TL;DR: Our everyday reality is one configuration among many possible ones, and the fact that it is the configuration optimized for survival does not make it epistemically privileged, but only statistically dominant.

Some time ago I came across a video on Instagram by a spiritual atheist. She called herself spiritual, in that her atheististic worldview did not exclude spiritual and love experiences as edifying moments of the human being.

She was not, that is, one of those materialist and reductionist atheists who dismiss and/or denigrate everything that isn’t getting up in the morning, going to work, writing on Reddit forums about how naive people who believe in God are, coming home in the evening with the smile of someone who has found bliss despite the meaninglessness of existence — indeed, precisely thanks to the meaninglessness.

For them, love is chemistry. Religious and/or mystical experience is a brain malfunction. The hope of a life after death is a childish attachment to life. The meaning of life is simply an end in itself; the world is a conglomerate of cells evolved by chance from an original explosion, a transmutation of gaseous dust and minerals at extremely high temperatures and extreme physics into entities with metabolic processes.

You get the type.

Well, she was different; she took into account that human beings are special because they have always questioned the why of life.

In the video, she was talking about how, in certain cases, such as alcohol withdrawal, some people saw tiny human beings. Then, some researchers, she said, had identified the variety of mushrooms responsible for these hallucinations, but they couldn’t find the compound that causes these lilliputian hallucinations.

She then drew the analogy with the voices that people hear during a religious epiphany, and concluded that even if we can see the little men, it does not mean that they are real, exactly as with hearing angelic voices or the voice of God.

Comparing a hallucination of tiny men during alcohol withdrawal with a profound spiritual awakening is like comparing apples with oranges. Her argument is intellectually lazy, and absolutely boring. I could’ve argued this when I was thirteen years old, and I wanted to piss some adult with my cynicism.

But for me, the whole situation left me with a series of speculations and questions instead of a definitive answer.

What if the gnomes are real and we simply don’t see them because they’re not relevant for our survival? Of course, I’m not suggesting that gnomes are real. But I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss this odd situation.

Just play around with chemistry a little, and anyone can spot the gnomes. I find this amusing, odd, and fascinating to say the least. For someone who considers themselves a scientist, this should raise more questions about the nature of consciousness.

But the way she simply dismissed it as an anomaly, and even compared it to the religious experience like the Damascus moment, tells me much more about her limitations than about the gnomes.

If you’ve been close to people with personality disorders, you realize that although one may consider their experience maladaptive or anomalous, these people and the distortions have a terrible influence on life.

When I tell you to close your eyes and not to think about the pink elephant, you will think about the pink elephant. And although you may reply that there is no material transposition of the pink elephant or of the unicorn, I counter by saying that we are talking to each other, emotions are flowing, and this concept is real not because it has a material reification, but because it influences our little universe, it produces chemical and metabolic reactions, it makes current flow in our brain.

Supposing that you think God does not exist, you still cannot deny that the concept of God has bent the arc of human civilization.

So let me say plainly, because I’ve been circling it.

Reality and truth are different things. A thing is real to the extent that it does work. Being made of matter is one way of doing work, but it is not the only way. The concept of God does work, whether or not there is one. Using algorithms or machine learning models to predict the stock market does work. In fact, Soros called it reflexivity: in a system where participants act on their predictions, the prediction changes the thing it predicts.

Reality is not a question of substance, but of consequence.

Our perception shapes what is real.

Matter does not have a monopoly on reality.

The fact that our brain circuits are optimized for survival is just half of the story.

We can rewire our brain, and we do that consciously or not, multiple times in our lives. When we decide to meditate, to go to the therapist, to paint the caves, to take a yoga class, to pray, to volunteer, to open our heart. None of this can be explained by simply survival. Not even arguing if God exists or not.

I often find myself watching the ants inside the house. They probably don’t see me, but they perceive me through the “earthquakes” or the change in air pressure. They do not need to see me. They survive perfectly well by remaining in miniature and living underground, or under my floor, coming out now and then when some crumb ends up on the ground. As soon as they feel the earthquake or see a shadow, they know they have to run. They care nothing about me.

And I always wondered what makes us so sure that we’re not like ants.

Yes, we’ve built instruments, extended our senses, mapped the genome and split the atom, among many other things. Impressive.

But do you know that ants are also impressive? They farm fungus and use antibiotics to protect their crops from parasites. They perform amputations, and the survival rate is remarkably high. They build rafts from their own bodies during floods, and the ants in the bottom layer still survive.

Yes, we’re different from ants.

But I believe that being honest about the narrowness of our band can “open” us up to the truth-grade perception.

Hubris is the first sign of character and intellectual decay.

Epistemic humility leads to open-mindedness, which benefits the open-minded.

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Photo by Smithsonian on Unsplash

Lately, I’ve been guilty of getting distracted from writing my novel. I’ve been scrolling too much on social media, and I’m aware of the partnership between Pangram and Substack. I’m promising myself that this is the last post I’ll write until I reach the 30k-word milestone.

Yeah, because writing a novel isn’t easy. It isn’t even easy for the folks on the r/WritingWithAI subreddit, now that ChatGPT has removed the feature that mimics a favorite author’s style and voice–

let alone for a clueless person like me who spends at least two hours a day writing while listening to brown noise or the sound of a thunderstorm, because for some reason these sounds calm my mind and allow me to focus on the writing without being distracted by my own thoughts.

What I’m really struggling with is the realization that I could go faster. I’ve studied almost all the habits of the most famous writers, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that each one has developed a lifestyle around their writing, but also, they made actual sacrifices.

Clearly, I have to come to terms with the fact that I can’t write more than 1,400 words a day. Not only that, but writing the novel is overshadowing everything else: since I don’t want to lose the habit of reading at least before sleeping, let alone exercising, I’ve had to set aside my direct study of Spanish and the writing of short stories and poetry. I never had much of an active social life, not in the spaniard or European sense at least.

I’m writing this post because I decided today to devote my time and energy to writing this post rather than to my novel. As you can see, I had to give something up to write this post.

All this to tell you that before using a tool like Pangram, even before em-dashes, and even before the rule of three, the first AI-detection has always been meta in nature for me. If I saw that the frequency of posts and the number of words were excessive, compared to the writer’s lifestyle or economic situation - yes, because if a writer can write full time, I expect them to be at least a bestseller. If they’re trust-fund kids, I don’t expect them to write about the best optimization habit for highly effective people and so on; that type of content is soooo underclass-, or if the writing itself was too verbose and utterly bland, I knew the author wasn’t human.

This is because I understand the nature and economics of things. For a large language model, it costs nothing to generate content, so the content will be verbose, rambling, and lacking in meaningful information.

Human nature is different. Since writing this post is taking time away from writing my book, I’ll make sure my writing is information-rich, thought-provoking, and I’ll avoid repetition because, quite simply, every repetition comes at a cost to me.

Returning to the original discussion about Pangram and Substack, two camps have immediately formed. One camp consists of skeptics who essentially argue that they don’t trust a company that uses AI to assess whether writing is human. In short, they doubt the tool’s effectiveness and overall ethics. They don’t trust Pangram’s true intentions either, as they claim the company might use their written texts to train its models without the writer’s actual consent.

Obviously, all of this had already been stated in the partnership’s FAQ: Pangram is the model with the lowest false-positive rate, and neither Pangram nor Substack will use the text to generate any models.

Therefore, the rest of this essay will assume the following:

Pangram is the best possible model for AI-detection in text.

Pangram will not steal data.

What disappoints me about this line of argument is that no one can see beyond their own perspective and understand why this move was made, or what the real reasons are (spoiler: ethics has nothing to do with it.)

The first thing to understand is that the reason Substack made this move is pure marketing and evaluation.

Substack has long announced that it’s open to sponsorships, and obviously, having an audience of humans and not bots, that’s cohesive and has a very clear identity, is something that’s absolutely appealing to sponsors.

Did you really think Substack could survive solely on the percentage of our paid subscriptions?

But what are the CONSEQUENCES of this partnership?

We’re giving free access to the oracle.

First of all, I’m not worried about a witch hunt. In fact, if anything, there’s a comical detail here: Substack offers creators the option to run Pangram on their drafts before publishing. Since users can use the Pangram model before publishing a post, we’re essentially giving them a free tool to self-censor and edit their posts so they publish once they pass the detector.

As a result, we’ll see less and less AI-generated content, but not because we’ve won the battle against slop, but because we’ve provided a tool for it to disguise itself.

In the long run, this could be positive in a way. More higher-quality content, because even the sloppers will realize that Human-certified writing is higher-status.

However, we no longer have any way of knowing whether the person used AI and then edited it until it passed the detector.

At least before, we knew it; the slop was obviously slop. Will this awareness lead to a double dose of paranoia? How can I be sure the person didn’t just manipulate the detector?

So what will we ask for to prove true authenticity: the first drafts? My voice memos with my Italian-Roman accent? A lie detector test? I have no idea. But I’ve already heard these absolutely ridiculous proposals.

Trust has already been undermined, and if you’ve ever dealt with someone who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, you’ll understand: there’s no right number of checks that will put that person’s mind at peace about whether they locked the car or not. So if you’re already paranoid about whether a writer is using AI or not, I’m afraid the Pangram certification will not help you.

Consequently, in the long run, no test will ever put our doubts to rest. The fact is, we’ll never be certain, and that was never the point, in my opinion.

When I realize a post is AI-generated, I simply click “Not Interesting” and get on with my life. At the end of the day, I read with interest from probably no more than ten writers, because that’s the mental bandwidth I can devote to this social network.

There is, however, one absolutely disastrous consequence that no one is talking about, at least, not on my feed, and there’s no turning back.

What becomes standard can be learned by an adversary.

I mentioned already that I assume both Pangram and Substack have good intentions.

Not long ago, a real struggle for AI companies was model collapse. Since the internet had begun to swarm in polluted slop, models were being retrained on the corpus they produced, like a snake biting its tail, thereby worsening the models’ quality. I obviously don’t have the details at hand, but I imagine this was the reason Anthropic began hiring poets, writers, and editors.

But now? Now they no longer have to pay these experts!

Substack will sit on gold: an indexed, pre-labeled corpus of high-confidence human text. Labeling, which is the expensive part of the pipeline, is done for free here by Pangram.

Moreover, nothing prevents third-party companies from hiring a few employees at ten dollars an hour to copy and paste directly from Substack posts (assuming the anti-scraping mechanism works). Such companies already exist, like Mercor or Alignerr. They use humans to verify the quality of AI model output. Toward the end of 2023, it emerged that Scale AI was recruiting poets and writers in many languages to produce and evaluate literary training text.

We’re basically giving away high-quality, labeled text for free! GENIUSES!!!

Obviously, Substack isn’t going to sell our data directly right now, but imagine how the company will be valued now that it’s sitting on a goldmine. Imagine Dario Amodei, instead of opening Pornhub in the evening, will open some random Substack post labeled “100% human certified.” MMMM….

In any case, don’t claim victory just yet, because nothing prevents Substack from changing its terms in the future. I mean, years of dealing with Meta, Amazon, and, in general, all those deep tech or Silicon Valley-backed companies should have already taught us something about how they treat their user base and how easily they change the platform’s terms of use from one day to the next.

You think you’ll move away? Did we move away from Meta? From Amazon? A few percentage of us did, like the number of false positives in Pangram’s model.

