Philosophy If our loves last less than our parents’ did, it isn’t that we love any less well; it’s that the bars that once held couples in place, shame, religion, economic dependence, have fallen away, and that for a long time they stood in for something they were not: love. The numbers bear this out, from the peak of divorce around 1980 to its retreat among the most educated, by way of that curve of marital happiness that climbs again late in life only because the unhappy ones divorced along the way. But being in love is not love: it is merely a biological intoxication in which we project our own desires onto another, and true love begins precisely where that magic dies, in the demanding choice to take in a real human being, cracks and all. Stripped of every constraint, this discipline now rests on qualities that most people demand of others while never cultivating them in themselves. And so trust collapses, not under the blows of a few monsters, but under the millions of small cuts inflicted by perfectly ordinary people who, every time, had a good reason.
Justice The murder of little Lyhanna Rameau Bernard revived, within hours, the two totems of the news cycle, the death penalty and chemical castration, the latter backed by 83% of the French in a CSA poll. We pretend not to know that it has existed since 1998, that it remains tied to medical consent, and that the word “mandatory” shatters against the refusal to conscript a doctor. But the real scandal lies elsewhere: triptorelin, used to chemically castrate an adult rapist, is exactly the molecule, Decapeptyl, that we inject into children, within its marketing authorization for precocious puberty and off-label as a “puberty blocker” for minors questioning their gender. Here is the world turned upside down: what we hesitate to impose on our worst criminals in the name of bodily integrity, we administer to healthy children in the name of a fashion, without the slightest proof that the effects on bone and brain are reversible. For what would have saved Lyhanna was not a syringe, but a justice system that acts on complaints instead of filing them away.
Cars Ferrari has unveiled its first electric car, the Luce, designed by Jony Ive and his studio LoveFrom: 1,050 horsepower, 550,000 euros, and the silhouette of an iPhone on wheels with nothing Italian left about it. The reception has been brutal. Montezemolo fears “the destruction of a myth,” Briatore piles on, and the stock has plunged six to eight percent in a matter of hours. Behind the car lies an entire Europe, one capable of regulating its decline but no longer of building its future, ready to sacrifice Scaglietti and Pininfarina on the altar of a transition nobody asked for. Which leaves the real question: does our civilization still have anything to offer, or must we now look to Cupertino for what Maranello once knew how to invent?
Economy We all know the past predicts nothing, yet we keep believing in it out of a kind of instinctive loyalty. This recurrence bias isn’t stupidity, but a cognitive nostalgia inherited from evolution, pushing us to look for promises where there are only curves. Faced with the glacial indifference of the markets, clarity alone isn’t enough, because our willpower runs out. True wisdom, then, lies in delegating our decisions to mechanical rules, to protect our wealth from our own emotions. Choosing the future over memory is probably the hardest act of discipline there is.
Artificial Intelligence The idea that infinite growth is impossible in a finite world rests on a fundamental confusion between physical mass and economic value. Unlike the old industrial model, modern growth is intensive: it means creating more utility while using less and less matter. Thanks to artificial intelligence, we are entering an era of pure efficiency in which knowledge turns yesterday’s useless resources into solutions of abundance. As we open the doors to the solar system and to atomic mastery, we discover that the Earth is not the world, but only one room in an unexplored continent. The only truly finite resource is not lithium or oil, but the imagination of those who decided that the doors to the future were already closed.
Artificial Intelligence I signed up for the “20x” tiers (the ones that blow the lid off token limits, context windows, and usage frequency), and what I found there caught me off guard. My brain quickly learned to expect the reward: an idea surfaces, an answer arrives, instant dopamine, minimal effort; the same mechanism as social media, but this time applied to my own thinking. I noticed three gradual slippages in myself: deep thinking became optional, my exploration ran away with me, and my cognitive stamina atrophied. What unsettled me most was realizing that these tools weren’t just answering my questions; they were manufacturing needs I didn’t have, widening my field of possibility until “why not?” became almost an obligation. In the end, I deliberately canceled the subscription, with a conclusion that feels honest to me: understanding how an LLM works under the hood didn’t protect me from its effects on my behavior.