We live in an era where everything tends to be framed in personal terms: your brand, your feed, your truth. This is from the ideology of #stupidindividualism witch tells us that the highest form of freedom is to curate a bubble and call it a life. But this is the common sense illusion, the mess we need to compost. When I say “it’s not about you”, I don’t mean you don’t matter. I mean: you really matter in relation to others. You, in society, in collectives, in struggles that go beyond the mirror.
Thinking only in the first person – the endless monologue of me, my, mine – is not freedom. It’s a cage. And in the non-personal, political sense, it becomes a form of blocking. Sometimes wilfully, when people refuse to act collectively because they want control. Sometimes will-lessly, when people have been so trained in individualism that they literally cannot imagine acting as part of a whole. Both forms stop us from building the commons we desperately need.
Blocking is social rot, it is not neutral, it kills movements, turns every initiative into a “project of one.” It’s why promising spaces collapse into burnout, sectarianism and co-option. #Stupidindividualism whispers: “If I don’t get my way, I’ll take my toys and go home.” But society can’t be built like that. Collective projects thrive when people accept that compromise is not defeat, that mediation is not weakness, that our worth is measured by what we build together, not what we hoard alone.
The path we need to take is, yes, it is about you. But not in isolation. It’s about you as part of us as a voice in a circle, a node in a federation, a shovel in the compost heap. The #openweb, the #OMN, the reboot of grassroots media, these are not projects that can survive on these monologues. They only live if we break the spell of (stupid)individualism and start thinking, feeling, and acting on collective paths again. Because the truth is simple: alone, we block; together, we build.
