cooking to ordering in.

groceries to restaurants.

a book to clubbing.

rocks to sunbeds.

tents to hotels.

cereal to biscuits.

the dark to lightbulbs.

beer to cocktails.

wine to beer.

water to wine.

a bike to cars.

my own two feet to bikes.

the old to the new.

the dead to the living.

kisses to photos.

fruit to sweets.

rice to pasta.

soap to makeup.

home to traveling.

glances to words.

black to colors.

headphones to concerts.

fingers on a keyboard to headphones.

water fountains to straws.

churches to bars.

the stairs to elevators.

the Beatles to Queen.

the solo discographies of John, Paul, and George to the Beatles never breaking up.

the cinema to TV.

a Margherita to any other pizza.

real luxury is simplicity

That’s ok, because unlike other animals we have the prefrontal cortex, which requires a lag between instinct and action.

Can you imagine a sloth dancing at a club until dawn?

I can. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about in this letter.

Rather, it’s about another difference between you and a sloth.

Namely, the thing you’re holding in your hand to read this.

Read more

I think we should get back to them.

As a kid, I used to ask myself countless questions. So I tried to recover some of them—and added a few that only came with adulthood.

You can use them to get to know yourself better, to reflect, or not use them at all. Up to you.

1. How much is 1 hour of your time worth?

2. Who’s your hero?

3. What’s something that you keep observing, but other people can’t see?

4. What’s the biggest lesson you learned from your family?

5. What’s something that you understand now that you didn’t 10 years ago?

6. Who would you be if you never met your best friend?

7. What’s more important, peace or freedom?

8. If you could solve one mystery, what would that be?

9. Is it better to be desirable or valuable?

10. What’s the meaning of life?

11. Who would you be without your smartphone?

12. Would you sacrifice freedom for loyalty?

13. Is there a God?

14. Who are you beneath my roles and habits?

15. What makes a life meaningful?

16. Is meaning discovered or created?

17. What are your core values?

18. What assumptions about your life have you never questioned?

19. Which mistakes do you keep repeating?

20. What is a good life?

    ---

I hope these questions give you the opportunity to reflect in a positive way and get to know yourself more deeply. Feel free to answer any of them, or share your favourite questions to ask in the comments below.

At least that’s what you tell yourself the day after going to bed a little later than planned.

You could even decide to drop everything, follow your flow, and finally silence all those voices screaming in your ears when all you want is silence and peace.

Besides, until last week everything was going smoothly. You were on top of work, eating well. You woke up and went to bed at the same time every day. Then one afternoon you swerved, you overshot by half an hour. You went an inch off the road, but that was enough to total the car. Now you need the safety car.

In this letter I want to offer you both my personal perspective and a solution (scientific, proven).

Let’s first understand why the hell bad habits keep coming back even after you’ve beaten them senseless in front of a nightclub, spat on them, and told them in no uncertain terms never to show their face again. Then let’s try to find the motivation to, once and for all, get back on track.

Damn bad habits

At university, around my first or second year, I started obsessing over routines. I don’t remember if I’d already read Atomic Habits, but I was definitely consuming a ton of videos on the topic back then. It was the second half of the 2010s, and YouTube was already filling up with self-improvement content.

I wanted to become the best version of myself, and I’d realized that to do that I needed a structured life.

So I started timing how long it took me to get from my dorm to class, how much money I spent and in which categories, how many hours I spent on my phone versus at the piano, figuring out which moments I was most productive in. Then I’d put it all together and write out routines.

I’d promise myself I’d follow them to the letter. I’d pack in as much detail as possible.

However, I (very) often failed at the first point: wake up at that time. Which made me fail at the last point: go to bed at that time. In fact, it was impossible for me to fall asleep at 10 if I’d woken up at 11 that morning.

In between it was all a mess.

Even after 5 days in a row of hitting every point, all it took was missing one item on the list to strip me of the motivation to “be consistent,” as I’d once solemnly written on the inside of my door one night.

So I’d rewrite the routines. So I’d fail to follow them.

What saved me, though, was precisely tracking my activities. Comparing the ambition of the lifestyle I wanted to build against the one I was actually living.

As the days and the experiments went by, I actually managed to dissolve that initial gap: on one hand I became more generous about what I demanded of myself, on the other more aware of my own inclinations.

I was learning one of the most underrated skills most people never develop: establishing a constructive dialogue between who you are and who you want to be. That dialogue lets the two get to know each other and imitate one another.

I don’t think they can ever become the same thing, but they can certainly be friends.

We are what we do

If we change habits, we change who we are.

Motivation helps you carry out an action once. Or twice. But to repeat it consistently, you need a system.

The brain doesn’t repeat a behavior because it’s “good.” It repeats it because, at some point, it solved a problem better than the available alternatives.

If you remove a bad habit without replacing the need it satisfies, your brain will find its way back.

