Susana Mendez Gago

The Spermatozoid Complex Susana Mendez Gago

Entitled "El complejo de espermatozoide" in Spanish, this book is an ironic essay on mediocrity, an all-pervasive social ill that has led to individual and collective mediocrity. It is a metaphor about how we live today and how our eagerness to be number one and our thirst for success have made us lose sight of our true goal. In a fast-moving world it is very easy to lose our bearings and to rush forward without really knowing where we are headed, dragged along by the tide of urgency, the quest for practical solutions and the drive to achieve objectives. This individual race becomes a collective race where people measure each other up as they are sucked up in an existential vertigo. Life has become a competition where winning is what matters, not the journey along the way, and where we have turned others into our rivals or the mere means towards an end. While we amass experiences, objects and triumphs in this frenetic competition, we are incapable of assimilating what we have lived. This is an ill that affects men and women of all ages and all societies. Nor is it new. Cases of famous people who suffered from the same problem are to be found in the history of the world's civilizations, but modern-day circumstances have exacerbated this trouble, making it no longer an isolated phenomenon but a common disorder in the society of the 21st century.