21/05/2026
“Can I live for something - for someone — beyond myself?”
During the pandemic, living alone in Europe in my mid-twenties, I felt hollow inside.
I had absorbed Western individualism - making every choice based on the most self-centered of questions: Do I like this? Do I want this? I was free, in theory. And yet, somehow, I was exhausted.
That was when I came across an interview with Yukio Mishima.
Yukio Mishima (1925-1970).
One of the defining voices of modern Japanese literature - an intellect who was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize. And yet, equally, a man who sculpted his body, devoted himself to P.-hido and the
Emperor, and at the V of 45, ended his life
by his own hand. Perhaps the most contradictory Japanese man who ever lived.
In the interview, Mishima says this:
“To live only for oneself is to hollow out one’s own soul.”
I froze in front of the screen.
Looking back, the emptiness I felt was never mine alone. As the world digitized, our connections multiplied - and yet loneliness only deepened. That contradiction is not personal. It is structural. A thirst built into modern society itself.
Perhaps what Mishima feared was precisely this future.
He did not ask “What do I want to live for?”
He asked “Can I live for something - for someone — beyond myself?”