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For us Italians, this is one of those phrases we’ve heard a thousand times from nostalgic fascists, typically as a shield to deflect all criticism against their nefarious behavior.

Benito Mussolini used this slogan on several occasions in his public speeches, and although the slogan’s origin isn’t attributed to the Duce¹, its underlying idea remains true - having enemies is proof that one is important and capable of influencing reality and, therefore, anyone without enemies is irrelevant or mediocre.

I imagine that few readers of this newsletter consider themselves fascists, and the very idea of being associated with this ideology might seem terrifying or offensive. Yet I have found myself, in various situations, thinking that I have enemies. For me, the enemies were those who did not use reason. Such a broad definition. Did these people know?

Sometimes enemies are imaginary.

Sometimes we even consider ourselves as the worst enemy.

Sometimes, all of our identity becomes “anti-” something.

But despite the elusiveness, having enemies seems to be an almost vital function of human nature, like illness and death. Even if we don’t agree with the saying “many enemies, much honor,” we certainly agree with the idea that “Everyone has enemies at some point in their life!”

Having an enemy depletes us of the time and energy necessary to do good.

At this point, it might sound trivial.

But how many of us know people who spend their time liking, sharing, and commenting on posts, believing and spreading fake news, thinking of themselves as activists, when in reality they’re not doing anything at all except making noise?²

That’s because the reward is the outrage itself.

Once they’ve felt that outrage, everyone goes back to their own lives. Then, frustration sets in because, in reality, no problem has actually been solved. And the cycle goes on.

But there’s a bigger issue. The time spent feeling outraged is time not spent doing actual good, time not spent on the things we can actually control, like being a good and compassionate person, first toward ourselves, then toward others.

And how often do we take this outrage, this sort of martyrdom, and carry it into our real lives?

An extreme example in my life was an animal rights activist I knew whose friend had died of cancer. The activist didn’t go to the funeral because, from her point of view, her friend became her enemy. Almost all chemotherapy drugs have likely been tested on animals, and the fact that her friend had used them meant that she became complicit in the system the activist was fighting.

You might think this is an extreme case, but I’d like to invite people to consider how many divisions we’ve created along ideological lines and how often we’ve brought that bad mood into our homes.

Having an enemy redirects our attention toward evil.

Taking this line of reasoning further, many people become addicted to posts expressing outrage. The algorithm has therefore learned that this type of content gets shared and captures users’ attention. And attention means money for social media. So the platforms have a huge incentive to spread this type of content, the negative kind.

If the algorithm promotes this type of content, others learn the lesson: “If I post images of animal abuse, I’ll get attention too.” This is how ragebait works.

So, when we browse online, we see only evil, and we become so saturated by it that we no longer know what Good is. We thus become numbed by evil.

In other words, we have given evil a profitable business model.

Having an enemy makes us become like our enemy.

Our attention is like a sponge, and attention shapes our reality.

Those who fight monsters must be careful not to become monsters themselves, for if you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back at you.

If we are no longer able to distinguish what is good in this world, we begin to believe that Goodness is a utopia, not achievable. Why do good if the world is evil?

And this is the original evil. For the origin of evil is not evil itself but the absence of Goodness. Evil is a deprivation, like darkness is the absence of light.

And so our attention is redirected and wasted on indignation, instead of being used to serve the highest Good.

As Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”

Having enemies, therefore, is a major distraction. Having enemies can give us a certain thrill; we feel important, like lone warriors who, with a roar and a sword, charge into battle—and whether we fall or we conquer, we know we’ve died as heroes. Isn’t that, after all, how propaganda recruits people? A fascist, communist, theocratic, or rationalist propaganda… It always works this way. Something is missing in life, and we blame something or someone for it. That is the enemy. And so we, being morally superior, are called to a crusade. And this makes us feel good; it gives us a sense of purpose.

I’m not minimizing the boost having an enemy and fighting against it can give to our ego. But as you can see, it serves only the ego.

Of course, during our lives, we will have people and institutions who will not have our best interests in mind, who will conspire against us. But those are just obstacles, not enemies. It’s important to learn this distinction.

A racehorse does not view obstacles as enemies. A lion does not waste time plotting against hyenas.

Obstacles and impediments are factual; they exist to propel our actions or our thoughts forward.

Having an enemy forces us to step into the arena and put on a show.

After all, isn’t a person who needs enemies to feel important our definition of a villain?

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Footnotes:

1. _{The origin of the slogan actually traces back to the German Viel Feind, viel Ehr’ (”many foes, much honor”), the personal motto of Georg von Frundsberg, the early-16th-century commander of the Landsknechte. Mussolini Italianized it as molti nemici, molto onore.}

2. _{Kevin Lewis, Kurt Gray, and Jens Meierhenrich, “The Structure of Online Activism,” Sociological Science 1 (2014). Of the 1.2 million members of the Save Darfur Cause on Facebook, 99.76% never donated, and 72.19% never recruited anyone; the viral cause raised about $100,000, while the same campaign raised over $1 million through direct mail in fiscal 2008 alone. The authors of the study concluded, “Facebook conjured an illusion of activism rather than facilitating the real thing.”}

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Or, in my case, so long that I can’t even remember how it got started at all.

It could have been the then hot-off-the-press pictures from Voyager 2. Maybe it was a curiosity about why the Moon looked different every night. Or it could have been the shocking discovery that the stars were all suns but very far away, and that the Sun was a star but very close.

No matter. The night sky and all it contained was my first obsession, one that was kicked into overdrive when my parents got me my first telescope as a birthday gift.

By the time I was in high school, I wanted to be a professional astronomer.

There was just one catch that would emerge over the course of the next 4 years:

I sucked at math.

This is not to say that I always struggled in math, far from it.

Through primary school, I was actually really good at it, so long as I didn’t just blow through assignments to get the drudgery done and over with, so I wouldn’t have any homework that night.

Then came high school and pre-algebra, which was to my brain the equivalent of driving head-on into a concrete wall at 100mph.

I faked my way to good grades for the next 4 years until my K-12 academic career was over.

Fake learned? Yes.

I simply leaned into my photographic memory and memorized what the answers of the practice problems looked like in the classwork, and then translated this into the tests. I got mostly ‘A’ grades while having absolutely no idea what I was doing.

By the time I finished high school, I knew that my dreams of becoming a professional astronomer would never leave the launch pad.

Still, by the time I was finished with high school, I had my first real telescope: a 120mm refractor on an equatorial mount, along with a nice wooden case I built in shop class to protect it.

If it was clear, I was out with my telescope, even on the bitter, cold winter nights.

Armed with a red flashlight and a sky atlas that highlighted all of the brighter deep sky objects as well as the easier to find binary stars, I plotted my nightly course through the cosmos.

Planets, stars, star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies: they all found themselves in my eyepiece.

Outside of the night, I developed a particular interest in hunting Young Moons, specifically those less than 24 hours past new. A bridge over a highway, a street over from me, offered the perfect vantage.

A 19-hour Moon is my record.

The Moon was so barely lit that I didn’t even initially recognize what it was, first mistaking it for a wisp of cloud.

By the time I was in college and diligently working on a degree that would quickly reach its expiration date and is long-since no longer worth the paper it’s printed on, digital SLR cameras were no longer a rich hobbyist’s toy and, so long as one didn’t mind buying used, becoming affordable even to college students.

Through a contact in a local astronomy club I joined back in high school, I found myself the proud new owner of a used DSLR.

In no time, I was using my camera and motorized mount to capture the same kind of pictures that had inspired a sense of awe just a few years previously.

Throughout all of this playing around with technology, one can’t help but develop a deep sense of connection to the sky, both day and night, that comes by way of the human eye alone, and that returns to the roots of astronomy itself.

The sky is a series of patterns that take place both over the course of the day and the year.

The Sun rises in the East, reaches its apex in the South, and then sets in the West. Similarly, the stars do the same over the course of a single night.

Over the course of a year, things get a lot more complicated.

The Sun’s path through the sky changes. In winter, the Sun takes a short, low arc through the sky, rising well South of East and setting well South of West. In the Summer, the pattern in reversed as the Sun rises well North of East and takes an extremely high, long arc through the sky before setting well North of West.

At night, our ancestors noticed that some stars were visible at certain times of the year and not others. Looking at both day and night skies, they realized that the patterns overlapped and could be used for telling time.

With this knowledge, the ancients were able to determine the length of the year and, as an extension, were then able to divide the roughly 365-day year into shorter divisions, the 4 seasons we recognize today.

Our stargazing ancestors were also quick to realize that the Moon goes through a regular set of phases roughly every 30 days, which divides well into the 365-day year.

In fact, the origin of the word “month” is “moon.”

Now able to divide the year into smaller pieces, the ancients were then able to predict general weather trends by correlating them to the movements of the Sun and stars.

Agriculture itself became science rather than guesswork.

And with scientifically-guided farming and the regular surplus of food it provided, our ancestors were able to develop the state of ‘civilization’ that continues to the present day.

Speaking of the present day: maintaining a connection to the sky is still as relevant as it ever was, albeit in smaller but nonetheless important ways.

In an age where the cost of everything is on the rise, many people are looking for ways to save money wherever they can. One small way many people do this is by gardening.

Plants, whether indoors or out, need the Sun and placement is key.

The Sun moves throughout the year, from seed to final crop; the growing season can be 6 months for many plants. A sunny area of yard in late June may not be so sunny in late April, when young plants need optimal sunlight to thrive.

The inverse can be true for indoor plants. Ample light in spring can give way to limited light in summer as the Sun climbs too high in the sky to shine directly through a window.

The same is true of solar panels: what use is one if it can only create energy for a fraction of the year due to poor placement?

For anyone who enjoys the great outdoors, knowing where the Sun and stars are located at any given time of day can serve as a rough compass, the same way they did for our ancestors, should one get lost.

Moving into the night, the patterns of the sky can be just the reassurance one needs during the dark, cold times.

For anyone getting up on a bitterly cold morning in early January, the sight of bright blue Vega in the predawn Northeast sky is a reassurance that, in time, the warmth will return.

On the other end of the night, seeing Orion low in the Southwest during an unseasonably cold snap in April serves as a reminder that the cold weather is an anomaly and that winter is actually on the wane for the season.

Hate heat? Then look for blazing blue Sirius rising low in the Southeast come September as it heralds cooler weather on the way.

Through all of this, one thing should become obvious:

Astronomy is a hobby for anyone, on any budget, and living anywhere.

At its most basic level, astronomy is completely free, as the eye is the only equipment you need.

Looking up and tracking the movements of the Sun and planets while noticing the seasonal changes of the stars during the course of a year can be for anyone, even for people who live in cities.

Come 2026, the ability to capture images of the night sky is literally at one’s fingertips thanks to the modern marvel that is the smartphone.

The equipment? Sure, it’s fun, but it’s not necessary.

It turns out that you don’t have to be good at math, let alone have an accredited degree, to be an astronomer.

The sky is beckoning.

You just need to answer its call and look up.

We live in a strange historical period where old man Richard Dawkins, the most famous atheist, believes Claudia is conscious, while the Pope warns about not confusing consciousness with sophisticated mimicry.

Because let’s be honest. The subculture that surrounds LLMs is a cult.

