Hunger for Chaos

A savage desire for strong emotions and sensations burns inside me: a rage against this soft-tinted, shallow, standardized and sterilized life, and a mad craving to smash something up, a department store, say, or a cathedral, or myself.

― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

A Savage Desire: Raging Against the Sterile Life

There are moments when the stillness of modern life begins to feel suffocating. When everything around us is manicured, managed, and muted—soft-tinted walls, standardized smiles, sterilized routines. We are taught to value comfort, convenience, and conformity. But deep inside some of us, there is something wild—a gnawing, animalistic hunger not just to feel, but to burn, to break, to bleed.

It is not merely a rebellion; it’s a reckoning with the absurdity of existing in a world where everything is sanitized into safety. Where we scroll through synthetic emotions, sip on lukewarm dreams, and live lives that are technically pleasant—but emotionally barren. And so, arises the savage desire for strong emotions and brutal sensations—something that shatters the numbness, even if it means chaos.

We may not always understand this craving. It can come as a sudden jolt of anger, or a desperate yearning to disrupt something pristine—a department store that represents consumerist shallowness, a cathedral that echoes blind obedience, or even our own skin, in the madness of needing to feel real again. It is a protest against the manufactured softness we’ve been fed as living.

This isn't about violence for its own sake. It’s about the violence of awakening. The chaos of confronting our deadened spirits and demanding that they feel again—feel ecstasy, despair, rage, awe, even horror. Because these are the things that make us human. Not algorithms. Not predictable plotlines. Not socially acceptable calm.

There’s danger in this craving, yes. But there’s also truth. There’s a call to step beyond numbness. To refuse the beige coating of existence. To dare to live a life that is jagged, alive, unedited.

So, if you're feeling that urge—if the walls feel too soft and the world too polished—maybe you're not breaking down. Maybe you're just breaking through.