“When all you have in life is a hammer, it’s not uncommon to see nails everywhere.” I read that sentence somewhere and then forgot it and got out of bed with it today, just like you can’t get it out of your head as soon as you wake up to the chorus of a song. I go everywhere with the phrase hammer, and others emerge from it: when you become a biologist, you see the world through biology; when chemical, from chemistry: if you suffer from ulcer, from ulcer; if nearsighted, from myopia; farmer from the tractor; yes millionaire from the best penthouse in town.
It’s called prejudice.
Health officials politically reject the protests of medical staff who can’t cope. He who lives from politics sees nothing but politics. The more people there are, the more prejudices there are. I have a tragic prejudice: It seems to me to quote another sentence whose author I can’t think of, that we are just shadows and ashes, only shadows and ashes and life is a terrible dream. I also have a pharmacological bias: I rely heavily on pills, so I took an anxiolytic in the middle of the morning so I wouldn’t hear the hammer hitting my nails. Interestingly, this, hammering nails, was one of my childhood pastimes. When my father saw that I was bored, he would give me a bunch of nails, a piece of wood, and a hammer.
“Try not to crush your fingers,” he told me.
My house was full of boards that looked like hedgehogs. I just read a great novel, Copenhagen Trilogy, by Tove Ditlevsen, where a character spends their life doing the same thing. Maybe the phrase hammer originated from reading that book. Now it should be added that there is nothing worse than just having a hammer, and that this did not find any problems with the shape of the nails. Here you go like an idiot, looking around without finding anything to fix. In such cases, it is not uncommon for the hammer owner, who is filled with unbearable societal grudges, to break heads.