive ones. But whether it's due to the times I live in, my country, society, just my own life, or entirely my character—who knows—I generally feel constricted, bored, and succumb to despair. I see most people living robotically, in a Matrix-like fashion, spending a lifetime without thought, simply acting on what they’ve been taught and what they’re supposed to do. Yet, when I look closely, these robots are happy. Or are they just programmed to be happy in a fake way?

I observe that people have, for a very long time, been trying to live only through the eyes of others. No one cares about their own pleasure. To go even further, no one even has their own tastes anymore. Tastes, too, are being standardized and imposed. People engage in activities that could be considered "pleasurable" not because they genuinely enjoy them subjectively, but to look cool. In short, people live to post stories. Our characteristic traits are being stolen from us. No one has a sense of style, no one has hobbies, no one even has their own perception of beauty. Everyone is as if they’ve rolled off the same factory conveyor belt.

So why do we care so much about other people's judgments of us, striving to be a "something" in their eyes? Why is being a "something" in our own eyes less important? I believe this phenomenon has drastically increased with the deep intertwining of social media and life, becoming people's life motivation. Creating a perception in someone else’s eyes, especially in societies with low cultural levels, has assumed a vital position. The place is teeming with luxury cars and, correspondingly, luxury car posts. The fact that acquiring these cars, or any other material object, can drive people into unreasonable hardship and sometimes even ruin is willfully ignored. And for what? Just so someone might say, "So, this is the kind of person they are." Why is that so important? Let's assume it is important. Then why is this usually about material things? Why, when people want to be seen as a "something," do they foreground "things"? Isn't a life lived through the eyes of another a life wasted?

When summer arrives, places valuable for their story potential, like Bodrum and Çeşme, become incredibly crowded. For many who go there, their vehicle is the loan debt they will pay off all year with their low salaries. When they get there, they wait in lines at many places, can't even set foot in some spots, and are often even subjected to disrespect. But what does any of that matter! The posts were made, the mission is accomplished. They now believe they have changed people's opinions about them and secured a place in their eyes, and they can be happy with that. After all, they worked for a year and paid off a loan for this; is it too much? Furthermore, maybe many of the people going there don't even like beach holidays, maybe they don't like the Aegean. Maybe they prefer something else… What does it matter? They were never given the opportunity to discover and realize themselves.

In short, anyone without their own ideas, tastes, and the courage to notice and realize them is, in contrast to Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch (Overman), an Untermensch—a subhuman. They are mental and hedonistic slaves. Wretches who have surrendered their lives to the thoughts of the masses. These types of people—whose percentage of the population is growing steadily—will always be deprived of true pleasures; their fake dopamine hits won't even last as long as a story (24 hours). In this era of fast-food dopamine, nothing else could be expected anyway.

I hate sounding like a conspiracy theorist, so I leave it to your valuable thoughts to decide: are there techno-feudal lords behind this, states or secret organizations, or is there nothing at all, and we are merely living out the requirement of the age?