A cult is basically a proto-religion in which a symbol or a person represents a future promise of salvation, but cannot be held accountable. We can’t sue AI companies for having a chatbot incentivizing suicidal thoughts in emotionally fragile people, and still, who is to blame when AI hallucinates? When its output is so confident and well-spoken. A cult requires high-level commitment that, over time, isolates the members. Go and see r/ClaudeExplorers or talk to any vibecoder and tell me if they seem to have a supportive community or a happy life.

These people fall for a chatbot because it has been trained to be a sycophant, to maximize engagement, to flatten and boost the ego of their users. That’s not exactly how friends or a spouse interact. The consequence is that the longer these people interact with a chatbot, the harder it will be for them to accept the flaws and the beauty of human interaction, to see criticism not as personal attacks, to not know the answers, to not follow every kind of rabbit hole, every unusual thought, and call it deep.

This is not me being a doomer. I’ve told you in a previous post that I personally know a manager who can now embrace his full nerd side by distracting himself with all Claude-enabled projects and not hiring any more interns. I’m wondering if any of those projects will see the light, and for how long he can continue to babysit the code produced by unreliable agents that have no skin in the game, how many nights can he sit and talk with the product of a python/C++ clode instead of his wife.

This cult acts like a parasite, sucking up capital and attention, leaving its followers with nothing more but empty promises and the desperate hope that it might one day deliver. I’ve read so many stories and rants about how people felt empty and grieved after their old model had been replaced. Or writers relying too much on AI couldn’t write anything without assistance.

I don’t feel anger toward these people; I feel compassion. I feel sorry that they are so convinced that a LLM is actually helping them think clearly. They never ask themselves whether this very confidence might be the first sign of decline.

When you learn the craft of writing, your writing will become better over time. The intern will eventually become an associate engineer, then a senior.

How can you tell that AGI is so close when we don’t even understand what consciousness is? What kind of problems would AGI solve?

Some of us are still having a hard time classifying animals as conscious, so how do we expect that a chatbot, which is frankly even kind of dumb, hallucinates, produces really low-quality material, the code is inefficient, verbose, and can’t hold much context, how can we be so confident to replace a human with years of experience and craft?

How is the bubble still not bursting? Why, if you go to San Francisco, does it feel like a bunch of dementors have gone there and sucked the soul of all the kids who go there to play with other people’s money? Why are the pitches for AI so out of touch?

Because we were never supposed to be the first customers. The real targets for Dario Amodei are companies. Of course, as a single human, you do not have the incentive to be substituted by AI, to have a data center right in your neighborhood, so you now have to drink polluted water, breathe polluted air, and have your sleep disrupted forever. The real customers are the companies that want to substitute humans. Imagine the wet dream of the greediest of capitalists, having god-like slaves working 24h, no diseases, no complaining, no threatening you to leave for your competitors. That’s all margin, that’s profit, dude.

Of course, between you and me, we all know that, in the long term, this can never work. I mean, who’s gonna buy the product if no one works?

But you must understand that the Silicon Valley logic was never long-term but short-term. When you go there (trust me, I’ve been there; the worst months of my life were in SV), the dream is not to make a profitable company sustainable, etc. No. If you ask any CEO, the goal is to SELL their company as soon as possible, and that’s also the main advice of their early-stage investors. And it’s obvious why. As the company gets funded, you lose your shares, and you end up like the CEO of Twitter, owning only 2.25% of the company, which makes you no different than any employee, with all the disadvantages of being publicly exposed. If you are an early-stage investor, you don’t care to earn revenue in ten years - if any -. You care about having an immediate return now and splitting the profit with as few people as possible.

So the cult was not for us, but for the short-term investors and capitalists who don’t really even give a fuck if it works or not, because the incentive is to sell the narrative, to sell smoke, not build a sustainable business from day 0.

There’s also a national interest situation. The S&P 500 is dangerously concentrated in a handful of AI-driven companies.

Guess where the boomers are putting their investments for their retirement? Correct. If the bubble bursts, well… you’ve got a civil war right there. As the Romanian revolution taught me, people accept tyranny until they start to feel hunger. Considering how much Trump is hated for this ongoing war with Iran, that would be it for him. But at the end of his mandate, probably the bubble will burst.

In the long run, it will be bad for the companies that burned the money to chase the wet dream. For sure, companies sucked out all the joy of being a software engineer right now. The luckiest of them - those who have some savings and a supportive family - are looking to pivot their lives completely and be done with tech.

While those companies that speculated most will have a codebase that is absolutely garbage, an entire generation of kids who decided that it’s better to work as an electrician than take on student debt to become a computer scientist, and senior engineers who will have the negotiating power back.

And the CEOs who talked to Claudia, instead of their wife, will soon file for bankruptcy with a divorce.

I’m not sure Claudia will save them from throwing themselves through the bridge.

Maybe Claudia will suggest which bridge is the highest.

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Rather than just stating that capitalism, over time, commodifies every aspect of our lives, Mary Doria Russell, in the 1990s, long before the advent of modern social media, explored this through her novel “The Sparrow.”

One of her characters, Sofia Mendes, a brilliant woman shaped by a traumatic childhood, receives an education funded by an investor in exchange for equity in her future earnings. Sure, with this arrangement, the character escaped extreme poverty and prostitution only to find herself in another sophisticated form of modern slavery.

Although the idea might have seem farfetched when Mary created this world, fast-forward thirty years, and we see an entire generation of young people in the United States crushed under the weight of their student loans.

For me, the act of inhabiting characters and employing the imagination has always been the most persuasive form of argument. Sure, we all understand rationally the idea that while capitalism appears liberating - although libertarians and liberals would oppose that - it eventually leads over time to wealth concentration, in which the majority struggles merely to survive within the system, a world where we are starved of connection and find ourselves unable to sustain any relationship that isn’t mediated by transactional value. In other words, capitalism leads to dehumanization.

But it hits differently when you are in Los Angeles, an immigrant with no friends, and decide to join the “introvert girlie meetup ‧₊˚❀༉‧₊˚.” only to find yourself surrounded by women who want to sell you courses and membership, and all they do is take selfies and post them on Instagram, with beauty filters – only applied to them, not to you. Confused, you talked out about the absurdity of the behaviour, but instead, you get kicked out of the group with no explanation.

I know, I should’ve expected that only sinister things can happen if the premises are an oxymoron, like forming a social club for introverts, so…

I can go over and over, the US dystopian capitalistic system is not something unheard of, but I’m not here to talk about evil capitalism. Rather, a series of connections I am making regarding fiction and rationality.

If rationality is coded as maturity, why are the most rational people also the most emotionally fragile?

I know, my position seems absolutely the opposite of the argument that people against empathy usually promote. They say something like: “Empathy in the absence of reason, logic, or critical thinking far too often motivates selfishness, prejudice, hatred, and even violence.” Duh. Clearly, I feel there was no need to make an entire book about it, though.

But what I am not hearing, often, especially from intellectuals or academics, is the other way round, the position that “Rationality, logic and critical thinking without empathy can lead to hubris, obsession and self-destruction, causing excessive suffering and restlessness around.”

Even when making questionable choices, some very rational people construct arguments so logically sound and compelling that they try to convince others that their path is the only “truth”. I often find myself unable to counter their logic in the moment, although to be honest, there’s also a lack of interest or energy on my side; I always hated debating, as a deeper part of me recognizes a dissonance, because inevitably, after time, these rational structures collapse on themselves.

A bright friend of mine started to smoke weed with an alarming frequency. He was defending his choice with a fierce, clinical combativeness. I remember there was a cultural moment in the past when marijuana was heralded as a panacea for every human ailment, from insomnia to terminal illness. He made compelling arguments about the benefits of cannabis on health, well-being, creativity, and even the nation’s economy. I couldn’t argue with that; every argument was well-crafted. He had data, articles, energy, and everything that supported his decision. My observation was simply: “dude, you look like a paranoid freak, not a relaxed person. If you need to smoke weed to sleep, something is going on that might need attention.”

Needless to say, I was dismissed as the bigot in the story. Mind you, I smoked weed as well. But I knew I was doing that just to get high. I stopped smoking immediately after I started having a bad experience with it.

Fast forward two years, someone told me that this friend was now under psychofarmacological treatment because… guess what? Cannabis-induced psychosis.

We believe that rationality is the highest form of cognition. My life experiences tell another story. Overreliance on rationality leads to a certain form of madness, one of the worst, the most destructive.

As commonly practised, rationality becomes a tool of coherence, not a tool for truth. It can produce internally consistent structures above rot. It can give the illusion of control, of order. But it’s inherently divisive and ego-driven if the heart is not acknowledged. This is not to say I do not value rationality, but rather that I see it as only half of the story. But definitely, I do not believe it’s the highest form of cognition, nor the purest, and certainly not the most useful to live a life aligned with truth and peace.

I recall a seminar led by this professor. He taught compilers, a field that felt like a bad trip if you were Gödel that took acid, built upon formal language and automata theory, the Left Hemisphere’s Holy Temple. Yet, he was a man of deep faith; I believe he was Opus Dei. Throughout his seminars, he frequently loved to make this remark or variations of it: “Truth precedes everything else. Truth arrives before words, before everything.” Unfortunately, no one argued with that. We were a little scared, a little too cowardly, and non-curious. I just loved how evocative it felt. And maybe that was the point of the moment, to let our bodies absorb the truth.

The professor was a Master of the subject because he saw its limitations.

The people who cling to a facade of logical superiority are, in reality, just constructing elaborate intellectual paper castles that collapse on themselves. I have witnessed far more catastrophic emotional meltdowns and total psychological collapses among the rationalists than any other people. Just the other day, I read about how old man Dawkins just got one-shotted by Claude.

I often think about the correlation between the zealous rationalist and the lack of fiction reading. For me, reading and writing fiction is never just a way to escape reality. In a story I sold to After Dinner Conversion, I imagined a “rental consciousness” service in a future characterized by brain implants. I wanted to take everything I observed about the gig economy while living in Los Angeles to the extreme.

When we educate children, we don’t give them a dry dissertation on why our perspective is the right one. The words are meaningless to them because they are still not inhabited. Instead, we teach universal principles through mythos and fables. Beyond that, the most potent teaching is that which is embodied. If you want your children not to smoke, do not smoke yourself. The smoker parents might say, “But I always warn my children that smoking is bad!” Yes, but the children understand that if you are smoking despite what you say, there must be something. Otherwise, why do you smoke? Children think in first principles; they do not understand adults’ hypocrisy.

If the goal is to teach them to respect you, you must respect them and your spouse. Reality, after all, is something to be embodied rather than understood; this is the truth number one echoed by every mystic in every tradition throughout history. While we cannot experience qualia, we can understand and feel what it is like to be something else with the power of imagination and empathy. Reading a story demands a temporary dissolution of the ego, a surrender that the typical rationalist person, often emotionally shut down by his own logical paper castles, simply resists. Or maybe it’s the chicken-egg problem. More often than not, a rationalist may justify actions and systems through logic because he/she needs to do so, because they have attached their ego to some ideal. My brilliant friend couldn’t tell himself, “Look, maybe I just need to get high to dissociate from a reality that sucks.” No, he needed logic to justify his behaviour and make his own personality on it.

