At the Beach of the Human Ocean, While Zuckerberg Cruises Through Dissociation

 At the Beach of the Human Ocean, While Zuckerberg Cruises Through Dissociation

By Sylvie Shene

This evening, I’m home with my cats, resting at the beach of the human ocean. I wait for the heat to soften and the sun to kiss the horizon before heading out on one of my walks. It’s these quiet moments that remind me how rich and alive life can be—without yachts, without noise, without the need to dominate or display.

Meanwhile, far from this peace, Mark Zuckerberg sails into Svalbard, one of the most fragile and threatened places on Earth, aboard not one but two superyachts. One of them emits 40 tons of CO₂ per hour—a floating monument to emotional dissociation. Activists rightly protested, calling him out not only for the emissions but also for how his platforms, like Facebook, have poisoned public discourse and sabotaged meaningful climate action.

“If he thinks he can come to one of the most threatened and fragile places in the world with two yachts (while one of them emits 40 tons of CO₂ per hour), without being criticised, he's thinking wrong,” wrote Arctic Climate Action Svalbard.

These yachts are not symbols of success—they are escape pods for the emotionally blind. I know that blindness well. I lived inside it for decades. I nearly drowned in my own repressed grief back in the year 2000, when the breakup with Marty cracked open all the buried pain of my childhood. But unlike Zuckerberg, I didn’t flee to distraction—I stayed. I felt. And thanks to the courageous work of Alice Miller, I survived.

I don’t have a formal education past sixth grade. School never understood me. I was dyslexic, and my memory—especially short-term—was badly impaired, likely from the time my first-grade teacher hit me on the head with a blackboard pointer. The educational system didn’t want me to think or feel; it wanted me to memorize like a parrot. I failed at that—but I succeeded in something far more vital: I taught myself how to see.

Today, I write not for status or spectacle, but because it’s how I stay afloat in the human ocean—and how I offer a hand to others lost in it. I left Facebook years ago, after it repeatedly censored my posts, especially when I tried to speak out about injustice and emotional truth. I wrote about that in this blog post from 2011, when I was still trying to use their platform to awaken minds.

Mark Zuckerberg may have all the yachts and money in the world, but what he doesn’t have—and what no machine can manufacture—is emotional integrity. Without it, all that power is empty. Just like the megayachts that pollute the very oceans they pretend to glide over.

Let the world see the contrast.

A woman with no formal education, resting with her cats by the human ocean, radiating truth.

And a man with global power, running from his pain at full throttle, spewing smoke and disinformation behind him.

Who’s really free?