Zvone – Inner Dialogue

Somewhere Along The Way I Became A Project When Life Still Felt Natural There was a time when life felt much simpler. Not easier.   Just simpler. Back then people still worked hard, worried, fought with life and carried responsibilities on their backs, but somehow there was still room left for ordinary existence. People sat outside in silence without immediately needing to optimize the experience. Nobody measured how many calories they burned while carrying wood or whether staring at clouds increased productivity. Today even relaxation feels like unpaid work. Sometimes I sit with coffee and realize that my mind no longer knows how to simply sit. After three minutes some invisible manager inside my head clears his throat and asks:  “Good. And what exactly are we accomplishing here?” Nothing. That is the whole point. But modern life has trained many of us to feel almost physically uncomfortable when we are not  progressing,  improving,  solving,  bu...

Exhausted but Refuse to Rest One of the strangest things about exhaustion is that I often do not respond to it logically. You would expect a tired human being to simply lie down, sleep, recover, and feel better. Sometimes that happens. Physical exhaustion after healthy effort can lead to deep, satisfying rest. The body collapses into bed and the mind quietly shuts down like an old machine finally allowed to cool. But there is another kind of exhaustion where rest somehow stops feeling restful. You sit on the couch but cannot relax. You scroll your phone instead of sleeping. You are tired all day and somehow even more tired at night. The body wants rest, yet the nervous system behaves as if stopping were dangerous. I used to wonder about that a lot, especially during periods when I felt emotionally burned out. There were evenings when I was so exhausted that even making tea felt like unnecessary mountaineering, yet instead of going to sleep, I would continue staring in...

The Wrong Measure of Suffering Many years ago, I knew a woman who had a simple explanation for almost every human problem. Whenever somebody was hurt, disappointed, anxious, depressed, heartbroken, exhausted, or simply struggling with life, she would shrug her shoulders and say something along the lines of: "Life is hard. Nature is cruel. If you can't handle it, that's your problem." Sometimes she expressed it even more bluntly. I remember sitting there listening to her and wondering whether she actually believed what she was saying or whether it was simply a habit she had developed over the years. At the time I didn't argue with her. There was little point. People rarely abandon opinions that have accompanied them for decades. Still, her words stayed with me long after the conversation ended. Not because I agreed with them. Because I wasn't entirely sure why they bothered me so much. Years later I think I understand. The problem wasn't that she believed l...

Do What You Feel Like Doing. Without Guilt. When Energy Was Not A Problem There was a time when I had endless energy. At least that is how it seems when I look back today. Maybe I did not actually have endless energy. Maybe I was simply too young and too stubborn to notice when the tank was getting empty. Either way, life moved forward at full speed. There was always something that needed to be done. Build a house. Support a family. Buy a car. Learn new skills. Advance at work. Repair things. Help people. Solve problems. The list never ended, but somehow I still found time for things that had no practical purpose at all. I could jump on a bicycle and disappear into nature for an afternoon. I could spend time by the sea, swim for no reason other than enjoying the water, stop to look at flowers, watch birds, admire some strange insect crawling through the grass or simply sit somewhere and enjoy being alive. Back then I never thought about whether these activities were useful. I simpl...

When Tiredness Starts Feeling Like Loneliness Today was a strangely difficult day. Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody died, nobody argued, and the world did not collapse. And yet from the very morning something felt wrong. I drank coffee with relatives, wandered around the house, sat in front of the computer, checked messages, opened random websites, closed them again, looked at unfinished work, avoided it successfully, and then repeated the entire process for several hours like a highly inefficient office employee trapped in a psychological escape room. I simply could not start. Not because there was nothing to do. There was plenty to do. But every task somehow felt heavy before I even touched it. So I circled around work like a cat around hot soup until almost noon. And then something else slowly appeared. Not boredom exactly. Not even depression at first. More like a strange emptiness. A feeling that something was missing. The Feeling ...

Learning Not to Treat Yourself Like a Work Animal Why Some People Sacrifice Themselves Long After It Stops Making Sense A few years ago I slowly began noticing something uncomfortable about myself. Actually, that is not entirely true. The behavior had existed for most of my life. What changed was that I finally recognized it clearly enough to name it. I was treating myself badly. Not dramatically. Not in some visible self-destructive way that immediately alarms people. From the outside it probably looked like responsibility, hard work, reliability, endurance, and willingness to help. The sort of behavior society usually praises. But underneath, something was wrong. I noticed that work, effort, productivity, solving problems, helping others, and achieving results often felt more important to me than my own body. Sometimes probably more important than my own mental health too. And that realization disturbed me. Because once I started observing honestly, I saw how often I was...