2023-08-04 08:38:52
The writer and scientific communicator Daniel Arbos (Barcelona, 1976) has presented his third novel, «the bad decisions» (Empúries). The play tells the story of an anti-hero who, upon reviewing his past and the bad decisions he made, surrenders to mediocrity in the face of the prevailing culture of success. And the author assures us that we live in a society that imposes success on us as a goal, giving great value to overcoming.
Are you fatalistic?
No, quite the opposite. I don’t think we are predetermined, quite the opposite. Between the decisions we make and a lot of factors we don’t control from the environment and chance, things happen to us.
How do we reverse fatalism?
Avoiding being fatalistic at the outset.
What bad decisions have you made?
One of the ideas of the novel is that many times the decisions we make are not good or bad in themselves, but it depends a lot on how we and our environment deal with the consequences. In this sense, I don’t consider myself to have made any big bad decisions.
We cannot go back, beyond our thinking. Human condition or divine punishment?
The important thing is not so much the decisions you have made but how you assume the consequences. In the event that you have made a mistake, how do you accept the mistake. In hindsight it’s very easy to see that you were wrong, but there’s no point in getting angry.
We rarely think about what led us here.
It’s that where we are now, that is, the job or partner we have, the flat we live in, etc. They depend on so many factors, many of which are beyond our control, that it may not be worth doing a comprehensive analysis of how we got to where we are.
Have we already made the decisions for the future? Is there a destiny?
No, I think it’s just the opposite. There is no such thing as destiny. I do believe that not everything that happens to us depends on us. Of course, the idea of ”if you want, you can” is very toxic, because it makes you understand that if you don’t achieve something it’s your fault, when there are many factors that influence it: luck, socio-economic situation, talent… .
His anti-hero embraces mediocrity in the face of success culture.
Society imposes on us that we must want to succeed, we must want to transcend. The media does not stop bringing out stories of overcoming. People who simply want to keep doing, or who have failed in some project, are just as respectable as the rest.
Can the culture of success be worse than a slave slave?
Totally. You used to have to be productive at work. Now you have to be 24 hours a day. We self-exploit, because we have to do a lot of things: go to concerts, watch a lot of series, travel… Otherwise, they make you feel bad because they make you think that you are wasting your life
His character escapes from this life programmed to succeed. Is running away cowardly or brave?
He is brave. It’s brave to run away from social pressure and be who you want to be and not what they want to impose on you. If you want to leave the comfort zone, go ahead, but don’t bother me. As the novel says, Everest is full of corpses of motivated people who wanted to get out of their comfort zone.
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