DABOISASTRGLEDT – Ivaniel “Ivo” Georgiev
DABOIS, what you may know simply as a “man” – and what I call the metamodern man – is quite a strange figure; not stranger than those who came before him, but strange in a contemporary post-modern sense because he is rarely understood. When I say he is rarely understood, I truly mean it in all possible ways because the ability to be understood requires first that you understand yourself – which turns out to be the harder task.
The problem I want to explore today isn’t about intelligence or access to information because we have more of both than any previous generation – and somehow it seems that we are so far behind on it. But the bigger problem is that despite all of it, the ability to truly be understood – and to understand oneself – seems to undergo a shrinking effect. Why? Because while we live surrounded by more channels of expression than ever, at the same time, something essential keeps getting lost in transmission (and in translation; by the way, great movie).
Today’s blog is heavily influenced by television and film – specifically, the FX show The Bear. I won’t talk much about the show itself but about what it revealed to me – what life also proved revealing to me over the years, but this specific TV adaptation just laid it all out.
I just want to mention that the cast is exceptional, the writers have done their job, and the visuals are stunning – yes, I’m a huge fan of the show, and I recommend you watch it with full attention. I think this one is one of those rare shows, because it does something that only rare shows do: it connects all the dots (the characters) to a kind of reality most people recognise but rarely think about – or at least long and consciously enough to see its real worth. I urge anyone who wants to watch it to pay special attention to the characters’ traits – not the plot so much (which is surely important), but more so, their traits.
What the latest episode revealed to me was a complete circle. But was it really complete? I lean toward no (very heavily on that). What I see is something closer to a stock chart – representing the ups and downs of all – and while most of everything looks like triumph, it is usually just a higher point in an ongoing oscillation – and that oscillation is what I want to trace today… because it smells… strraaaangely enough to follow its mark.
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Before we continue, thank you. (YES, I WILL NOT STOP REPEATING IT!)
I know time can’t be reclaimed (NEVER), and I’m genuinely glad you’re spending part of it here.
If you’re new: this isn’t a place for preaching or selling. It’s a courtroom with no verdicts – only questions that lead to more questions. My goal is to reveal what hasn’t been revealed – or if it has, to at least offer a different perspective on it.
I draw attention to the things we accept, swallow, or hide and pretend daily that they don’t shape us – even though we’re under their control. If something here makes you feel uncomfortable, then you’re on the right path – discomfort is perhaps the best sign that we haven’t yet learned how to numb it.
1. Curiosity lights the match.
2. Action keeps the fire alive.
3. Effort is what everyone talks about until it becomes necessary.
Of course, I can’t forget the tune on the DABOIS’s radio for today: “Hold The Line” by TOTO. I believe it is exactly in the spirit of today’s blog. You most likely have heard it before, and you love it, but if you haven’t, don’t miss out on giving it a chance. I bet my head on it that if you loop it, it will make the blog even better.
Aaaaaand now, it’s time to check out what Mr. Ivo is up to. (I hope you stick around until the end… but that’s up to you.)
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Bear Boy, a.k.a. The Stranger Within
I’m not going to spoil the show for you, but indeed I would look at someone who may come close to Carmen, and that is why I would call that someone Bear Boy. Most of all, he is an ordinary person. He was a little kid just like the rest of us. He has a family he’s closely connected to and grew up surrounded by loved ones. And alongside everything wonderful that family brings, Bear Boy is lucky enough (or unlucky enough) to inherit the complex psychological bonds and all the hidden mechanisms underneath all of it that will quietly but undoubtedly shape everything that follows.
That is the peculiar thing about childhood: we tend to imagine it as a beginning full of possibility, when in reality it is already a consequence of consequences along the chain.
That is why long before Bear Boy learns to speak properly, long before he develops opinions of his own, he has already inherited the passive, the aggressive, and every other pattern of human connection – tied to shared language and regional culture, and while his, never entirely his. And when I say language, I don’t mean only words. I mean the language of reactions, fears, expectations, silence, affection, disappointment, celebration, shame, and so on.
Truth is, every family has them. Some whisper it; others broadcast it; and those who cannot do either are just neglecting it. But what is most striking to me is that nobody remembers who first taught these things – and more importantly, whether they should.
This is why I’m against the idea that people begin life with an empty page. If looked at honestly, it’s rather a chaotic structure that has been structured for millennia. People’s lives begin with margins that someone else already drew – and most of the time, those who drew the margins didn’t mean to do anyone a disservice. You’re simply working with what you’d been given.
