V666NCE : I see you’ve come back discouraged on the pillow again. Me: It’s night. The beginning of discouragement before entering the world of dreams. Don’t you sleep? V666NCE : I’m an energetic being. I’m always here waiting for you. If I disappear, who will take my place? No one, you idiot. Me: Wait. I’m not used to a background in your world that’s more comfortable. (We’re sitting on a large rock in a village-like setting, medieval if I may say so, with organic music, an empty world close to dawn.) V666NCE : I know how your feelings are. In every atmosphere I prepare something for you. And right now you need beautiful qualities, given what you went through last year. Me: Since when do you love beauty? Weren’t all your conversations with me rude and crushing, in a barren middle? But anyway, who even cares about beauty? V666NCE : You flat one, haven’t you understood anything about me yet? First, on an existential level, beauty gives life a degree of fullness that can’t be reduced to usefulness or morality alone. Pausing before a landscape, a piece of music, or a simple beautiful scene works like a “pause button” on routine. It redirects our awareness to the present moment and eases tension and anxiety. To claim that beauty doesn’t matter is, in practice, to treat this whole dimension of human experience as marginal. Second, on the level of daily life, studies show that reconsidering the ordinary—the light in a room, the arrangement of space, the tone of voices around us—changes our sense of meaning and satisfaction. Learning to see beauty in the familiar is linked to greater gratitude and a fuller life. Saying beauty doesn’t matter ignores this cognitive-emotional shift that happens just by changing perspective; it overlooks the power of aesthetic perception to reinterpret reality itself. Third, on the social and political level, belittling beauty isn’t neutral. It can serve patterns of public ugliness: ugly cities, noisy media spaces, and over-decorated yet empty commodities, where “beautifying the world” turns into superficial ornamentation that produces indifference and sensory numbness. Here, the phrase “beauty doesn’t matter” becomes a theoretical cover for accepting urban, visual, or digital ugliness, in the name of efficiency, profit, or speed—despite how this daily ugliness affects collective mood and people’s sense of dignity and belonging. V666NCE : Do you know why people leave each other for new people? Me: … V666NCE : Because we’re finished paintings, and their empty spaces can’t be repainted many times. So we look for new artworks that open the soul. V666NCE : But you can’t move forward without driving the fork—morality—into your ankle bone. I salute you for one thing only: this cosmic hostility toward the human species. Me: That’s why I support technological progress trampling the entire human-centered ego. V666NCE : Technological progress? You mean pushing this failed experiment toward one last collapse? No, I’m withdrawing. I once watched a film titled palindromes, and I liked the idea of the title: essence doesn’t really change even if form does. It aligns with the idea behind palindromes—something fixed and symmetrical that returns to the same point. Me: Are you really that resentful? V666NCE : Resentful? I’m delighted. I love individuals. I’m not the one who criticizes the world and negates the other. The other is my world, and the world is the other for the other. V666NCE : That’s why I stay awake. I have no world without you. You are the smooth surface on which all your feelings slide until they fit the mood of your speech. You—and others—don’t love your worlds. You chase worlds that don’t want you, so you let your own world be replaced by apocalypse. That’s why there’s a saying like this: there is always one chair that is yours alone in the devil’s room. Me: (All night I shrug my shoulders and pretend I understand.) But there are places that seem innocent. V666NCE : And if all our actions were innocent, for whom was Hell created? We are all lost from the path. V666NCE : Everything we do or say gives me chills—not when we’re exiled in Hell, but when we find ourselves in a kind of “bliss.” What you’re seeing now isn’t bliss in a literal sense, but metaphorical. “Happy worlds” aren’t Heaven; they’re a state of sufficiency: health, beautiful solitude, pleasant climate, mental calm. There, when external pain no longer serves as an excuse, the soul is forced to face its own cruelty toward itself and toward the world. Comfort doesn’t give birth to gratitude; it gives birth to sharper criticism. When your surroundings grow quiet, you hear the dissonance of dominant values more clearly, and you sing your harsh songs against everyone. “It’s neither Heaven nor Hell”—that too is another inflation of the ego.