A friend comes to visit me, anticipating that he needs to talk. As I imagined, he wants to confide a not positive state of mind: let’s call it anxious-depressive, using an imprecise but commonly used definition. A mature person, having entered what we used to call old age or seniority, without economic problems, without work nor the need to work, without children or a cohabiting partner. One could say he is a lonely person, but that adjective would not capture the discreet network of social relationships he maintains.
This is at least the third case of a person in this age group who in a few months shares with me, if not the desire, the willingness to seriously and calmly consider their own death. Which is, all things considered, understandable if one surpasses a certain age threshold without relational ties deemed essential, either for oneself or for the other people with whom one maintains them, and without particular economic needs. It is problems that push us to go on, difficulties are the engine of our daily actions, need and dissatisfaction transform into hopes and motivations, producing the energy necessary to continue the routine.
If I am not useful to someone or something and it seems that nothing is useful to me, it is understandable to enter a mood stalemate that can decline into depression. And since such conditions identify a very large portion of society, particularly Italian and generally Western, it is equally understandable that the spread of some depressive symptoms is recorded. We are roughly cutting through touches of psycho-sociology with a high degree of trivialization, on which however the case of Jannik Sinner could shed a particular light.
First of all, because of the celebrity of the person, his young age, because yesterday’s collapse follows some previous episodes and a golden period but conditioned by the parallel downturn of his main rival. As long as Carlos Alcaraz threatens the top spot, fighting to maintain it or acquire it makes obvious sense; without the rival, finding one becomes more complicated. A hypothesis that could also apply to Belen Rodriguez, a television star with good visibility but very far from the peak achieved by showing the inguinal butterfly on the Sanremo stage.
We are talking about two very different characters from each other and, even more, from us. An exceptional athlete for physical, technical and mental abilities, who with other colleagues has imprinted a sports revolution on Italy; a “little actress,” as we would disdainfully say in the past, reduced to wandering between glamorous evenings, variety shows, and talk shows. One at the top and the other in the second tier, but always in the bright empyrean of success. No one knows us, whether we are up or down the media don’t care; we can live, die winning a small mention, or, generally, just get by.
But we too, like Belen and Jannik, are more or less Italian, European, Western; we are more or less well-off, belonging to the fortunate tenth of the world even if not to the most fortunate millionth. We vegetate in a well-being that cannot satisfy our desires, an inevitably transitory condition, and above all cannot generate them. An immigrant fleeing wars and poverty, an African or Asian aspiring Italian or European, a radicalized Muslim who hates us have the paradoxical advantage of a goal ahead: so clear as not to be obscured by psychological nonsense. And it is more or less for these reasons that some dissatisfied Westerners improvise whatever to escape boredom, perhaps hating and fighting a non-Western.
