I am The Worst Person in the World

The Worst Person in the World (2021) directed by Joachim Trier is my story, is your story, is our story as a generation. I know that sounds cheesy and maybe overly simplifying, but I could relate to every change the protagonist needed, to all the uncertainty her future holds, the ambitiousness faced with constant doubt, instability, the sort of inconsistency of her life. That wish that we inherited from past generations to find a stable home, create a family, have a safe job and maybe buy some plants and forniture... it's simply a wish that expired.

Our culture, as Aksel so very well lets us know, is different from the past, it is not made of things, objects. The wish can never be obtained because it doesn't exist, it has not form, no substance. It's a bunch of numbers on a computer, followers, data, files, gigabytes. It's an idea. We run towards an unobtainable idea.

As a generation, we fail to embody the perfect individual of the past, and have yet to create a goal for the future. We're lost, stuck in between two worlds that cannot communicate. We don't understand either of these worlds fully. So we sit, silently, in the middle.

In the film, there are multiple shots were the protagonist, Julie, is looking to the horizon, at first she is the one in focus and the background is blurred, but then the roles get reversed and the landscape becomes in focus, while she becomes blurry, almost fading away. I feel that's precisely how our generation sees ourselves: we think we're the center of attention but then we look to the future, to the bigger picture, and we realise we are so small, so irrelevant, that the scale of things has simply become too big for us to handle, for us to change. We don't know where to start, so we simply don't.

We are an old wreckage invaded by cyborg technology. On the ship you think you can do anything, but you're soon faced with the reality of a world around you that is old, and dying. We're the last ones standing. And we are the only ones who noticed.

It's subconscious, of course. Rationally we keep following our parents path, chasing their dreams : going to university, getting a degree, finding a job, buying a house, getting married, having babies. Consciously we still believe there's a future, a tomorrow.

But underneath there's something pressing to come out, like a restless animal, it knows that we're fucked... Yet, instead of finding new ways to deal with and comprehend a changing world, we let time pass and get the best of us. Maybe we're convinced it's already too late, or maybe for the change that it's needed we'd have to completely revolution our society and we're just not ready for it.

Maybe it's a conspiracy and the magnates prefer for us to have panic attacks rather than riots. Maybe we're a passive generation. Maybe we're anesthetized. Maybe we're blind. Maybe we're just scared.

Truth is we don't know, and we are too worried about keeping our bubbles safe to really ask ourselves if there's something else we could be doing.