Zalando

Deep inside you it's been churning for weeks
a long-dormant throbbing.
Yes, now you feel it too,
there in your belly;
something has crept in there in secret.
And now? You're in despair:
"Fuck man, how can I drive it away?"
And then you don't think about it,
but it doesn't take long,
yes it comes back and will ask:

"What are you actually doing? Sitting on the tram with headphones on your ears and gazing thoughtfully out of the window. No wait, you're pretending to gaze thoughtfully out of the window, because you want people to think when they see you: 'Oh, that's quite a thoughtfully-out-the-window-gazing young philosopher! He's definitely listening to a Richard-David-Precht podcast right now' – but you're not listening to a Precht podcast at all, you're listening to mixed
stuff and suppressing the fact that you're not a philosopher just because you couldn't sleep one night because you were thinking about… things."
Yet you once told yourself you'd become a philosopher!
And a presenter and scientist and entertainer and you didn't care what – as long as not some Anglicism job at Zalando (#Communication-Marketing-Supervisor) and as long as a Wikipedia entry! You wanted a Wikipedia entry! Preferably one in English, because then you've really made it, and you wanted to make it,
you wanted to be seen, you wanted so badly to be seen… but without anyone noticing. You didn't want anyone to see that every day of your life was a single struggle to increase the number of people who will cry at your funeral, because what does the world care about you if you don't get an obituary on the Tagesschau and you will get an obituary on the Tagesschau, they told you that, because they said everything is possible if you just go your own way, and you believed them, but now you see that your name doesn't seem to appear on any of those paths, no, your name isn't on any of those paths and the only thing that would make you happy would be finally knowing what would make you happy. But hey…
"Look what you can do.
See the world.
Go hiking in the Urals,
just meditate for a bit,
and then you'll finally know what you want man.
Don't rush into it.
Better not ask 'When?'.
If you want to be one with yourself,
let freedom in…"
but there's so much freedom, you're suffocating in it!

And you don't even want freedom – you want security!
No! You don't want security, you want self-realisation!
You want self-realisation, but not self-obsession!
You want change, but not responsibility…

…and you know that now is the time you'll later say about: "Oh if only I had, why didn't I, why on earth didn't I". And you know you won't forgive yourself if you've become someone you swore you'd never be and you know you're afraid you're on the path to becoming exactly that, but
to tell yourself you're an exception anyway, and you know that's exactly what makes you even more of a rule. So you sit on the tram and let yourself be driven down the street.
But now as those years draw near, which were always so beautifully vague,
You've missed your chance, because in the end everything turned out differently.
And you're on the verge of burying your dreams, yes you almost think, "Communication-Marketing-Supervisor", that actually sounds quite Tinder-worthy, and then you see in the reflection of the tram window a sticker that says: "People who live their dreams… are a danger to public safety" And you
rip your headphones from your ears: emergency brake, button press, door open, out of the tram, into the Thalia and you nick all the crappy self-help books that claim you can only be happy with more money, more friends, more travel and more six-pack and you take these books, run with them to uni and shove them up the arses of all those freedom-misguided self-realisation fuckers!
And you still don't know what you actually want, but for the first time you ask yourself why your life should consist of only one particular purpose or whether you really want to self-realise and why you actually have to prove yourself by necessity? I mean, what are you, a fucking mathematical formula!?

So fuck passion,
Because where it only brings you suffering,
you might notice,
it could be that it's enough,
if you do something without it anyway.
Once you wanted to become someone,
bequeath your works to the world.
But now you think: "Oh –
why not after all,
just apply to Zalando."

Yannik Ambrusits