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bogdan » the age of bitter moons

12:07 am on Oct 29, 2025 | read the article | tags: sexaid

i first read Pascal Bruckner’s «Lunes de Fiel» («Bitter Moon») more than sixteen years ago. i no longer remember the names of the main characters, but i remember the story: its cruelty, its claustrophobia, the slow decay of desire into domination. what i couldn’t have known back then was that i’d start recognizing fragments of that novel in the lives around me, almost as if Bruckner had written not about a couple, but about us, about love as it mutates inside a self-destructive civilization.

it feels exaggerated to say, yet i see those patterns everywhere.
relationships today break like cheap objects; no one fixes them, they just replace them. when people get hurt, they retaliate as if filing a warranty claim for emotional damage. intimacy has turned into a performance, a race against fomo: have the spouse, have the children, have the divorce. on social media, love is another product: a carousel of curated happiness, filtered affection, and envy-based engagement. algorithms feed on our pettiness, and we feed on what they give us.

even the way people meet has changed. dating apps pair the wounded with the weary – hurt people hurting each other, repeating the same cycles of attraction and disappointment. it’s as if Bruckner’s vision from 1981 had become prophecy: the industrialization of desire, the commodification of passion. love has become consumption, and consumption, our form of worship.

when i revisited the ending of «Bitter Moon», i noticed something i’d missed years ago. the corrupted couple tells their story to another pair, strangers on a ship, perhaps still innocent. the gesture isn’t pedagogical; it’s contamination. like the serpent in eden, they reveal the knowledge of decay. it’s up to the listeners whether to resist or to reenact it. that’s where Bruckner, i think, hides his faint possibility of redemption: in the listener, not the teller. in awareness, though even awareness can corrupt.

as for the larger picture, i’m not optimistic. i believe society has passed the point of no return. without a massive, world-shaking event – not a technological miracle, but an existential shock, a war or a planetary disaster – we’ll keep sinking into the loop of digital narcissism. the algorithm rewards excess; it feeds the very hunger it creates. the more we consume, the more we’re consumed.

individual redemption, though, that i still believe in. there are people who can break away, who see the pattern and refuse to follow it. but they are exceptions, not saviors. one clear mind cannot reverse a cultural current.

maybe i feel this more acutely because of where i come from. growing up in post-communist romania, the years after 1989 were filled with the dream of the global village. we believed in openness, inclusion, tolerance – the idea that humanity was finally converging. and yet, in just a few decades, that optimism vanished. the pandemic exposed how fragile we really were. locked in with ourselves, we discovered that intimacy – with partners, with family, with our own minds – had been quietly dying long before the virus arrived.

if we can’t sustain peace or empathy between nations, how could we expect to sustain it in love?

when asked whether i still find solace in understanding these patterns, i had to think for days. the truth is, yes, i do. it comforts me to know that i can see clearly, and that i’m not alone in seeing. it’s a selfish comfort, a validation of lucidity. but when i look at the world as a whole, i feel almost nothing. for a while, i tried to force myself toward one feeling or another, afraid that indifference would make me less human. then i listened to a review of Osamu Dazai’s «No Longer Human», and it gave me the courage to admit it: that sometimes, the more clearly you understand, the less you can feel.

and maybe that’s all right. maybe lucidity isn’t the opposite of humanity, but one of its late, melancholy forms.

now i have neither happiness nor unhappiness. everything passes.

– Osamu Dazai, «No Longer Human»