You don’t exist.

What you call “I” is a pirated assembly of other people’s ideas about success, installed on your factory hardware back in childhood. Clumsy, with broken drivers, but with a full suite of office programs: “Be convenient,” “Don’t stand out,” “What will people say?”

Your parents, out of immense, panicked love, were the first system administrators. They wiped your native, wild, illogical operating system and installed this one. Stable. Proven. Like everyone else’s. And all your inner impulses, your quirks, your inappropriate joy at the sight of a worm, the new system marked as viruses and quarantined.

And so you live. Your internal cooler whirs, trying to cool a processor that is simultaneously performing two tasks: being who you were programmed to be, and not dying of longing for your true self. You constantly check for updates in the eyes of others. A “like” is a small green checkmark: “The system is stable.” A judgmental look is a system error. Criticism is a blue screen of death, after which you frantically reboot, rolling back to the last “successful” version of yourself.

You go to a job you don’t need to buy things you don’t like to impress people you don’t know. This is not life. This is a background process that eats up your RAM. You crave closeness, but your built-in firewall blocks any incoming connections that could reach your system files. Too dangerous. What if they see your source code? All that jumble of fears, absurd wants, and your secret love of silly comedies.

The funniest paradox is that everyone around is the same pirated copy. We live in a world of cracked software. Everyone is afraid their “crack” will fail and the world will see their glitchy interface. We polish our avatars trying to connect, not realizing that real contact happens at the level of bugs - those very “viruses” we hide so carefully.

Your “laziness” isn’t a failure; it’s an emergency power-saving mode because the pirated OS drains too many resources. Your “incompetence” isn’t a virus; it’s a seed breaking through to life.

You seek harmony, read books, meditate. You’re tuning someone else’s system - new wallpaper, a cleaned registry. That’s self-delusion. It’s like doing a major renovation in a prison cell.

What to do?

Stop searching for the “Become Happy” button. It doesn’t exist in your interface. The only way out is to consciously trigger a total system failure. Let the blue screen of death happen.

It’s the moment you don’t laugh at the boss’s unfunny joke. The moment you say “I don’t know” instead of bluffing. The moment you allow yourself to lie down all day and stare at the ceiling without scolding yourself for being “unproductive.” The moment you answer “How are you?” not with “Fine,” but honestly.

It’s terrifying. The system screams about security threats. Warning windows pop up everywhere. And only after that crash, in the ensuing silence when all foreign background processes finally stop, do you get a chance to hear the quiet hum of your own hardware - your real self.

Then you start from zero. Not perfect. Not successful by someone else’s definition. A beta version of yourself. Buggy, unstable, constantly updating. But, damn it, authentic. Alive.