Therefore, what I think is actually being passed down – and this is the part that interests me most – isn’t trauma. What parents pass is their strategy for surviving trauma. Like me, Bear Boy’s father didn’t hand him his fear. He handed him his way of handling fear. Then there’s the same case with his mother, who didn’t pass on her anxiety. What she passed is her method for getting through it. Of course, we can’t forget about friends, and while having friends can make you feel lonely, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are giving you that feeling of loneliness. All of the groups mentioned (as well as any others you can name) are simply transferring their technique for escaping – and on top of that, it’s absolutely free… but that’s not the kind of gift one expects or cherishes. Anyway, the tragedy here is that those strategies – shaped by entirely different people, in entirely different eras – often don’t fit the person who inherits them. Hence, whether it’s Bear Boy or any of us, we tend to spend years running someone else’s initiative, deluding ourselves that it’s us who wanted it in the first place.
Every parent hands over unfinished business alongside their own version of unconditional love – because unconditional love is real, but it often stings more than it keeps you whole.
That is perhaps a problem for each generation: unknowingly asking the next to carry a burden that was never theirs because while the shape of the burden changes, the burden itself doesn’t.
Bear Boy is no different. His parents love him – and they do so very genuinely. Yet love has never been enough to guarantee a mutual form of understanding. If anything, it complicates everything, because what most people call love is really the emotional dialect they grew up speaking without understanding. Honestly, it’s like any dialect there is: it’s precise within the group that made it and nearly untranslatable outside it – but the problem to begin with is that even the group is not sure why they use this specific dialect. The greatest misunderstandings in life often happen precisely between people who love each other most because they carry the strongest expectations of who the other person should become – and that shit sucks.
So, no one really has raised Bear Boy because he happened to be there at this specific moment with these specific people. Everybody had a part that they were doing in the best way they could – it’s the best not because it’s really the best, but because that’s what they did. And eventually, you can see very easily that different people from the circle of Bear Boy are proposing a different version of him – and then the world begins making its own proposals, and then Bear Boy starts to trace these proposals and ends up God knows where.
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What the World Asks For
Of course, I mentioned friends earlier, but I haven’t gotten to the nitty-gritty of it all. What I mean is, while growing up, Bear Boy begins meeting other “Strangers”. That may be anyone, such as teachers, friends, enemies, mentors, lovers, and so on. Each one presents another possible version of himself, and for a while this feels liberating. Then comes the moment when he realises every relationship asks for something in return.
Friendships ask him to be funnier, more emotionally available, and more consistent than he naturally is. Romantic relationships ask him to be softer than he feels capable of and tougher than he could ever be simultaneously. Work asks him to be more productive than he imagined possible – and if he falls into a career path, he risks becoming a slave to a structure he never truly chose, apart from the financial benefit and whatever meaningful relationships he finds inside it. Society asks him to be visible because visibility is how the contemporary world measures existence. And his family – the one he never chose – asks him, quietly or loudly, never to become unrecognisable to them.
Each demand is understandable on its own, but together they become impossible.
This is where the Stranger analogy fits most precisely. Someone who may not consider himself a Stranger is one by nature – there is an ongoing, lifelong process of separating himself from everybody and everything. Not because he wants to, but because there is simply nobody around him asking the same questions anymore – and by that, I mean the questions that are necessary for his survival in this complicated, beautiful world.
Everybody else seems occupied with becoming someone. And on top of that, occupied with giving opinions to others – the kind of opinions nobody asked for – about how to live and strive.
The Stranger becomes occupied with a different question: whether the someone he was supposed to become was ever his idea to begin with.
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The Ordinary Days
That is why adulthood feels so exhausting; not because of the visible responsibilities – the bills, the career, the mortgage, the ageing parents, etc. – but because of a responsibility nobody teaches and few people want to acknowledge: deciding which parts of yourself actually belong to you and which were borrowed from everyone who arrived before you.
That is a process that never finishes, not because people are dishonest, but because memory is ambiguous. Memory edits – which means personal memory is edited, which means societal memory is edited too, now and forever. And while memory has a protective purpose, what it protects us from is often the very understanding we need to feel truly protected.
