My muse
Added 2025-09-07 15:00:03 +0000 UTCIf you have friends from post-Soviet countries, you’ve probably noticed: they’re not exactly the cheeriest people. A little gloomy, a little depressed.
Well — that’s me. And all of my friends from that side of the world too. And I’ve noticed one common thread: we don’t really know how to feel joy. We don’t know how to truly enjoy things. We’re constantly looking for a flaw, for what’s wrong. As if nothing can simply be good or perfect — we’ll always find some tiny “imperfection” and start picking at it.
We don’t celebrate our achievements, we can’t praise ourselves, we don’t even notice in the moment when something turns out well. Because there’s always that inner sense of being “not enough.”
Not thin enough. Not professional enough. Not young enough. Not successful enough.
We’ve gotten so used to living in our sorrows that we don’t see where we are now, or how beautiful the world around us actually is. We keep running forward, and even when life is changing for the better, we’re still mourning, still pitying ourselves, still stuck in the victim role.
Why is that? Why us, Slavs?
Why are our women some of the most beautiful, yet carry the lowest self-esteem (men, take note!)?
Why do photographers who create masterpieces call themselves “not professional”?
Why do we zoom in on the negative and overlook the positive? Why is it so easy to sink into the swamp of self-blame and so hard to crawl back out?
We chase the ideal so much that we forget to enjoy the process, the little steps, the small wins. We don’t even notice them — because there’s always something “more important” ahead.
I’d like to think it’s just a certain “type of person”… but so far, I haven’t seen this pattern as much among Europeans.
Please tell me — we’re not the only ones who feel “not enough,” right?
Comments
Beautiful 🌹
natureman
2025-09-07 20:17:32 +0000 UTCAnybody from any background may feel this sorrow or victimhood, and so many do. There are endless reasons to internalize the difficulties of life, however there is a pretty easy to understand reason it’s so prevalent with Slavic people in comparison to Western Europeans or say Americans in general. If we go back to the Middle Ages in Europe, the vast majority of people lived in a feudal society where kings/czars owned all the land, gave rights and obligations to an upper class of lords, and those lords controlled the masses of low class peasants or serfs who acted mostly as slaves tied to the land and were forced to work and contribute to the lord who in turn passed much up to the royalty. Their living conditions were horrible. Then the most devastating era in European history took place with The Plague. Though this was a horrible couple centuries, it actually is what transformed the west into what we think of today as “free”. This is because as the Black Death killed off 1/3 to 1/2 of the peasants in both western and Eastern Europe, it triggered very different responses in each area. In Western Europe, the lords perceived this new lack of a strong peasant labor force as a threat and proceeded to begin to offer better and better deals in order to attract more people to their lands. Some offered no unpaid work, for instance. This also sparked rebellions by the peasants in greater and greater ways. In this way, the equal rights/workers rights movement began slowly to take shape and it grew and grew all the way up until the French Revolution and those that followed saw monarchies fall to constitutional governments which established better living for the lower class. But in Eastern Europe, the settlements were more spread apart and typically settled by smaller numbers of peasants, and so peasant rebellions were crushed and these rights were never won by the Slavic lower class. Then as standards of living continued to grow in the west, and the creation of patents allowed for innovation across all aspects of life, the Slavic rulers and lords felt threatened by such advancements. They perceived that they would disrupt their carefully maintained system of control over the masses who still worked the land and had no rights. This is all to say that Slavs developed, both technologically and in terms of rights, freedoms, and standards of living, much less than their western counterparts and by the time Stalin realized just how far behind “his country” and people were, he took drastic industrialization measures to catch up - at the expense of feeding and caring for his population. Horrible atrocities were committed as the Soviet Union scrambled to catch up to the likes of the west towards the onset of WWII and though the USSR had a brief moment in the limelight during the 1930’s, when it defied the otherwise global recession (due to forced repurposing of the population from agriculture to factory settings), its dictatorial communist power structures continued to repress the people all the way up until its collapse. Well, you know the story since then. It hasn’t been pretty, it’s forged some strong people, namely the Ukrainians, who continue to fight their oppressors for the permanent rights and freedoms won hundreds of years ago by their western neighbors. It hasn’t been a very joyful history. There is a lot of heavy lifting that still must be done to elevate the Slavic people into the modern age, and this is what you fight for. It’s what you know is worth fighting for. And so you question it all deeply. And you allow yourself to grow. Every moment of joy is a victory.
Sendrock
2025-09-07 15:35:51 +0000 UTC
