"He spent forty years in a role he did not choose but accepted because it paid well and his family needed stability. He married young, raised three children, helped his wife through a long illness, buried her six years ago, and watched his children move to different cities and different lives."
"He finds himself sitting in silence and wondering: what do I actually like? Not what his family needed him to like. Not what was practical or affordable or sensible. Just him, at the core of it."
"The people who are asking this question now, quietly and mostly to themselves, belong to a generation that was shaped by an entirely different relationship to selfhood."
"You buried your preferences because preference felt like a luxury. You were useful, and being useful was the point."
A man in his late seventies reflects on his life, having spent decades fulfilling family obligations and societal expectations. He married young, raised three children, and cared for his wife through illness until her passing. Despite feeling content with his life, he now grapples with understanding his own preferences and desires, having suppressed them for so long. This struggle is emblematic of a generation that prioritized collective needs over individual wants, leading to a profound sense of self-exploration in later years.
Read at Silicon Canals
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