Renne Nunes

Have you ever imagined everything starting to fall apart at once, without warning and without giving you time to breathe? First a financial setback, then losses that arrive unannounced, debts piling up while life itself seems to shrink. Little by little, your days become narrow, repetitive, almost automatic, as if you were simply following a script you never chose to write. Until, in a gesture that looks small but isn’t, you decide to disappear for a few days, no phone, no trace, no way for anyone to find you.

You take what little money you have left and, perhaps more out of exhaustion than hope, you stake it all on a long shot that promises the impossible. And then it happens. The unlikely. The money comes, not just a little, but enough to completely reshape your life, enough that you would never again have to calculate every decision or measure every desire. But on your way back home, something shifts everything out of place: a body has been found, unidentifiable, and they decide it must be you. Your story is brought to an end without your presence.

The shock comes first, then the anger. But soon something else begins to take shape, quieter and far more dangerous: possibility. If everyone believes you are dead, what exactly still ties you to the life you had? You can change your name, your city, your appearance. You can settle far away from everything and everyone, with enough money to answer to no one. The question seems simple, but it isn’t: what would you do?

This is the crack from which The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello begins. But to read it as a fantasy of reinvention is to miss the point. Because the problem was never only a life falling apart, but what happens when that life suddenly ceases to exist for others while continuing to exist within you.

We live as if we were always on the brink of another life, quietly seduced by the idea that one event, one decision, one stroke of luck might finally set things in motion. In the meantime, we keep adjusting ourselves to demands we never fully chose, presenting increasingly refined versions of who we are, measuring our worth through performance, visibility, and approval. Lately, there is also a growing expectation, almost naive, that recognition should come quickly, that a single well-timed moment, a viral post, a sharp line, might be enough to change everything.

It is not hard to find examples. Internet celebrities who seem to appear out of nowhere, gathering followers, deals, and numbers that feel almost unreal. Stories that circulate as proof that success can be immediate, accessible, almost inevitable if you play the game the right way. What rarely enters the conversation is the invisible cost of this logic, or how it sustains an imagination that pulls people away from their own lived experience and places them in a constant waiting room for some life-changing moment. Meanwhile, the concrete life, the one that requires time, repetition, frustration, and real engagement, keeps being postponed.

In that context, the idea of simply disappearing becomes even more seductive. Not as an act of cowardice, but as a promise of freedom and perhaps even a successful reinvention. But this promise carries a mistake we rarely confront: leaving your life is not the same as leaving yourself. And perhaps what binds us most is not the name we carry or the place we live, but the quiet ways we have learned to exist and to measure our own value.

If no one knows who you were, what is left of you?
If there is no one to confirm your story, does it still stand?
And more unsettling, would the life you imagine truly be different, or just the same logic repeating itself in another setting, with new applause, new metrics, and the same need to be seen?

The strength of Pirandello’s novel lies not in offering answers, but in dismantling this fantasy with almost cruel precision. He is not interested in what you would do with a second chance, because he suspects, rightly, that you would end up doing more or less the same, even if in a different setting, under another name, perhaps even with a different appearance.

The problem is not the life you live, or the circumstances around you, but the way you keep inhabiting them. You can move to another city, rewrite your story, change direction entirely. You can even disappear from the world. But no disguise can resolve the most persistent discomfort: that, despite everything, you are still yourself. And perhaps that is why the idea of starting over is so seductive, because it spares you a far less comfortable question, one that borders on the indecent.

It is not about starting over.

It is about what still keeps you from beginning, without the excuse of waiting for the world, chance, or some future version of yourself to do the work for you.