Μake us preferred on Google .” The words sound like a reminder of the life that remains. But take them beyond the stage, and they become a question addressed to society: how much room do we leave people to breathe? And what is the value of urging them to carry on when, day after day, we strip away the very conditions that would allow them to imagine a tomorrow?
The play *An Ordinary Day* (*Mia Kanoniki Imera*), directed by Sotiris Tsafoulias, provides the starting point. A woman speaks to her husband, who died by suicide. She speaks of love, their children, the small rituals of a life shared, but also of the debts he could not repay and the shame that weighed upon him. The story offers no easy answers. It does, however, compel us to look beyond a private tragedy, towards the values by which a society decides who counts as successful, useful, worthy.
We have grown accustomed to speaking of financial hardship as though it were invariably the result of poor personal choices. Income, employment, housing and security are presented as individual achievements, detached from wages, the cost of living, inequality, institutions and political decisions. In this way, a social problem is given a new name: personal inadequacy. And the words “I cannot pay” risk becoming, in a person’s own mind, “I am worth nothing.”
There is no single explanation for suicide, nor can debt alone account for a person’s psychological suffering. That is precisely why it is dangerous to treat despair as a weakness of character. When financial pressure meets the stigma surrounding mental health struggles, shame can become twofold: shame at not coping, and shame at needing help. Political responsibility begins where the convenient advice to “try harder” ends.
What, then, does social protection mean in practice? It means access to meaningful mental healthcare without stigma, fair opportunities to restructure debt, protection against extreme insecurity, and work that makes a dignified life possible. It means the state cannot appear solely as a debt collector, nor society solely as a judge of “personal responsibility”. Dignity must not depend on whether someone has managed to be financially infallible.
Yet there is another, less visible debt: the one imposed by social roles. We expect men to provide, never to buckle, always to have an answer. We expect women to care, to support, to hold together the cracks in a home. In a society that teaches a man he is worth as much as he can provide, and a woman that she is worth as much as she can care for others, how much room is left for either of them simply to exist as a human being?
The woman in this story does not describe marriage and motherhood as a prison. She was happy. She loved her husband, her daughters, the everyday life they had built together. And yet, when he was gone, a painful question surfaced: who was she without him? First someone’s daughter, then someone’s wife, then the mother of her children. People in her circle had accused her of clinging to him. Now she begins to wonder whether, beneath the harshness of that judgment, there was something she had not wanted to see.
We do not need to disparage a woman’s choice to devote herself to her family in order to recognise the political issue at stake. A choice has meaning when genuine alternatives exist alongside it: financial independence, access to employment, social recognition of care work, and the possibility of returning to professional life. Otherwise, society celebrates maternal devotion for as long as it needs it, then leaves a woman on her own when circumstances change. It asks her to keep everyone else standing without ever making sure she can stand on her own.
The woman wants to raise happy daughters. That desire is not merely a duty; it is an expression of love. But even here, a difficult question arises: will we allow a woman to seek happiness for herself, too, or will we once again ask her to exist only as a source of support for others? Caring for others cannot be the only dream society permits a woman to have.
And what of love? Should it not have been enough to keep him alive? Should his love for his family not have been enough? These are questions born of loss, not a fair verdict on those who love. Love is not a cure for depression; it does not pay the bills or replace collective care. A person’s inability to bear their pain is not proof that they did not love enough. Perhaps love is not enough to make us happy; but it may give us a reason to keep searching for happiness.
That reason also needs a horizon. It needs dreams. Not merely the relief of no longer fearing the next loan repayment, or the reassurance that you will make it to the end of the month. Those are conditions for living, not the limits of what you have the right to dream of. A dream is studying something you love, creating, travelling, changing direction at forty or sixty, building something that will outlast you. It is being able to imagine a life different from the one dictated by necessity, fear or other people’s expectations. And, more than that, it is daring to dream beyond your own small world: of a fairer society, where progress is not the privilege of a few and hope is not reduced to individual survival. Dreams are neither a luxury nor naïve optimism. They are the force that drives us to demand a tomorrow that is more than a slightly less difficult version of today.
That is why the conversation about happiness cannot remain a matter of personal attitude alone. Of course, we often confuse “more” with “better”. But it is politically convenient to tell us to appreciate the simple things when housing, free time, healthcare and security are becoming increasingly difficult to secure. Gratitude is no substitute for rights. And individual resilience cannot serve as a permanent excuse for the absence of collective responsibility.
“I have no breaths left. You still do.” It is not enough to hear these words as a personal command to survive. Let us hear them as a public demand, too: for room to breathe, for help, for autonomy and for dreams. Because if human worth is measured by what people produce, and happiness by how much they can endure, then the problem lies in more than our personal choices.
Ultimately, what kind of state asks people to keep dreaming while, day after day, denying them the room to breathe?