Bear Boy notices that the stories he tells about his childhood change every few years. Not the events – those stay roughly the same – but their meaning transforms completely. I’m going to put myself in the shoes of Bear Boy here – because I’m a Bear Boy after all – and I think of things my father said to me at ten, fifteen, and twenty years old.
These are literally the same sentences. And while they stay the same, there’s a completely different resonance. Some things that seemed wise then look like nonsense now; some that seemed like nonsense then reveal themselves as the most precise observations he ever made.
That is why time doesn’t simply pass, and if it does anything, it translates.
The same happens with friendships. What children imagine about friendship is something pure – a shared world and, most of all, a permanent company. Adulthood, of course, sneaks in and replaces that with something more complicated: shared logistics, incompatible trajectories, and love that remains genuine but finds fewer and fewer occasions to express itself.
Nobody planned the distance, and nobody is ready for it. Life simply specialises people and alienates them from themselves. Therefore, the older Bear Boy becomes, the less he loses friends through conflict and the more he loses them through quietly diverging paths. One day he looks around and discovers that everyone still loves each other – and yet something went wrong somewhere he can’t locate.
Alienation is not born from rejection; most often, it is a child of ordinary days.
Think of it as a missed phone call, a postponed coffee, or a birthday text instead of a conversation. This is how years pass. Nobody did anything wrong. It’s life that happened.
Perhaps this is what makes modern loneliness different from older forms of it.
It isn’t dramatic.
It’s very bureaucratic if you think about it.
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Parents as People
Eventually, all Bear Boys notice the same thing. The parents who once looked like superheroes (then turned into villains) are now simply ordinary, exhausted people with their own set of contradictions.
He begins to see everything about them: their disappointments, the compromises they made, the unrealised dreams they stashed in the back, and the moments they chose stability over possibility. And what he realises – slowly, then all at once – is that they were never the architects he thought they were. To put it simply, they are survivors: people doing the best they can with strategies they themselves inherited from people who are now gone.
And I think at that very moment, forgiveness becomes easier, not because the hurt disappears, but because the alternative – resentment toward people who were also frightened – stops making sense. Everyone is just as frightened as Bear Boy. And while he may or may not understand this, he is there surviving like everybody else.
Maybe that’s the thin line where adulthood actually begins. I don’t think it’s the independence from the parental figure, but more so the moment you stop expecting them to have the right answers – because they never did.
Only then can Bear Boy begin to shed his Stranger shell. Though here’s the problem: it’s less like removing a shell and more like a snake shedding its skin. Because underneath is another skin, and underneath that, another.
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The Stranger Within the Stranger
Until the day of his death, there will be at least two strangers living inside Bear Boy.
I say at least two, because first, there is the most neglected, which is the child within, who still waits for someone to explain what no one could. And then, there’s the most visible one, which is the adult who is slowly (often too slowly) realising that nobody can. Not even God himself, if you believe in one.
That is why I called today’s figure the Stranger Within the Stranger. Because even if there is a Stranger 3.0, or any future version after that, there will always be a stranger within the stranger. The one created by society, driven by individual traits, living consciously. And the one going through a quiet rebirth every time he realises something new – every time he escapes one expectation and finds an unknown stranger already waiting on the other side.
Perhaps maturity isn’t becoming less strange; perhaps it’s finally recognising which part of your strangeness actually belongs to you. Just then, Bear Boy may – I say may because it’s a big “if” situation – understand that the labyrinth was never really a labyrinth he needed to escape. Its longest corridors were always symbolic rather than structural – things to be understood, not solved.
And even then, the temptation remains: to keep expanding it; to keep diving deeper into the concept of one’s own strangeness, as if at the bottom of it something solid waits.
Maybe nothing does. Maybe that’s not the point. Maybe I’m wrong after all.
But there is a relentless feeling inside me that believes Bear Boy is not a mere person. Bear Boy is the name I gave to “The Stranger” here because every structure produces him naturally, and when problems occur, everybody pretends they didn’t have a part in it.
That is Bear Boy.
That is me.
That is also you.
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No poems, no haiku. I leave it up to you to come up with the poetic conclusion.
What do you think, BOIS and GALS? I’m waiting for your feedback more than ever.
Strange as we are, we don’t have to remain simple strangers.
Sincerely yours,
Ivaniel “A-Bear-Boy-Within” Georgiev
In case you missed the last blog, you can check it out @ The Distant Future, or the Very Well-Orchestrated Narrative Creating a Reality…
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