The antidote to lack of motivation is action

The brain doesn’t respond to ambition, but to experience. For almost all of human history, uncertainty was dangerous. A familiar path to water was safer than exploring a new one. A known food source was safer than experimenting with unfamiliar plants. A familiar social group was safer than risking rejection. Evolution hard-wired the idea that what worked yesterday is probably good enough today. An idea that persists even today, in a completely different environment.

Habits conserve energy. Deliberate decisions are metabolically costly. Once a routine is established, the brain has little incentive to question it. So if you’ve had unhealthy habits up to now, it’s extremely difficult to overturn them by willpower alone.

For most of human history, food, information, social interaction, and entertainment were all scarce. Our brains evolved to seize these opportunities whenever they appeared. Today those same rewards are effectively unlimited: sugar became soda and sweets, social connection became social media, curiosity became endless scrolling, rest became binge-watching. Going for a run still requires changing clothes, lacing up your shoes, hauling your ass out the door, and braving rain and wind. The instincts haven’t changed, but the environment has.

Falling into a rut, especially as a kid, and carrying it into adulthood is incredibly easy. When one option is effortless and the other isn’t, the effortless one usually wins. Switching to a good habit requires a surplus. That surplus is motivation. As long as it’s there, you move differently. Once it runs out, the system falls back to its resting state, unless you understand how habits work.

How to get out of the rut

The following three components aren’t some new tool you’re about to learn. They’re the mechanism that, right now, is already fueling your behabiour. You just weren’t seeing it. Making it visible is the first step toward taking control.

1. Trigger: the first domino tile. As soon as it’s set off, the loop begins. It can be the environment, a time of day, a person, an action, a notification.

2. Routine: exactly what you do once the routine kicks in. It’s the sequence of dominoes.

3. Reward: how does the habit make you feel better? What do you feel when the last domino falls?

Then there’s a fourth component, the one we’re trying to bring out right now: metacognition — that is, the awareness that the domino chain exists at all.

Say that every time you get home from work (trigger), the first thing you do (routine) is pull out your phone, flop onto the couch, and scroll social media for an hour to relieve the day’s stress (reward).

The easiest way to destroy this domino chain is to replace it.

• Metacognition: Accept it. It’s still a routine even if sometimes you scroll for 45 minutes instead of an hour. Why is it bad for you? How would your life change without it?

• Trigger: Move the couch. Put a Post-it near the entrance. Even better: keep a sheet of paper where you mark a checkbox every day you don’t give in to the bad habit.

• Routine: Make a deliberate choice about what you want to do once you’re home. It has to be something exciting — something that can compete with the dopamine hit of scrolling.

• Reward: Your brain is used to that dopamine hit, so put yourself in front of low-dopamine but highly gratifying activities and environments — sports, nature — and step away from screens. Put your phone in a drawer. Don’t pick it up even when the demons scream “just check that one thing” — because right after, you’re back in the rut, and worse, you won’t get to check the box on your sheet, which is the best reward of all.

Building a new habit — and therefore eliminating an old one — takes about 90 days. To do it effectively, you have to be brutally honest about your starting point: scrolling social media is an extremely powerful short-term reward activity. In the first days of trying to replace it, you’ll have demons inside you whispering “come on, just let me check one last time.” It takes strength and courage to plug your ears. This is where you build the constructive dialogue between who you are now and who you want to become.

Take small steps. If you slip up, it’s fine. Slipping up and trying again is part of the dialogue. Don’t turn one missed day into a missed week. Skipping a workout doesn’t make you a lazy cow. Eating junk for months does. Focus on keeping the trend going.

Resisting in the first days is the hardest part. After a month it gets easier. After three months, you’ve won.

Your brain loves consistency. Compare:

“I’m trying to quit scrolling” vs. “I’m not a zombie.” “I’m trying to write” vs. “I’m a writer.”

Evolution gave you a brain that keeps asking itself one question, over and over: “Should I do that again?” It answers based on experience, not intentions. Every repetition is a vote.

Start today.

Complicate the trigger. Replace the routine. Be reasonable with the reward.

If you manage it, write day 1 in a notebook and check it.

If you slip, try again tomorrow.

That’s motivation + system.

Over time, the good habit stops feeling like self-control and starts feeling like the default. That’s the point at which you’ve truly replaced the old habit, instead of just resisting it.

Forza!

— Francesco

Yeah.

It seems hard because whoever came before you gave you precise directions on how to live that don’t feel right anymore. “Get on these rails,” they told you, “you’ll pass through these stations,” and “you’ll see, it’ll all work out. You’ll be happy.”

So little by little you built yourself a nice little train. You loaded it with everything needed for the trip, and set it on the rails.

Though, it’s true, sometimes you derailed. Other times you found yourself at a fork and didn’t know which way to go. But either way, alone or with someone’s help, you always managed to find the road again.

I’m the third of three children. My brother and sister are 8 and 7 years older than me. In a way it’s as if I’d had four parents, each with their own manual.

