Human life unfolds in a delicate balance between what we are and what we need in order to be. When that balance breaks, questions arise that are not mere philosophical speculations, but silent cries of an existence torn between dignity and survival. What good is life if we cannot satisfy our human needs? The answer seems cruel: very little, because life without minimum material conditions becomes a daily sentence, a permanent effort not to disappear.
Work, that activity that should dignify and open doors, becomes an irony when the salary is not enough to feed us, buy medicine, or enjoy recreation. Why work, then? And yet we work, because not doing so is worse; because hunger does not wait and illness does not negotiate. But that work that barely sustains the body while withering the spirit reveals a profound contradiction: human effort should guarantee life, not merely prevent death.
And then another uncomfortable question appears: are we alive despite breathing when we cannot do the elementary things of human beings? Breathing is the most basic act, the minimum threshold of biological existence. But human life is not exhausted in oxygen. Eating with dignity, healing pain, playing, laughing, creating, resting: that is what makes us human. When all of that is missing, breath becomes routine and the body moves forward while something essential fades away.
How can we live without our well-being deteriorating after several days without electricity, connection to the world, or drinking water? The answer is that it cannot be done, at least not without paying a very high price. Electricity and water are not luxuries: they are conditions of possibility for modern life. Without them, time becomes a threat, isolation deepens, the body sickens. Well-being does not withstand deprivation indefinitely; it cracks, it crumbles, it ceases to be well-being and becomes pure endurance.
All of this leads to the final question, the most painful one: am I alive because I breathe, or am I dead in life? Perhaps the answer is not absolute. To be dead in life is to inhabit a body that functions while the reasons to live fade away. It is to breathe without a horizon, to work without reward, to exist without enjoyment. But recognizing that death in life is already an act of lucidity, and lucidity, even though it neither feeds nor illuminates, is the first step toward demanding what is rightful: a life that is not reduced to breathing, but that truly deserves to be lived.
Note: I used the DeepL Translate translation tool.
The image is my own.