A grape is beautiful thing. Sweet, juicy, refreshing, nurturing. I love grapes.

Wine is something you make out of grape and… processes. One of these processes involves crushing the grape and make it lose parts of itself (like everything that’s not in the fruity part). Another process is fermenting, or letting the crushed grapes accumulate some stamina.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference in behavior form the “grape” level to the “wine” level.

All that’s at a grape level is fresh, not verified, not enduring, but spectacular.

All that’s at a wine level is slow, contained, powerful and enduring.

I think the vast majority of today’s world is acting at the “grape” level. People are borrowing opinions – which “taste” good, but aren’t verified by any of the user’s experiences – and they propagate those opinions until they find something even tastier (and equally unverified). Every modern “thought” current is made up by people propagating half-baked ideas, caricatures of theories, masked into something that’s easy to consume. Very few people can actually spend the time to verify and internalize those theories.

For instance, I’ve been baffled when I saw how easily youngsters from capitalist countries are supporting socialism and communism. As a person who spent the first 19 years of his life under communism, I know first hand how this is. Spoiler alert: it sucks. And yet, people who never experienced this regime, not even a day of their life, are identifying themselves with these ideologies.

And it goes like this in many others areas. People don’t take the time to beyond the “grape” level.

Becoming “wine” means losing some parts of your identity and only keeping the ones that will survive. Even those, will be then transformed in a slow, dark process in which they’ll get infused with a new type of power.

Becoming “wine” is suffering and transcending this suffering into something that will make you see the world, even if for just a few hours, in a better way.