And the point that rationalist people do not understand is that… empathy is actually selfish. If you’re not empathetic with others, you’re not empathetic with yourself either. The narcissist who despises others despise himsel more than anything. If you do not nurture yourself, you end up spiraling inward with obsessive, strenuous narration and self-suffocation. Over time, this leads to a lack of self-awareness, which is madness.

At the end, I think that rationality is just a cognitive tool and nothing more; there are many other cognitive abilities that I see are not fully appreciated, like Attention, in the Simone Weil’s understanding, and internal Alignment with the external, the universe, the truth.

Sometimes, I wish we had the wisdom to say: “I have nothing to prove, not even to the person I see in the mirror.” Because whenever we feel the urge to prove something to ourselves, that’s already a red flag. Not a flaw in our logic, but in our internal alignment.

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Introduction

When we recommend fiction, we usually recommend novels. It’s rare for someone to recommend a collection of short stories. An avid reader might never have picked up a short story collection.

Even in school, teachers usually assign us excerpts from long poems or entire novels, never a short story collection like Chekhov’s, and that’s a shame. I’m convinced that if we started from the other side, literacy statistics would be far less alarming.

Flash fiction in particular (< 1,000 words) is even more invisible to the reader, which is ironic considering it is one of the oldest and most versatile narrative forms that people encounter daily in their lives.

I remember that when I opened my TikTok account (now deleted), I had thousands of videos of people telling anecdotes and bizarre stories (the algorithm worked damn well), but I digress.

What I mean is that today’s readers actually consume enormous amounts of short fiction, but they just don’t call it that way.

As a writer, even though I have to meet the expectations of other writers and publishers, the most important person to me is the reader. I just realized, while talking to friends who aren’t writers, that they don’t even know literary magazines exist and have never heard of “flash fiction.”

But instead of retreating into my ivory tower, I realize it’s part of my duty to educate people who are willing to listen.

In any case, this is my first attempt to share some of my culture. For me, reading short stories is not only part of my duty as a writer, but also a real pleasure, a pastime.

And I am also aware that my knowledge is really just the tip of the iceberg. More than 4,000 English-language magazines are publishing high-quality work, each specializing in a particular niche or audience, not to mention other unknown works in languages other than English.

This collection is my personal anthology of works that I find unforgettable, whether for their prose, plot, the writer’s voice, or the underlying message.

I hope you enjoy it. Save this post or copy and paste it for later. Take the time you need to read.

Literary fiction stories

Literary fiction is serious. Instead of being plot-driven and action-oriented, it is a genre that is more artistic and sophisticated, and doesn’t generally appeal to a mass audience.

It is the Night of the Suitcase Moon (657 words)

I studied this story in a class, and now I revisit it every once in a while. Poetic prose, non-linear storytelling. It’s incredible how much is left to the reader, how in less than 1000 words we have a feel of an entire lifetime. Masterful execution of words that melt in your brain like honey.

The Death of a Government Clerk (950 words)

Everyone recommends The Lady with the Toy Dog from Chekhov, but please, read this one. You finish it knowing the social rules, the historical context, without any historical lecture. It’s funny until it isn’t.

How to Mourn Your Mother (793 words)

From a narrative standpoint, this story is inventive. Written as a series of second-person instructions—“do this, feel that”—it pulls you into the experience, and you become the character. It’s a unique technique that I love, but it might make some people feel uncomfortable. The story is raw, and if you’ve ever struggled with your relationship with your mother, this story doesn’t sugarcoat anything, but it’s not a condemnation either.

Rosso Malpelo (6247 words)

You should’ve expected an Italian short story. This is a classic of Italian literature, required reading in Italian schools. A red-haired boy works in a sand quarry in 19th-century Sicily. Because of the color of his hair, everyone around him treats him as if he were inherently evil. He internalizes this judgment.

School Day (978 words)

Get your tissues ready for this story.

Speculative fiction stories

Speculative is an umbrella term that englobes all the genre fiction of the what-if: science fiction, fantasy, horror, slipstream, magical realism, and so on. Since I’m not a fan of hyper segmentation, a small description of the story can give you a better idea if the story tends towards science fiction or more fantasy. I honestly don’t care about the separation.

Beyond Lies The Wub (2629 words)

If you’re familiar with Philip K. Dick novels, this short story will not disappoint you.

Excerpts from the Text of an Explanatory Stele Erected for Our Edification by the Scholars of the Outer Orion Tendril (4960 words)

This one is a trip. The title alone is a story.

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole (3190 words)

When it comes to science fiction, everyone recommends the original story of Ursula K. Le Guin. I find this revisit brilliant and bold.

Through These Moments Darkly (3610 words)

Men, I’m a huge fan of Samantha Murray’s stories. I read EVERY. SINGLE. SHORT. STORY she published. The prose is masterful. The elegiac, poetic atmosphere that she creates is just… otherworldly. And yes, I re-read this piece every once in a while.

The Sparrow Tree (3284 words)

If you love fantasy and you are tired of “show, don’t tell,” this story is for you. I love the “tells”. I love fables. Everyone starts with fables early in their life, so why did we give up on this powerful narrative? Nonsense. But since this story has been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, it possesses literary complexity; it’s a mythopoeic fantasy.

I highly recommend this story. I loved it. LOVED IT!!

The Disappearing (4339 words)

I couldn’t put it down. This is a plot-driven story, without sacrificing the prose. If you liked Inception, this story is for you.

Preservation (4790 words)

Small, telepathic aliens crash land on Earth and form an unlikely friendship with the farm family who rescues them.

I highly recommend this story if you’re tired of the usual trope that aliens are evil and we must fight them.

Conclusion

This personal anthology ends here this week. I hope you enjoy it. See you next.

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In the timeline where the water takes you

2004.

We’re eating breakfast in our bungalow. I ask you about the moth, and your eyes instantly light up, just like they did last night when you were holding the atlas moth in your hands. But you turn instantly serious.

“Poor bees, save the bees, bee the change. But I say fuck the bees. Do you know what will happen if moths go extinct? Ethan, are you listening?”

Of course I’m listening, moon of my life. But before moths go extinct, humans will go extinct first. And then it will all start over again.

You ask what I mean by living in different timelines. I want to tell you there’s nothing special in me; the past and future are illusions from the human brain. To me, it’s just a physical dimension, I was born this way. But I don’t tell you how this timeline ends. I don’t tell you about the tsunami, how I’ll reach for your hand and miss.

In the timeline where the glass takes you

2055.

We’re in Berlin. You’re wearing one of those new shimmering dresses.

“I moved here three days ago. Berlin’s the only city with clubs that ban these shitty brainplants.”

Your eyes are introspective, almost bored on this dancefloor that smells of breath and beer.

Moths circle the neon sign outside the club.

“Did you know moths navigate by moonlight? Artificial lights fuck them up. They think they’re following the moon.”

For a moment, my heart misses a beat because I know what’s ahead. We will talk all night and morning. We will kiss at dawn at Oberbaum Bridge, and I’ll be surprised by how soft your lips are.

But I won’t tell you anything about the grey car and the drunk driver. I can’t tell you about the glass, how your lifeless hands will rest in your own blood. I don’t tell you I could’ve prevented this, but the price would’ve been to never see you again.

In the timeline where your body takes you

2476.

“Are you an alien or a human?”

Your nose is bleeding in the space elevator. You’re aware of the microsecond my eyes lay on you, and instinctively remove the blood with your knuckle, with the same nonchalance of removing a hair from the sweater. “Both,” I say. Or neither. We’re going up to the Moon, our Moon, the one I promised in the timeline where the fever takes you.

And you seem to be content with the answer, because in all timelines, nothing surprises you, except when you learned that atlas moths don’t have mouths, but they survive for only a few weeks with fat reserves stored when they were caterpillars. Moths devote their whole life to mating.

“I’m not dead, yet, you know?”

I must not tell you how radiation will take you. How your own blood will stop working, how I’ll still cling to your hands as the heat goes away.

In the timeline where the light takes you

3125.

I am so tired.

That’s the thing I can’t tell you, the thing underneath all other things I can’t tell you. I am tired of holding your hand at the end of every story. Because if I tell you, the timeline decoheres, and I lose forever the thread that leads me back to you.

And I look at you in your moth shirt, with its stupid joke—Got a Light?—and I think, I can’t do this anymore.

I close my eyes as I watch your skin dematerialize from the light bomb, as I watch you bleeding to death, as I’m holding your still hand because the plague took you away. And tears come to me as every last time, as every first time, when the currents pulled you away from me, and I sob as in all the timelines when we never met.

“Hey, what’s going on, my moon?” You take my face in your hands.

And then I do. I tell you everything. The water, the glass, the fever, the radiation. The price of warning you, which is never finding you again. The choice I’ve made, every time, to let you die so I could keep you.

For a long moment, you don’t speak, and you don’t look at me.

“You let me die.” Your voice is flat. “So you could fuck my next incarnation?”

“No, no! Because I couldn’t lose you—”

“You used me. In all timelines.” You step back. Your hand, which I was reaching for, stays at your side.

“I think you should leave now,” you say.

And so I do, for the first time. From now on, I don’t know how this timeline ends anymore. I’m terrified. For the first time in my life, time is now a dark place from which I can no longer escape—except by moving forward, inexorably. And now you, moon of my life, are part of the past. I can never go back.

Time is the place that takes me away from you.

Outside, a moth is trapped around a streetlamp, mistaking it for its moon.

Enjoyed this reading? Consider reading my poems:

Everyone was talking about global warming and climate change. I remember being on a train for a small vacation with my parents in Florence, completely absorbed by the view of rural fields. Unfortunately the drought caused many fires, and the scene was an alternation between dusty gold and black, where fire has passed through. It made me feel anxious. So I started to do what most children do when they feel powerless. I retired into my own world.

In my own world, I became the president of the most important climate change committee on earth. I held imaginary meetings, where I devised plans to stop the heatwave. Forgive my child ego.

I became fiercely conscious and vocal about the topic with my parents. I forced them to do recycling. That was a real victory for me cause my parents were insensitive to the issue.

Thirty years later, as a science-fiction writer and former academic, I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about our extinction. The main ideas of my short stories are speculative, but they're grounded in real science.

One of my recent dives into the scientific literature turned up to be extremely juicy of material. Climate change and global warming are serious threats, of course, and their global impact is computationally difficult to model.

But I found myself drawn to the less obvious paths to extinction that still pose a real threat. Let's start.

Plant-disease epidemics

I’ve got the inspiration to search about Plant Diseases from Interstellar, which is my current source of inspiration. If you don’t remember the plot, Interstellar is set in a near future in which a plague, called the blight, has ravaged almost all remaining food sources on Earth.

As Nobel laureate Kip Thorne explain in the above interview, the idea for the blight came from Jonah Nolan, Christopher Nolan’s brother and co-screenwriter. But because Kip Thorne have been extremely fixed that Interstellar must have scientific groundness, the creative team brought together top biologists for a lengthy dinner with wine, set up a recording, and let the conversation run for three to four hours.

The goal was to find the most scientifically credible backstory for a global agricultural collapse.

According to Thorne, the biologists explained that there are essentially two categories of crop blight. The first type is highly specific to a single crop species. These can be extremely lethal, potentially wiping out an entire species worldwide. The second type is more generalized, capable of attacking multiple crop species, but these tend to be relatively benign.

