The trap of indispensability

There exists a subtle form of domination disguised as absolute devotion: turning one's availability into a chain that binds the other. The subject who makes themselves indispensable isn't giving, but capturing. Under the mask of infinite generosity lies a control strategy that turns the other's dependence into a justification for one's own existence.

This sacrificial position not only suffocates the other but functions as a resistance against one's own becoming. By constructing our identity around being indispensable to others, we build a fortress against our own development. The limitations we impose on ourselves, disguised as virtue and sacrifice, become obstacles not only to our growth but to the freedom of those we claim to love.

True availability paradoxically requires the capacity to not be necessary. Only when we renounce the fantasy of being indispensable, when we assume the risk of being dispensable, can we really be present for the other without turning our presence into a prison. Being oneself implies allowing the other to be themselves as well.

Laughter as insurgency

Real laughter is not simply an emotional release valve, as the entertainment industry would have us believe. It is an event that shakes the very foundations of our subjective construction. In that instant of loss of control, when laughter possesses us, something of our most entrenched certainties begins to waver. The rational ego, the one we believe we govern, reveals itself in its precariousness.

This moment of bodily insurgency against our habitual defenses has something revealing: it shows us we are not who we think we are. Authentic laughter breaks with the illusion of self-control, with the fantasy of coherence that sustains our image. It's an involuntary reminder that there is something in us that escapes our domain, that rebels against our attempts to maintain a facade of seriousness and control.

That's why true laughter has something revolutionary about it: it not only challenges the established social order but subverts our own internal order. In that instant of abandonment to the jouissance of laughter, we are momentarily liberated from the tyranny of our identifications, our assumed roles, our everyday masks.

The power of what's missing

The contemporary fantasy of completeness sells us a fundamental lie: that the good life consists of having everything, filling every void, satisfying every need. It's the illusion that there exists a point of arrival where desire finally quiets down. But the human mind doesn't function by necessity like a machine requiring fuel; it operates by desire, that perpetual motor that feeds precisely on what it doesn't have.

Desire is always desire for something else, for what's missing. It's not a lack that can be filled, but a force that emerges precisely from the difference between what we have and what we want. This gap is not a defect to be corrected but the very space where vitality emerges. Desire pulses, pushes, mobilizes precisely because it never finds its definitive object.

True fullness, then, doesn't consist in having everything - an impossible and alienating project - but in recognizing and embracing what we lack. A full life is not a complete life, but a life that knows how to name its absences, that can inhabit its voids without desperation, that finds in lack itself the source of its movement and meaning.