‘I wish I had the security of a straight white man’ is a phrase we’ve adopted in my group, and one we say more often than we’d like. We’re mostly gays and girls and we don’t have that many straight white male friends. Perhaps because of that, because we’re not used to it, we can quickly distinguish the overconfidence of some of them. They are gestures with which they show that the world loves them unconditionally, that they always land on their feet, that they don’t have to ask for permission or forgiveness, that they don’t have to question anything. It’s doing things without having thought about it at all, advice they assume you need, a comment or an unfinished sentence with which they expect you to make the effort to understand them, instead of them making the effort to explain themselves. It’s a feeling of impunity and immunity that is frightening. It’s audacity, in short. And I love them all the same, though, because they are my friends.

It's very hot. Suspended dust. Heat and humidity. Another plane crosses the sky, cloudy and heavy. Heat like from an exhaust pipe. The Tramuntana is not visible from afar. So hot that you can't go outside. The ring road at five in the afternoon. You can't even breathe. The highway, at the height of the airport, at any time. According to the forecast, tomorrow will be even hotter. Two girls are arrested; they say they had a banner at their home with the slogan 'SOS Residents'. Heat and anguish in the street: we don't know where to put ourselves. Gasoline is going up and yet everything burns: fire on earth and fire in the sky. Orange sunsets, beautiful as a bad omen, as a point of disaster. It's too hot: what if we take shelter from the fan? It's already the end of the month and we don't have money to spend either. Heat like a pressure cooker, as if about to suffocate us, as if about to make thunder.

“I think I can be the voice of my generation… Or at least a voice of a generation” is the most iconic phrase of the character Hannah Horvath in Girls, the series written by and starring Lena Dunham, which is already one of the best generational narratives of the early 21st century. In the case of Mallorca, in the midst of the 2020s, a whole host of young artists are giving voice to their generation. Anna Picornell, Miquel Mas, Lluïsa Febrer, Josep Alorda, and Mariona Jaume are five of them. With music, theater, drawing, cinema, and dance, respectively, they capture their Zeitgeist (the spirit of an era, in German). The moment they have to live through – like Hannah – grants them this fair dose of enthusiasm, marked by a realism that doesn't quite become pessimistic, and a need to define themselves shaped by social media.

It's only been a month since my friend Henry got his place, a rental apartment in Palma, and it has already become our Holy See: the meeting point, the safe space for the whole group. Maybe not the rest, but I knew from the start that it would be; it was enough for me to see how just two restored chairs and curtains fluttering in front of the stained glass window became a home. And deciding, at the last moment, to go there to watch the World Cup final confirmed it, like a revelation, just as spontaneous acts do. It seems we had needed this for a long time, a sanctuary for our sorrows and joys. A place that welcomes us, spontaneously, where we can relax and be the only thing we want to be: friends.

A setting, a laptop with a webcam, and an hour of live chat with random people. With these ingredients and the premise of adapting the dramaturgy and choreography based on the conversations, Lluís Garau (La Torre, 1997) created The Meat in 2022, a performance interpreted entirely by him. His obsessions – the internet and identity shaped by algorithms – have led him to this “painful” process of stepping into the shoes of a cybersex addict. After receiving accolades such as the Oscar Wilde Award at the Dublin Theatre Festival, he turned The Meat in film, to go beyond the cybercruising. Directed by Joan Porcel, this thriller documentary has just won two Silver Biznagas in Malaga. It will be screened for the first time in Mallorca at the Atlàntida Film Festival.

I wanted to know what the obsessions of my generation are (that is, I wanted to confirm my suspicions). And, for this reason, I went to look for those responsible for fossilizing them: the artists. Specifically, six. And if time and space were not limited, the list would be much longer. They are Anna Picornell, Lluïsa Febrer, Mariona Jaume, Miquel Mas, Josep Alorda, and Lluís Garau. In these conversations, with all of them, I tried the same thing: to know what they feel, to prospect their souls, and to discover what obsesses them. Because – when we are sincere – obsessions are the only thing that truly makes us vulnerable, that betrays us as we are, genuinely, from the subconscious and without morals. I wanted to extract them “with a dessert spoon”, as Lorena G. Maldonado says, what this generation of artists feels. And what turns out to make them mortal, like the rest of humanity, is the same doubt, intrusive and inopportune: why do we do what we do and if that is success.

Ladies, we've betrayed ourselves. I, honestly, I try. We had agreed that we wouldn't think about our bodies anymore. We were all in favor of this collective delirium together. What? Advertising because “if you start in June, with this bikini operation you'll be unrecognizable in July”? It doesn't affect me. Capri pants are back in fashion, pants in which, even if they're my size, my thighs will never fit? I couldn't care less. What? You say you've gained weight and you look terrible? After telling you you're gorgeous, I won't think about myself at all, nor will I ask myself if I should worry too.

I remember the exact pressure I had to apply to the button on my mother's car glove compartment for it to open. Also the wide and round shape, and the soft touch of the plastic when I operated it, making a soft, muffled, almost spongy click. I liked the pleasant sensation of that button and the power it gave me. It was the era when we had the black Peugeot 206. That is to say, it was the early 2000s and I, the sole co-pilot of our vessel.

Life and I sign a pact of plausibility every summer. Weekends become a wonderful fiction and I, a very unreliable narrator. I tell myself that reality is what happens under this murky, whitish sky, so close the sun shines, and not the day-to-day illuminated by fluorescents. For 48 hours, it seems reasonable to follow the natural rhythm of things: waking up when sleep ends, honoring lunch by dedicating the time it deserves to be cooked and eaten, not leaving the house until it feels good, swimming if it's hot, and having dinner with the last rays of light. Days have no pretensions, hours don't want to last more than 60 minutes, time is what it is. And I believe it.