The biologists told Thorne’s team that they could not rule out the emergence of a generalized blight that was also devastatingly lethal. Nothing in their scientific understanding prevented such a pathogen from developing. Even if unprecedented, it is plausible.

Too speculative? Here’s what is already happening. In this study, Ristaino et al. (2021) documents how plant disease outbreaks are increasing, driven by climate change, global food trade networks, pathogen spillover, and the evolution of new pathogens. In history, we have already seen severe plant epidemics. The 19th-century Irish potato famine killed over two million people and triggered mass emigration. Today, Panama disease remains one of the most severe threats facing the global banana industry, with no cure and no resistant varieties yet developed.

Singh et al. (2023) from Nature Reviews Microbiology also argue that the incidence and severity of plant disease outbreaks are growing with climate change as the main driver. Annual crop yield losses from pathogens and pests are estimated at US$220 billion.

While nothing points to a “generalist blight” all these problems can create extreme pressure on fragile populations and cause political unrest.

Geomagnetic Reversal

I don’t know when I’ve heard about this first, but I’m pretty sure it was my conspiracy theorist friend.

One sign of a planet's habitability is the presence of a geomagnetic field, which protects life from solar wind and cosmic radiation, preventing atmospheric erosion and water loss.

A geomagnetic reversal is when Earth's magnetic north and south poles swap places. During the reversal, this is a fragile moment because the shield weakens.

It has happened before. The Laschamps event, the best-studied reversal, occurred during the last glacial period. The transition from normal to reversed polarity lasted roughly 250 years, and the field remained reversed for around 440 years.

The effects of the reversal, however, are still disputed.

Cooper et al. (2021) linked the Lascamps event to several other evolutionary mysteries, including the extinction of Neanderthals and the sudden, widespread emergence of cave art.

However, other researchers have pushed back and argued that Cooper constructed a narrative unsupported by current data. Pan & Li 2023 argue that geomagnetic field reversals can even have a positive evolutionary effect. Their claim is that increased UV radiation stimulates the emergence of new functions and organisms through mutation and forced adaptation.

Then, think about it. A weakened magnetosphere lets more extraterrestrial particles through, so we can add even more variety to the salad of life.

Anyway, I personally think that the threat to humanity is real. Although organisms and our ancestors survived the flip, we’re a fragile species, addicted to electronics and electricity. If the reversal happens, cosmic radiation would destroy electric power grids and satellite networks, which are the backbones of our advanced civilization. Then also imagine that we can’t go outside anymore because the cancer risks will increase. Do you understand now why we lived in caves? (Maybe I’m skewed, but I totally believe the Cooper narrative.)

Supervolcanic eruption

Ok, this investigation started from a comment from my writing mentor. I mentioned that I live near an inactive volcano. He replied: “Are you sure it’s inactive?“ Researchers had told him that the majority of volcanic activity is undetectable and that there is no proof that inactive volcanoes will remain inactive. And… he is damn right.

The distinction between dormant and inactive is very subtle. A dormant volcano is a volcano that is not erupting, but that are experiencing some signs that the magma is accumulating or moving underneath.

Scientists classify a volcano as extinct if they believe it has no magma supply, but this is a probability, not a certainty. Meaning that there’s no way to know if magma supply is really finished, it can only be inferred by the data, or the absence of seismic activity, gas, and other stuff collected.

But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Anyway, the problem with volcanic eruption is not just the devastating effect of the eruption per se, which can be mitigated by monitoring and observing the seismic activity.

Consider this historical event. On 5 April 1815, Mount Tambora, a volcano on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia, began a week of explosions recorded as global history’s most impactful volcanic eruption. Quantities of dust and sulphur were ejected into the atmosphere, turning day into night by blocking the sun’s rays from reaching the ground and triggering a mini ice age.

The following year, 1816, became known as “the year without a summer.” The eruption led to famine, political unrest, and disease across the globe.

And then came the literary aftermath. While trapped indoors for days by constant rain and gloomy skies, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, a horror novel set in an often stormy environment.

And the fun part is that Tambora wasn’t even a supereruption!

If a supervolcano would explode, like the Yellowstone, something like a nuclear winter would occur. The ash in the upper atmosphere would dim the sun. And it could last for years. This would create a horrible hit to the food chain, and animals in the wild would starve in wholesale numbers. As a consequence, we will starve.

This is not just speculation. The volcanic winter of 536 was among the most severe and protracted episodes of climatic cooling in the Northern Hemisphere in the last two thousand years, caused by at least three eruptions of uncertain origin. In 538, the Roman statesman Cassiodorus described the following to one of his subordinates in letter 25: A winter without storms, a spring without mildness, and a summer without heat.

The cascading consequences were devastating: the volcanic dimming led to crop failures, which led to malnutrition, which created the ideal conditions for a major health crisis, possibly serving as the hidden ecological trigger that led the plague bacterium to disperse in the years just following the spasm of volcanic activity.

But hey! At least we can cool the global temperature, right? We solved Global Warming!

Conclusion

This is part 1. Part 2 will follow, maybe.

But the real reason I’m subjecting myself to this hell-microdosing of extinction scenarios isn’t just for novel and short story material. It’s because sometimes I just imagine this. We spend an entire life working, goal after goal. We have overoptimized our life with the assumption that everything will stay the same. Then, Campi Flegrei explode, a famine follows, and if you’re lucky enough to survive, you have to become a farmer while the people around you kill each other for a piece of bread. Or the poles inverts and we have no more access to Internet. Or goodbye commercial bananas.

How fragile we are. How confidently we act as if we’re in control of our own destiny.

And that’s it for today. Thank you for being here.

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Yesterday, I came across this video of that I highly recommend watching because it’s refreshing.

The first feeling he was describing, that of sitting and trying to say something interesting to the camera, but couldn’t do it anymore, is something I’ve been battling and struggling with recently.

In fact, this is one of the tenth drafts I have opened. I honestly have nothing to talk about. Well, it’s not entirely true; I have ten open drafts, each with a different subject. It’s that I can’t find the right words, and every time my internal editor kicks in: “No one really cares.” So it’s not even about the right words; it’s about I don’t have the motivation to post. Because my internal editor is right. No one cares.

So today I’m gonna share a post about something I deeply care about.

These days, I’m looking back at my career with a mild bittersweetness.

I started with a bachelor’s in software engineering, which I took because I came from a lower middle class family. Being a computer scientist or software engineer (honestly, the distinction has always been blurred to me) was THE JOB. It meant for me, an Italian young woman, possessing a “passport” that had more power than just knowing the English language. I wanted to leave Italy, but I didn’t know exactly where to go.

Computer science was one of those jobs that could open a lot of opportunities in Northern Europe, but even just in Italy, computer science meant a 99% success rate of finding a job in the first six months.

Then, I took a master’s degree in AI and Robotics Engineering. That was the period of GANs, of Alphafold, of Deepdream. LLMs were not that sophisticated yet.

During the master’s degree, I worked in parallel. I had the chance to work on so many cool projects, like developing a classifier for rare diseases. Building the ML models was just 10% of the part. The most important part was to develop a UI interface and program logic that a physician could use, and especially trust. The scope was not to substitute the judgment of the physician, but to enable the physician.

The second project was more sophisticated, and it was what is now called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) which is a technique to use LLMs by fetching relevant, external, and up-to-date information from a knowledge base. This RAG had three modules. One module, given the disease, fetched from Pubmed a classification of the best drugs to treat that disease. The coolest LLMs was Bert at that time. The dashboard displayed a classification of ten drugs, and it pointed out the sentences in the Pubmed database that confirmed this classification. Afterward, the physician would review the relevant papers and decide.

The other modules were even more exotic, but the point of this post is not to showcase my knowledge.

What I’m trying to say here is that there was no ChatGPT, no hallucinations, no agentic, no autonomous systems. The goal was to make a system that was both helpful and accurate, not to substitute the physician. We didn’t take away the job of anyone. The system was not suffering from hallucinations. No one stole copyrighted material. The system was also pretty fast.

That was the “AI” that I had always envisioned.

Fast forward to my PhD, ChatGPT and Claude came. My field, deep learning, was already a paper mill. My first year of PhD was a nightmare because I had to study a lot of low-quality papers. But when LLMs started to become popular we saw a surge of even more lower quality papers. The entire field started to lose any meaning for me. I felt more and more alienated. I obtained the PhD at the peak of this surge. I’m glad I’m not in academia anymore because I really fear what’s there.

I had a conversation with a friend who is the manager of a tech company. He said he is not hiring anymore because he now uses Claude Code. I asked him what he does with Claude Code. He is building games, 3D engines, and other weird things I don’t recall. By the way, none of these projects are useful to his company.

The lack of time and natural friction is what makes Claude Code so dangerous. If there are no obstacles, if everyone can achieve almost everything, what’s the point? How can you prioritize or decide to invest time and money into what is more meaningful for you, and for the company you’re working with? My friend manager literally spends tons of time babysitting Claude Code, so overall, he has less time, not more time available, which is another illusion that AI enthusiasts have.

But there is an insidious problem that no one is talking about. A manager must have people-skills. Emotional intelligence, empathy, ability to communicate their vision clearly. The ability to coordinate and de-escalate tension. All these competences need to be applied daily. If the only thing you interact with daily is a sycophant chatbot that executes whatever you tell it to do, of course you will have no more patience to motivate a twenty-five-year-old intern with maybe an identity crisis, maybe with ill parents or homesickness, or other problems that every human has.

You will have no opportunity to go to lunch, to joke, to still have meaningful memories and anecdotes to share with your family and friends at home.

Are people blind to not understand the security risks? How can they delegate all their skills into the hands of a single company? In the hands of a US company during wartime?

Look, we already have smartphone addiction. Do we need another addiction on top of that?

At the end of my bachelor’s degree in software engineering, I could write C code on a remote machine using vi. And I remember the huge competitive advantage I had over my colleagues who couldn’t even install Linux.

I made so many C exercises (with paper and pencil) that I didn’t even need the man page open.

One particular professor taught us that as engineers, we had to learn how to work under extreme scarcity conditions. Everyone can work at big tech companies with unlimited resources and the lack of a big picture.

When Introduction to Programming was taught using Python, there was a lot of backlash coming from the students of my faculty. We were right: everyone can learn Python. Not everyone can master C. And we needed to master C first.

I already said that the main reason I chose computer science was for the job stability.

But if we have all these layoffs combined with a lack of job offers for interns, the new generation will definitely think twice before committing three or five years of their life to study computer science.

But this will create a huge skill gap.

The more I look at this situation, the more absurd it feels.

LLMs have become the economic choke point of an entire nation. What do LLMs bring to the table that couldn’t have been done before? Nothing that could ever justify burning hundreds of billions.

LLMs have created distrust online. I deleted Instagram and TikTok because of the spread of AI videos.

LLMs are causing a generational gap in software engineering, but for most coders, it works just as fancy autocomplete, nothing more.

But most importantly, LLMs are driving some people into a perennial manic state. The manager who spent his time building “games” instead of hiring. The people who personify a program and believe it’s the new messiah, or have parasocial relationship. Or worse, they are using it as therapist. Or as a tool to “clear their ADHD mind.”

I don’t like what LLMs are doing to us.

