'No future', the last party before chaos

"Get ready and enjoy the summer, because two or three very fucked up years are coming." In recent weeks, most of the very patient readers of this Punyalada will have said or heard this phrase –with slight variations– during work meetings, meals with friends, and family gatherings that prelude summer (I don't write "the dog days" because, on today's planet Earth, we live only between cold and heat, without warm seasons, in an existence of extremes). Indeed, for months now we have all embodied the pessimistic brother-in-law at Christmas dinner and the perspective of a world without a future is already an idea fully institutionalized in the imaginary. Whatever the macro-figures say, the inventors of startups and the directors of Mobile, the majority of citizens in the country glimpse the future with fear and have their brains fried, the empty wallet and the shrunken heart at the possibility of "no future".

If we take a supersonic trip around the world, we will see that politics does not help much to keep spirits high. I am writing this Saturday turra a day after the world joyfully bid farewell to a very singular prime minister who, four days ago, had won an election by a landslide. This week we also learned that Italian workers stormed the legislative chamber of our Mediterranean neighbors with a strong desire to grab deputies by the neck. Things are no laughing matter; this Friday, the assassination of Shinzo Abe brought gun violence back to the 21st century. There is no need to even talk about the war in Ukraine. On the other side of the ocean, Yankee judges have decided to get into politics and not allow the citizens of the freest country in the world to dispose of their corporality as they please. In Catalonia, plainly and simply, we are governed by the most mediocre political class in universal history. And I'll stop there.

Surely, the economy is not as bad as the apocalypse smoke sellers paint it to be. But if we think about the possibility of visualizing a future, especially in the case of the country's young generations, we will confirm something undeniable: most millennials and zentennials have been formed in permanent crisis, have only lived in recession, and see how their training does not allow them to access the labor market with minimal guarantees. It is enough to review the unemployment data in Spain to see how, even in moments of apparent boom, youth joblessness has remained at figures above 20%. That, in the face of recession chants, the state has decided,as usual, starting to spend more and fattening the administration is a fatal sign; no matter how little you talk to younger people, you will see howour boys once again have the highest existential aspiration of becoming civil servants

The majority of millennials and zoomers have been formed in permanent crisis, have only lived in recession, and see how their education does not allow them to access the labor market with minimal guarantees.

In this sense, and however much it hurts us, it is necessary to think again in political terms; if we review most of the leaders who are seen in the Barcelona or Catalan sphere, most of our representatives, far from provoking admiration, give off a disguised air of an office worker. Catalonia stands out in this aspect; today, to give just one example, most of the ministers of the Generalitat Government could not work in any small or medium-sized company in the country and would be unable to hold a job interview in English, even if it were to work as a waiter in a hotel. Politics is not everything and states are no longer the mecca of a country's imaginary, certainly; but it is undeniable that the political class establishes an indicative intellectual and economic average of what a community wants to offer. In this sense, ours makes you cry.

In a framework where disillusionment with politics will skyrocket and in which violence will be part of the contemporary world with a perhaps more radical presence than during the Cold War, it is very logical that most inhabitants of the West, including the brother-in-law of the moment, refuse to think about the future. I would say that the matter is even more complex, because most of the people I talk to are desperately trying to exhaust the present before the bomb explodes. That is why, if you notice, citizens we have uncritically assumed the advent of next summer as the last party before chaos. It's not that the future is non-existent, it's that we must exhaust it in an agonizing present. Let us enjoy the summer, then, for autumn will never exist again.