The two girls I have in front of me are the ones who are the most well-behaved in the entire group of third graders in Primary school who are now surrounding me. They were the first to sit down, further away from the rest, as soon as they entered the carriage. They remain oblivious to what is happening in the background, to their classmates, who are jumping, shouting and fighting to get into the photo the teacher is taking of them. Occupying the minimum space of their seat and with their legs crossed, they hardly move, nor is their voice heard during the subway ride. But those of us who grew up with the phrase “You, look and be quiet” recognize each other. I look at them and they are quiet. I don't need words to discover their universe, hidden behind the mobile phone screen.

“I don’t have a free weekend until August”. You will have heard it or said it yourselves, as if a packed calendar were synonymous with good social and work health. We stuff ourselves with tasks and plans, myself included. And they reproach us for being too weak, for being victims of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), for being afraid of missing something, for seeming like we don’t know how to be alone, still, at home. How easy and reductive the world becomes when we have an acronym to define us. That’s it: we have FOMO, as quick and simple as saying it. Do we really only need four letters to crystallize the feeling of a whole generation?

There are weekswhen I ask ChatGPT why it's possible that I can't stop crying and if I should worry about it. And there are weeks when I listen to the dirtiest reggaeton on repeat, so confident that I see myself capable of posting a selfie in the bathroom mirror. But at no time am I aware that this feeling is the product of my hormones. Every month I feel cheated by myself: another time, I surprise myself, as if this same process had not repeated for almost 20 years. That's why, and for when I feel I can't trust myself, I have monitored what happens to my body and my mind in the 28 days of my menstrual cycle, according to my mobile app.

We met at a party. When Tito’s was still Tito’s (which makes me feel very old). It all started as good love stories begin: with two glances that met in the middle of the room. “What’s your name?”, “What are you studying?” and a kiss as a promise that I would look for him again. And I did. Some supernatural force wanted me to end up finding him on Facebook (which also makes me feel very old), just from the two questions I asked him.

The only daughter is having her birthday: one, specifically. And, with only a few days difference, my mother too. She's turning 55. I like that I fell into this coincidence, because it reminds me more than ever that without a unique mother there would have been no only daughter. I started writing more inwardly and less outwardly when I discovered that the world could be explained through the stories we keep within ourselves. And the story with my mother is one of them. The first one, I'd say. And perhaps, one day, it will also be the last. Because it's a story that never ends.

There was a time when I loved my grandmother very much. And then, a time when I didn't, when I felt I had stopped loving her.

I like to hear the knife sharpener. I feel pleasure watching the pleasant women and the pleasant men selling black artichokes or borage cabbage. When I detect a sign with eighties typography that says ‘Bar Centro’ or ‘Bar Sport’, I stop to observe the hustle and bustle. But my knives are all from Ikea. I do all my shopping at the supermarket (fresh produce included). And it's very difficult for me to drink a coffee that is torrefied and without oat milk. I am a hypocrite.

I am stretched out, on the beach, half reading, half looking around me, catching other stories in passing. A mother emerges from among the beach umbrellas, almost crawling on the sand, struggling to reach the front line, laden with everything. She is accompanied by her twins. It's not entirely clear who is dragging whom. But she lies down, defeated, on the towel, which she hasn't even bothered to straighten when she took it out of the bag. She hasn't taken off her clothes either. And I can see her bikini through her white, Ibizan-style blouse. She's also wearing some denim shorts that she has no intention of taking off. And some black XXL sunglasses, where the expression I'd like to decipher is hidden. The twins don't move much from her side. They lie around her, adoring her, like in a Sorolla painting. They touch her hair, resting their little heads on different parts of their mother's body, also looking at the sea, in silence. After a period of rest, the two girls start to stir and liven up. They put on their swimsuits and go for a swim. The mother shows no sign of movement, let alone concern. The fact that she doesn't feel any unease seeing her six or seven-year-old daughters go to the sea alone makes me think she has already saved them from something much more dangerous. Whatever it is, it has devastated her. I feel like I am witnessing the conclusion of a crusade, as if this moment were the last chapter of a long story, the scene just before the final credits.

I don't need to make a list of 'things I'm grateful for today' to know what are the three or four things that matter to me, that make me happy. What would be the point of being grateful for them if, to be aware of them, I had to do journaling? I'd be pretty screwed. I wouldn't want to write them down either. When you write, it's as if you unburden yourself a bit of things, as if you release yourself from them. Why would I do it? Putting it in writing would be to distance myself a bit, to place them on a surface and materialize them, to see them outside of myself, to excise them from myself. And I already do that enough.

I find remnants in my home of things that are half-finished. Small daily failures. The leggings and the running top that have been hanging in the bathroom for two weeks, optimistic. The vinegar and the rice paper wrappers I bought at the Japanese week at Lidl, convinced I would make Goi Cuon, fresh Vietnamese rolls. The three books started on the bedside table. The analog camera that I proposed to myself – once a month – to learn to use once and for all. A table, which was more than a table, it was an investment to do a lot of work on and earn a lot of money. Versions of myself that I can't decide on. I want to be all of them at once out of cowardice, because I don't believe enough in any of them.

I am fascinated by symbols: minimal units of communication, which mean very specific things with very few resources. Language concentrates in them, acidic, explosive. My senses react to them like taste buds to monosodium glutamate. Pure stimulus. They are a mystery and our collective imaginary, the ultraviolet light that allows us to decipher them. Recognizing their meaning is addictive because it speaks to me of myself, reminds me of things I didn't know I knew and that help me interpret the world.