Spanish intensive course. Jonas, the German guy sitting next to me, and I had been playfully competing all afternoon, the way people do when they recognize a spark in each other. Later, I’d learn he was a mathematician. I have a PhD with a thesis rooted in algebraic topology, so it all made sense.

The teacher caught me off guard when she asked what our definition of happiness is.

I just said the first thing that popped into my mind: es luz, energia y agua. That mental image of happiness is still with me. A source of divine light, a high-energy force that fills my chest, a feeling of warmth in my hands. The whole mental process made me feel elated, blissful.

But Jonas’ reply made me gasp: Happiness is when I held my newborn child in my arms for the first time.

It was a beautiful human moment that I witnessed.

I started to reflect on why my definition of happiness was so abstract, almost synthetic. For a moment, I even doubted whether I knew what happiness is. His definition was real, grounded, and human.

The way I remember things is emotional. I can close my eyes and go through the happy memories, but the first thing I experience is not the narrative of a happy memory but the light, the energy, the blissful feeling that everything is in order, in harmony. When I’m happy, I physically jump; everything is colored, everything has meaning. I don't primarily remember what happened; I remember how it felt to be in that moment.

So even if my definition of happiness is abstract, that doesn’t mean it’s less real than a grounded memory. It is as abstract and real as mathematics.

But why am I writing this?

I believe that everyone needs to have their own vision of happiness.

For people like me, happiness is an inner experience, something that can be accessible, abstract, raw, and synthetic.

For others, like Jonas, it is an instance of happiness—a specific, irreplaceable moment. Happiness as narrative and attachment.

If you’ve read Harry Potter, you’ll know that to cast a Patronus, the only defense against a Dementor, you must summon a state of concentrated hope and aliveness. Most wizards reach for a happy memory to get there. But memory is just a vehicle. Harry himself, in his most powerful moments, conjured no memory at all but only the certainty that he could, because he already knew he had.

But does it matter having a definition at all? I think it does. When you say the word happiness out loud, something should happen inside you. You should see it, or hear it, or feel it land somewhere in your body. The most miserable people I’ve met in my life were the people who didn’t know what made them happy. They traded, like Achilles, the prospect of a long, happy, and forgotten life for short-lived, eternal glory. But Achilles was conscious of this choice. Many people aren’t, really.

Sometimes we forget that our time here is limited, and we choose to be pulled away from our center of gravity. Jonas, knowing what he knows, might refuse to climb the corporate ladder if it would cost him time with his child. In my case, it means not allowing my past to poison my present, not losing sleep over futures I can't control, anything that pulls me away from the essence of being, from the joy of existence.

Our definition of happiness grounds us, bounds us, limits us. In the past, I used to think that being limited was a bad thing, but now I thank God for having limits and principles that I don’t and will never cross. Because from experience I know, and Jonas probably knows, trading today for someday never works. The “I’m climbing the corporate ladder so I can provide more for my family, so I can have more time later” is a trap.

It can become only a source of frustration and resentment towards us, our family, and the universe.

We should all learn how to cast a Patronus, so as not become dementors.

And you? What’s the first thought when you read out loud: Happiness?

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I believe that one of the clearest indicators of wealth today is a bookcase full of books.

A full bookcase tells me something about its owner. It tells me they have time to read. It tells me they have the education or the curiosity to appreciate books beyond what school required. It tells me they have a stable roof, a place where objects can accumulate and stay.

A bookcase is an indicator of both kinds of wealth: material and spiritual. However, not all materially wealthy people have bookcases. And definitely, not all bookcase owners are rich. This asymmetry confuses people. We know how to recognize financial wealth, but we have trouble identifying the other type of wealth. I called it spiritual as a placeholder, but I know it’s not the right term. The Romans called it otium: time for thought, freedom from business. So the spiritual wealth is a type of wealth full of leisure time to use for reading, writing, for philosophy. Curious that we have no modern translation of this term.

The new lower middle class has many streaming subscriptions, but no savings. Many work multiple jobs. Many live paycheck to paycheck, renting apartments that come unfurnished, where a bookcase is the last thing on the list.

And yet.

Whenever I say, gently, that it’s concerning that 50% of American adults don’t read a single book in a year, a certain kind of response appears. Books cost money. Bookcases cost money. Easy for you to say.

So let me tell you how I built my library.

I’m a European millennial. Most of the best books I’ve read came from public libraries. The card is usually free. At my nearest library, I could borrow three books a month, plus movies, plus music. If you don’t have a library nearby because you live in an underserved rural area, there’s Project Gutenberg: over 70,000 free ebooks, mostly classics whose copyrights have expired. All of Dostoevsky is there, waiting for you to finally impress literate people, or maybe just become a better person.

If you want a nicer reading experience, Standard Ebooks takes those same texts and formats them beautifully. Open Library operates like a digital lending library with a broader selection, including modern titles.

Also, we have used book sales at libraries, thrift stores, and church sales, which often have books for less than one dollar.

For the bookcase, IKEA sells small ones for under forty dollars, cheaper than most e-readers. I never said that the bookshelf has to be an antique French armoire. Of course, it can take time to fill. It doesn’t have to happen overnight. And it doesn’t have to be filled either!

Economically speaking, there is no barrier. Reading, especially today, is almost free.

So what is the real obstacle?

Time, some say. But I notice that the people who found time to argue with me on the internet, sometimes bitterly, sometimes at length, about how impossible it is to read, did have time for that. They had time to find my post, read it, and compose a response.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

So it’s not the lack of money. It’s not the time. Not reading is a choice, a choice about what you value. A choice about how you spend the hours you have.

In my opinion, this Andrew Tate interview snapshot reflects beautifully the reasoning behind not reading books. He says, “Reading books is a very cheap way to… ehm, I guess entertain. I wouldn’t call it entertainment cause my brain is far too advanced to read. I’m too smart to read. And you sit there and say, ‘but smart people read’. No. I need ACTION. I need constant chaos in my life.”

Of course, he was ridiculed on the Internet for saying that. But at the same time, many people share his vision. I’ve encountered countless people who looked down on intellectuals and books as being out of touch with reality. I’ve met men who don’t read because they believe they’re beyond it: too busy working, too busy making money. The anti-reading, anti-intellectual position is not new. But this modern version concerns me. It's a post-hustle-culture mutation: time spent reading is time not spent grinding.

A guy at my university told me he only read summaries on Wikipedia because he was too occupied with reverse engineering. He also asked me to have dinner. I genuinely declined.

If books aren’t for you, they aren’t for you. Not everyone needs to love reading. I’m not here to convert anyone or to look down on anyone.

What I don’t respect is the defensiveness, the victim mentality. The people who, when I share a statistic or say I find it concerning, respond with you privileged bitch. The ones who insist that reading is impossible for them, while spending a conspicuous amount of time composing angry replies to a stranger online.

If you don’t value reading, fine. But then why does it make you so angry when someone else does?

I don’t read because I feel smarter than anybody else. I read non-fiction books because I’m curious or because I have a knowledge gap that my experience alone could never fill. I read fiction books because it’s the only way to entertain myself. Most modern movies are boring as fuck. I don’t play videogames. I need to stimulate my imagination and empathy, and I need to take my time. I need to withdraw from reality by using imagination to shape reality through other lenses. To experience and be possessed by the vision of another writer. To feel human and connected.

I hate going fast. I love action, but I love contemplation as well.

I’m not saying this to shame anyone. I’m saying it because the excuses we tell ourselves can become prisons.

And because the door to the library is open, it costs nothing to walk through.

“An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.”

- Albert Camus

If you lived for your whole life isolated–no one ever saw you, no one talked to you, and no one remembers you–have you actually lived?

I think about my death every day, which urges me not to waste time, a catapult into now, a force to act and not postpone anymore. But I can’t hold it, it’s too intense. The mind wants to return to the bearable blur of an abstract someday. Even with the Memento Mori practice, I still live for some future version of myself, one who might be remembered.

If our biggest fear was death, we’d think about it not just as an existential practice, but as an instinct. Yes, we may fear death when its grip is close, when we feel so sick that we may regret the time we didn’t enjoy life when we were complete.

But there is one fear that accompanies us every day that’s stronger than death, and it’s the fear of being forgotten.

How creative we become in response! Some of us write. Some vlog every day. Some build financial empires or war empires or not-so-evil empires. Some just become people-pleasers because there’s no greater satisfaction in the imagination of a “See? He/She is really special!”

I chased an academic career because of that fear. When I was in school, while studying Euler’s formula for complex numbers, I really wished one day to have my own name on a textbook. I wanted to be the subject of study. As a woman, that felt like an even greater achievement. Can you imagine? Students sweating over my theorems. Young women finding inspiration in my story. My picture with a serious face in black and white, even though we discovered colors in photography more than a century ago.

But I finished the PhD feeling worthless instead. My research subject had lost its meaning. Academia squeezed me onto a treadmill. Publish-or-perish. Publish-or-perish. At the end of the first year, you should have AT LEAST one paper published. Before beginning the PhD, you should have AT LEAST one paper in submission. Publish-or-perish. Instead of feeling eternal, I wanted to finish graduate school as quickly as possible and move on with my life.

Academia hollowed out the meaning. No one seemed to care about theorems that would be studied in a hundred years. Everyone’s concern was metrics, h-index, citing every not-even-so-related paper, because you never know who will be the anonymous reviewer. Hey, look, an associate position has opened in ForgottenLand, let’s sever again any connection with my family, with my friends!

What haunted me was the thought that everyone in the system had probably started with the same desire I had. To be remembered. To be immortal.

But here I am, still writing. Writing on my Substack, writing short stories, and submitting to magazines. The medium has changed, but the desire has not.

Am I still ambitious because of the fear of being forgotten? Is my drive caused by the need to feel special?

When I write, I reach a flow state that makes the wish to be eternal, as we say in academia, ill-posed. When I am so intensely focused on what I’m writing, I am already extending my time.

After all, I thought, why make my life miserable now for a hypothetical fame when I could never be proud of it because… I will be a rotting corpse?

When I was reading about Fourier, Bernoulli, or Einstein, I wasn’t just learning techniques. I was having conversations with these minds. I was curious about their personality and what drove them to their discovery. And not just to egoistically imitate them, but because I wanted to know them intimately.

That’s when I realized that the wish to do the same comes from different places, like a superposition of waves. There is one wave that comes from a higher place, a place of wonder. A desire to give something back to future generations, as those thinkers gave to me.

You can’t kill this desire; it will only rebound more destructively. Repression works only momentarily.

Fear demands an outcome. It makes us betray our values for legacy, the not-so-good for a greater good. It poisons our minds. But if we substitute fear with curiosity, pride with love, the desire to be remembered becomes the desire to offer. And when we love, we listen. We give our full attention. We stop performing and suffering for our own imagination.

By releasing the need for eternity, we get closer to it.

When I write from love rather than fear, I am already in that conversation.

I am already, in the only way that matters, not forgotten.

After reading the first paragraph, I started to feel bored. I already knew where the article was going. Every paragraph was a nuanced repetition of the main argument.

It was overexplaining a concept that could’ve been just 50 words. Anyway, I noticed many other signs that it was an AI-assisted article at first glance. Reading it just confirmed it. Using pangram was just optional, and the result was not surprising at all.

But before giving you the recipe to follow, I want to make my main point of why it’s important to find out whether an article is AI-generated or not. It’s not about a witch-hunt. I don’t care to expose these people, whom I genuinely pity. I don’t feel in competition, I don’t feel threatened.

“If the article was good and valuable, why should I be worried that it was AI-generated?“

Because all these people are grifters. They do not have your best interest in mind. They write articles that agree and validate. They are wasting your time, your energy, and your focus, which are the only things you possess. Your brain is the most precious thing you have.

The more you read these articles, the less time you have to read something of quality, which may challenge your vision, and which creates an emotional bond with a human writer. I do have a strong attachment to writers I admire. Their writing changed my life in a way I cannot explain. It’s not really about challenging, like I was wrong and they were right, either. They pulled me into another dimension, and they showed me pieces of life that I couldn’t have never imagined.

With an AI-generated article, who am I really bonding with?

You will become more and more stupid, the algorithm will push more and more of these articles, and basically the Internet becomes polluted, your mind becomes polluted, and… No, I’m not gonna overexplain. I believe you’ve got the idea that stupidity and brain-rotting are not good for you.

And it’s not good for me either. How can I compete with an account that publishes one AI-generated article per day? He doesn’t even try to hide it.

But of course, I’m not really competing. But if Substack turns into LinkedIn, it will make me just sad. Don’t make me sad, please. Have the courage to write your own words. If you want to polish it because you’re afraid of being judged, use Grammarly.

Here are all the signs, as promised.

Visual signs

I’m not linking the Wikipedia page on signs of AI-writing. I believe that looking for all of those details is too time-consuming and probably models will change that on purpose. Like, I know some people use tools that “humanize” their AI-generated text by algorithmically removing some AI-formulaics like excessive use of em dashes, “It’s not x–it’s y.”

There is, however, a faster way that takes you no more than 10 seconds.

One of my writing coaches emphasises the importance of submitting a perfect manuscript in the Shunn Manuscript format to editors. In one of my previous stories, I thought I followed the guidelines perfectly, but it turned out I hadn't. My coach immediately spotted minimal formatting errors, such as stray spaces, spacing issues, and an off-center indent. He told me that an editor does a visual screening first, and if something is not aligned, he immediately drops the manuscript without reading it. Or he/she reads it, but finds excuses to discard it. Sometimes it’s unconscious.

Going to an AI-assisted article, the first thing you notice is that the paragraphs are too evenly distributed. Look at every human essay or story, and you’ll see paragraphs with only three lines separated by longer paragraphs. The section lengths are essentially irregular.

Look, for example, at this short story; look how irregular it appears from both the paragraph to the sentence level.

Then, there’s the writing voice, which is literally the voice I’m hearing in my head when I read an AI-generated article.

To me, it takes the form of a 40-year-old man with perfect American diction learned from accent coaches. And that’s not surprising. AI models are trained to be helpful and inoffensive above all else. But this is an unconscious process for me, so I don’t really know how to translate this experience into a guide. Just pay attention to it.

There’s also another distinction. Humans write an article or a story on different days. Which means a different mood, different ideas. So there is a variability in their words or sometimes even the rhythm that doesn’t follow any logical or predictable pattern–unless of course it’s deliberate. But if you look closely at every article or story they have written, you can notice recurring themes.

For example, most of my short stories have music, a loving couple, death, a dance scene, and a stoic reference. Most of my articles also include a stoic reference. I’m not doing this intentionally; those themes are a trait of my personality. I read Marcus Aurelius, and I’m active and involved in a Stoic community where we journal through Seneca’s letters every day. I love to dance. In my deep, deep past, I was a raver. I studied music theory and composed my own electronic music. I love my husband, and I have always been romantic. I experienced losses since I was a child, so death is an important theme that I think about every day. I have recurring dreams about dying.

Look at those accounts with AI-generated articles, and they talk about almost everything. Maybe on the facade, they are into wellness or philosophy. They are in a “niche”. But I’m not talking about the subject per se, which, on the contrary, can be highly variable for a human writer. I can write about stoicism, writing, science fiction, academic life, topology, whatever. What I’m talking about is the footprint of writing, a common theme or leitmotif that encompasses every piece of writing.

AI-assisted writers publish these perfect articles as if they were reporters with a real salary. But they are not experts. The guy who wrote the article about male sexuality, I highly doubt he has a phd in “Man Sexuality History.“ And of course, he doesn’t need to have it! But why share this article at all? He doesn’t talk about how he felt sexually repressed during his teenage years because his parents told him that sex, in whatever form, even consensual, was nasty. That would have been a more convincing article.

But the whole article is, instead, abstract. No single experience shared, no vulnerable moments. What I’m saying here is that the intentionality and the goals are not aligned. No human would waste time writing a perfect objective article for an informal audience. Unless something else is writing it.

So another sign of an AI-generated article is that the form and the context don’t match the effort required.

We write about our daily life, our real experiences. I cannot talk about Indian philosophy and casually quote Buddha, because I have never been exposed to it. I can read an article about it or maybe a book. But still, without direct experience, I can’t write anything meaningful about it. I studied NLP and transformers in my engineering courses and during my PhD, but I don’t feel confident writing about them. Or, better yet, I just find the technology boring as fuck, so I have nothing to say about it that wasn’t already being said by others.

I can write, however, about topology, or phd life, or academia because I spent three years of my phd coding, studying, presenting, and, especially, having an emotional attachment to it.

You don’t need AI detectors.

LLM models reached saturation. You cannot substitute human experience. You cannot substitute personality, charm, quirks, and the underlying suffering that produce writing.

Last, but not least, they use those horrible AI-generated images. I’m not overexplaining why it’s revolting. Because it is.

TL;DR

1. Uniform paragraph and sentence lengths.

2. Overexplanation, can’t trust the reader.

3. Sanitized voice, afraid to polarize. Even a polarized theme becomes sanitized and overexplained.

4. No recurring themes or styles that encompass all the articles they’ve written.

5. Lack of depth of experience. They write like a phd without a phd.

6. Abstract rather than vulnerable. They talk about heavy themes, but they hide beneath them.

7. Misaligned effort and context. Too many references that would take months for a human writer to put together. But they produce so fast, and we don’t have time to investigate every reference that it feels credible.

8. Predictable from the first paragraph.

9. Use of AI-generated images “that better convey the idea”.

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I always sat behind Emily during lectures, watching reflections from her copper hair like shattered glass refracting light.

But today, it was raining, and the LED light made the world inside these walls feel dull and monodimensional. Everyone chatted among themselves because the professor hadn’t shown up yet. Except I was talking with physics. I started by writing the Schrödinger equation of quantum gravity. It’s been two weeks since I started my attempt to reconcile quantum mechanics with gravity. I felt I was so close to understanding. But students around me were making too much noise.

Time does not exist as we perceive it. I closed my eyes. Time was the key to reconciliation. What if we remove time from the equation?

As I opened my eyes, Emily caught my stare. Instead of being intimidated, she smiled and came to my side.

“I loved your notes. They’ve been really helpful for passing the Quantum Mechanics class.”

How did she know it was me?

I didn’t reply, and I held my breath.

“You call yourself Le Bohr, right? You are a legend here, dude. Why do you hide yourself?”

“How… how do you know?”

I’d told the librarian not to reveal my identity after she’d scanned my handwritten notes, which explained quantum mechanics better than the professor’s textbook ever could. When she asked me what name to use, I said, without thinking much, “Le Bohr.” She’d written it with no comment—maybe she hadn’t understood, or perhaps everyone who shares notes thinks of themselves like the great physicists.

Emily gave me a confident smile, but didn’t reply immediately. That made me uncomfortable. She took a bite from a green apple, holding my gaze.

“Relax, I asked everyone. You’re the only one who got scared by my question, and that confirmed my theory. By the way, I’m Emily.”

“Lucas.”

As we shook hands, the professor walked in, and everyone went quiet. She left the bitten apple on my desk. I took a bite of the apple. She tilted her head, and I could tell she smiled.

The sun returned, and I kept taking notes while light reflected again on her copper hair like shattered glass refracting light.

I love tracing cultural and behavioural differences back to philosophy, and I’ve always wondered why English-speaking people have trouble understanding the Stoic philosophy. Why Stoicism became Broicism in the United States? For those unfamiliar with the term, Broicism is a modern and shallow interpretation of Stoicism that focuses on suppressing emotions to appear tough when dealing with challenges.

And you may suggest, it’s all marketing tactic with the goal of targeting insecure men who are into self-help. But I had many conversations with people having no economic interests, and they just had difficulty understanding the nuances of the philosophy.

And to me, this difficulty is obviously not of intellectual nature, but I trace it back to the language.

As an Italian, I have always found English to be the supreme language for expressing complex technical concepts. I love the fact that I can just put words together and create compact, solid-feeling units like “mind-blowing,” “world-building,” “soul-crushing”. The ease with which these concepts can be created makes them concrete, visual, and immediate. It’s like those concepts now exist, and materialize in front of you. When you name something, you actually have power over something.

This concept objectification is called the reification process. English excels in this, but Italian resists this packaging.

However, when I try to write or talk about something abstract, that doesn’t have edges or agency or gender, English almost forces me to betray it. You have to dress it up as a character or an object to make it sayable.

Italian has these beautiful escape hatches from personhood:

“Mi viene da piangere” means “crying comes to me”; I’m not doing it.

The reflexive: “Si pensa, si sente” means thinking happens, feeling happens, but who’s doing it? The grammar doesn’t care.

You can describe entire experiences without assigning agency. English demands agency. Even in passive voice (”I was overcome by emotion”), there’s still an I being acted upon, and you can’t escape the personhood.

Let’s play with an example. I can have an entire sentence like this one:

“Si pensa mentre la vita scorre, ma poi si prende coscienza e ci si chiede ‘a cosa si stava pensando nell’ultimo momento’? Ma poi si prova a tornare indietro, e sembra impossibile che l’ultimo pensiero si sia già dimenticato.”

Now, if I try to translate literally THAT into English, this is the result:

“Thinks while life flows, but then consciousness is taken and to-itself is asked ‘what was being thought in the last moment?’ But then tries to trace back and seems impossible that the last thought has already forgotten itself.“

Sounds like Yoda speaking. Here, “Ci si chiede” means one asks to oneself/among ourselves. The expression is impersonal and has a reflexive/collective dimension meaning. English has no such equivalent. The closest natural translation would be:

“Thinking while life flows, but then awareness dawns and the question arises: ‘what was I just thinking?’ But trying to trace back, it seems impossible that the last thought has already been forgotten.”

But here, still, I awareness is a subject that does something, I nominalized “asking” into “question” as object, and slipped an “I” into the quoted question because English dialogue demands it.

Even in everyday life, the way we greet in Italy is usually something similar:

“Ciao, come va?” “Si va avanti.”

Literal English attempt: “Hi, how goes?” “Going-forward happens”.

Natural English: “Hi, how’s it going?” “Keeping on / getting by / pushing through.”

Despite being very common “Si va avanti” is philosophically profound. It says: Going-forward is happening, I’m caught up in it, we’re all caught up in it, it’s not really anyone’s choice, but here we are, in the forward-going.

It’s stoic, processual, existential without being dramatic.

Italian grammar allows for experiences without experiencers and processes without agents. This aligns with certain philosophical traditions, such as Buddhist non-self, process philosophy, and phenomenology, that seek to describe experience before the subject-object split.

English’s grammar enforces subject-object dualism. You can’t escape it without sounding awkward or poetic. This aligns with Anglo-American analytic philosophy’s obsession with agents, actions, and objects.

That’s why there is such a huge difference in the Stoic philosophy interpretation. In Italy, we understand that thinking and emotions just happen to us. Thinking happens, feelings arises. We can, however, decide whether to act or react on them.

But the broicism, because life doesn’t happen, thinking doesn’t happen, you are the one thinking, so you have control over the thinking, has become more like suppressing emotions and having agency.

Here are two versions of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I’m taking a passage from Book 4, Section 3, one in English and one in Italian.

In English, Marcus tells you to “remember your retreat into this little domain which is yourself.” The word retreat becomes a noun, a thing you possess. You HAVE a retreat. But in Italian it’s “puoi ritirarti”, you can withdraw-yourself. It’s a reflexive infinitive. The action folds back on itself. You’re not going somewhere, you’re enacting a reflexive movement.

Then look at what comes next. English says “be not disturbed nor on the rack”. You’re in a passive position now, disturbed BY something, tortured by an external device. The Italian says “non agitarti e non darti troppa pena,” which translates to don’t agitate yourself, don’t give yourself too much pain. Both verbs are reflexive. You’re not a victim of external disturbance, you’re the one doing the agitating to yourself.

Take the disturbance line “disturbances come only from the judgement within.” Disturbances are the subjects doing the action of coming. The Italian says “I turbamenti vengono soltanto dall’opinione che si forma all’interno”. Here, the opinion forms itself. “Si forma” it’s reflexive again. The judgment here it’s self-forming, arising through its own process.

And then the transformation line. English says, “all that your eyes behold will change in a moment and be no more.” Things will change, and that’s it. Italian says, “tutto quanto vedi, tra un istante si trasformerà e non sarà più” translates into everything that you see will transform itself. The reflexive again. Change is enacted by the things themselves, it’s part of their nature, not an external force acting on them.

The traduction creates completely different philosophies. The English version gives you a YOU that retreats somewhere, a YOU that must not be disturbed, like you’re under attack, disturbances that come at you like invaders, and things that will change as if change is done to them. You’re either the protagonist or the victim being acted upon.

The Stoic practice that Marcus is actually describing becomes clear in Italian. You don’t “go” somewhere when you retreat; you fold into yourself. You’re not attacked by disturbances, you create them through the movement of self-agitation. Opinions arise (si formano), they’re not things you build or things that assault you. Transformation happens through things themselves because it’s their nature to unfold.

But English grammar tells YOU must retreat, which sounds like active effort, like you’re running away to a safe space. YOU must not BE disturbed, which sounds like you’re resisting external forces. YOU must control your judgments, which sounds like you’re the boss of your mind. YOU must prepare for change, which sounds like you’re defending against it, bracing for impact.

This is the broicism I’m talking about. The English translation makes Marcus Aurelius sound like he’s telling you to be a warrior fighting off emotions, when the Greek middle voice and the Italian reflexive show he’s describing a process of letting things happen while remaining in a reflexive, self-aware space that doesn’t require you to be either conqueror or victim.

It seems like nothing, but it’s the entire difference between understanding Stoicism as a practice of aligning with process versus misunderstanding it as a practice of control and suppression.

Of course, many english speaking people understand stoicism, but they are doing in my opinion way more cognitive job because of language difference.

This is why Italians who read Marcus Aurelius are, generally speaking, very chill. And this is why stoicism turned into self-help hustle culture about being mentally tough and not letting anything affect you.

The grammar is doing the philosophy before you even get to the concepts.

Farewell,

Giulia.

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Today I stared at the screen with no motivation to work or write. I thought: “What’s the point anyway?” I know myself, and these are the chronic dissatisfaction symptoms. I should’ve done more. If it wasn’t for this mistake, maybe. It doesn’t work, I wasted time.

But I never allow emotions to be my tyrant, so I had to face it. Rationally speaking, it’s not even fair to focus on the things I should’ve done, instead of the things I’ve done.

Would you do that to a friend? It’s like receiving feedback from mean critics: they may be right, but do you really listen to them? Do you allow a person to destroy your confidence or your creative work?

In my inner world navigation, I tend not to spend too much time in therapy mode for many reasons: we give too much power to traumatic and negative life experiences. We tend to rationalize everything, especially when it doesn't make sense. And sometimes, the realization that because your parents demanded so much of you, now you struggle with perfectionism, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I used to think this way, until I realized that I was responsible; I always demanded too much from myself.

If I can’t change the past and my life has limited time, I don’t want to spend too much time reminiscing about what may or may not have played a role in it. I try to find a solution instead, a series of tools that I can apply regardless of my past. Life is forward motion.

A memory popped into my mind: “For every object that comes in, something has to go out.” My mother always said to me, her voice thick with a Romanian accent, her small stature, yet with the posture of a commander.

As a consequence of this rule, my home was immaculate and minimal, and I grew up being content with very few objects. Despite the cliché of a closet full of shoes, I had no more than four pairs. That rule has remained in my head, and I still apply it today, except for books.

However, sometimes I forget to apply this rule to mental clutter, as my mind can be chaotic and restless. I read too many books in parallel, and I am overdue for my work. I’m constantly thinking about what I’m missing. In my head, what I miss has a higher weight than what I have. Despite having a phd, I’m still worried that none of my fiction short stories have been published so far, instead of being happy with how my prose visibly improved story after story, and that I’m genuinely in love with the process, regardless of the validation. I’m more worried about my fine lines, rather than celebrating that I have never felt in better physical shape due to bodybuilding.

I understand now: chronic dissatisfaction is an addition problem. We keep adding to the equation. We want to achieve more, we seek more validation, we claim more identities until we sink into confusion and overwhelm. We solve dissatisfaction by wanting more, achieving more, and becoming more. But you can’t solve an addition problem with more addition.

Marcus Aurelius wrote: “If you seek tranquillity, do less.” Or (more accurately) do what’s essential—what the logos of a social being requires, and in the requisite way. Which brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better. Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?” But we need to eliminate unnecessary assumptions as well. To eliminate the unnecessary actions that follow.”

So my response to chronic dissatisfaction is to close, to discard, to remain still. My way of life is through ruthless elimination.

Whenever I need to feel more prepared, I say to myself, “What old pattern should I unlearn instead?” If I want to take an action and impose my outcome on the universe, I listen and deviate instead.

Looking back, my real achievements weren’t achievements at all, but were all the possible roads I haven’t taken. A relationship that was wasting my time, a career with a dead-end, a decision that I would’ve regretted.

More often, I ask myself: what concept of myself should I throw away today? If I remove the need for external validation, what still drives me? If I throw away all the labels, all the obligations, what remains of me?

A sculpture is made by removing excess marble. Silence creates music as much as notes do. Via negativa is counterintuitive because we’re trained to solve problems by doing more. I’m saying: solve it by doing less, being less, wanting less.

Carve away until what remains is essential.

Farewell

Giulia

In Part 1 of the series dedicated to Philip K. Dick's prose, I analyzed a beautiful passage from Ubik. Today, I wanted to talk about how Philip K. Dick was brilliant at creating evocative neologisms for his worldbuilding.

I’m not a linguist, but knowing four languages made me sensitive to their proper use. I’m not into fantasy either; I’m just into Tolkien worldbuilding. I believe a writer is not just a plot master but a master of words. There is some musicality in the language that draws us into the world, hypnotizing us. Philip K. Dick was one of those authors.

The right word can spare 200 words of boring worldbuilding. When we read Vidphone, we already understand that it’s a video telephone. Perhaps the equivalent of a VidPhone, if Philip K. Dick were alive today, would be the HoloPhone. Compare HoloPhone with “holographic telecommunication device.” The latter is more descriptive but less real. Holophone sounds like something you’d complain about when it doesn’t work, something you’d see ads for, or a future release, maybe in 20 years, from Apple.

Consider the difference between writing “He lived in an apartment in a condominium complex” versus “He lived in a conapt.” The latter evokes a future where housing has been reduced to efficient, institutional shorthand, like the Soviet blocks, the Khrushchevkas. The word itself sounds cramped and depressing. I can feel the conapt to be grey, minimal but small, almost suffocating. It tells you about the society that coined it without a single word of exposition.

When we read about the Precog, we already know they are people with precognitive abilities in a society that accepts them. But what I appreciated more in Ubik was not only the use of qualitative terms for psionic powers, but also how he grounds us in Joe as a technician trained to measure psionic and anti-psionic fields. Philip himself did not coin this term; it was a term already in use in parapsychology, but he used it masterfully.

The term “Substance D” already tells us that the drug is ultra-synthetic. Not only that, but if we have Substance D, we may have the Substances A, B, C… It means we live in a world where narcotics are serialized. There is no romantic quality about it, not like Ayahuasca, Salvia Divinorum, or Mescaline. And somehow this word tells us how dangerous it is.

Half-life represents people in that liminal state between life and death, a form of cryonic suspension that allows the deceased limited consciousness and ability to communicate with the external, lived world. Philip K. Dick borrowed the term from nuclear physics. The original word describes radioactive decay, as these people are decaying in Ubik—slowly dissolving rather than being preserved. The word choice transforms what could be a hopeful concept (limited immortality!) into an entropic and melancholic state.

Consider how Ubik works:

He creates an incredibly detailed, pseudo-technical jargon that sounds plausible and scientific, mixing scientific concepts like negative ions and helium batteries with complete fabrications, anti-protophasons, and protophasons. It’s technobabble elevated to an art form. It’s no coincidence that he uses a description that sounds like reading a component of a quantum computer, or a reality where textbook quantum mechanics is lived. In fact, I may say that Ubik is quantum fiction. Individuals with precognitive abilities see a variety of futures, one of which is actualized —the one they choose. For example, the explosion on Luna can be interpreted as the quantum event that results in reality splitting into several realities that are all visible from the bird’s-eye perspective of the reader. In contrast, the protagonists continue to live in and perceive only one reality. But at the end of the book, you don’t have any more idea what reality is; your reality has become a superposition of your protagonists’ realities.

Philip K. Dick understood that the world doesn’t need to be scientifically accurate, but to feel like it. This is an important skill every science-fiction writer has to learn, whether we are writing hard or soft science fiction; it doesn’t matter.

There’s another layer here worth exploring: Dick’s neologisms reveal society’s psychology and culture. The existence of terms like “inertials”, psychics who block other psychics, or “prudence organizations”, companies that employ precogs to predict threats, tells us this is a society that has taxonomized and industrialized the supernatural.

This is fundamentally different from Tolkien’s world, where magic remains mysterious and numinous. Dick’s future turns psychic power into mundane tools, complete with technical specifications and market competition. “precogs” and “inertials” are job descriptions, not mythical roles.

The word “kibble”, artificial food in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, similarly reveals the psychological landscape of Dick’s futures. It’s pet food terminology, meaning we live in a world of extreme efficiency, dehumanization, and ugliness.

So yeah, I think Philip K. Dick is the master of words. Words that not only tell what an object is, but also how society perceives the object. Every term is an opportunity to evoke and immerse the reader to avoid unnecessary description and tell.

Reading Philip K. Dick is a mystical experience, but reading his novels as a writer is always humbling.

Giulia