As a child, if you’d asked me the meaning of life, I would have told you it was to remain immortal, like the emperors of Rome. That the manual was for other people, that I would find my own path. It seemed to me that reading as many books as possible, learning English, traveling, migrating, were all steps that would take me further from those rails.

And indeed, I did get further from them, but only to find other rails built by other people.

At 22 I broke up with my first girlfriend and was in an existential crisis when, from a shelf by my front door, I picked up Osho’s Yoga1. I didn’t devour it, I savored it. It told me that I already was immortal. That there’s no need to pre-occupy. That I too, like you, can live here and now. That everything that isn’t here and now doesn’t exist.

I discovered that the answer to any question is in me.

My goal in this letter is to help you lay on your own rails.

You may have thought that to understand who you are you need to visit some shrine, eat mushrooms, or that deep down it’s all just a fairy tale for children.

You couldn’t be more wrong.

Knowing yourself is a journey whose map is traced inside you with millimetric precision.

If you learn to orient yourself, you can get wherever you want.

Don’t expect to keep groping in the dark and hope a train magically carries you to the station of your dreams. The problem with most people is thinking the answer comes from outside. They don’t see it as a path to go through.

There are two elements that guide the way.

Two poles. Two sole reference points.

Consider everything else an obstacle.

If you learn to orient yourself, knowing who you are won’t be hard.

I — Monsters

Everyone has at least one voice inside them.

Don’t tell me you thought you were the only one.

There’s one I fight with, that tells me it’s better to stay where I am. Every time I take a step outside my boundaries I have to challenge it, because it grabs me by the ankles and tries to keep me from moving.

I like meeting new people, but when I see someone at the gym wearing the shorts of an Italian football club and I want to ask him what he’s doing in Brussels, the voice comes out and tells me to shut up, “who cares,” “don’t be the typical Italian,” “what kind of question is that.”

This is the voice of fear, which comes from the opposite pole to the direction we need to march toward.

Living alongside fear are three other monsters, which hold us back from moving forward and blind our sight.

1. Bad habits. Even the strongest will-power can’t compete against them.

2. Unresolved past experiences. This is about living in the past, which we both know to be incompatible with walking forward.

3. “Rules” or “assumptions.” All those manuals written for some hypothetical average person who maybe exists but is certainly not you. Remember that there is no conceptual box you should fit into.

These monsters usually live in the basement of the psyche. To face them you first have to admit they exist. I still have to tell the voice to shut up, feel the discomfort, and introduce myself to a new friend at the gym anyway.

Stepping outside your own boundaries inevitably means going through a period of initial decline. Leaving a job you don’t like means being without a job. Leaving a relationship that doesn’t work means having no relationship.

This is why fighiting the monsters is so complicated.

Everything that improves your life is after worse-first.

To move forward, you must kill all the monsters.

II — Energy

I know you’ve seen at least 50 YouTube videos telling you to follow your passion. I’ve seen them too.

The problem with these videos is that they assume you have only one, and that it stays unchanged over time.

Even Lionel Messi doesn’t like only football. Choosing and following a single passion would mean killing parts of ourselves, or worse, selling off our lives.

A more precise and walkable direction is given to us by energy, which like passion seems an abstract and elusive concept, but which fundamentally comes down to this: does doing this thing lift you up or bring you down?

The reason this step comes after the first is that fighting the monsters requires a great deal of energy — energy that, before you fight them, was being used to protect them.

If it still feels abstract, there’s a game that, once the monsters are dead, lights up the path in two moves.

1) Write down 9 parallel lives

Imagine you have 9 parallel universes, running forward from this moment on. You can’t go back in time to change the past. Life one is the life you are currently living. In lives 2 through 9 you can do anything. In each of these eight universes, when you wake up in the morning you’re fired up and can’t wait to start the day. Write them down on paper and try to be as precise and as unpolished as possible.

It’s likely that in many of these there’s the child inside you, who is probably one of the last truly sincere versions of yourself, at least with yourself. I, for example, have put living like a hermit in a forest with my family, being a writer, being a teacher.

2) Pick the one that excites you the most

Read them and read them again. Look down at the page holding all nine. One — or more — of them shines more than the rest. Its pull is irresistible. Take it and carry it with you.

You can keep living in life 1. In fact, be certain your starting point is right there. I’m well aware that most “drop everything and go” plans are a one-way ticket to hell. But it’s essential to bring in at least one element from the other eight into your own. This becomes infectious, ending up setting the rest of your life alight with the same excitement.

If there’s still some poison left in you from the monsters of the first pole, here’s the antidote. Ask yourself: what would I do if I knew I wouldn’t fail?

Energy can lead you toward a treasure that only your specific destiny holds.

Once you’ve killed the monsters and started following your energy, you’re unstoppable. You’ve made an identity shift. You’ve gone from “it would be cool to write a book” to “I am a writer.” You’re indifferent to whatever initial exile awaits you on your new path. You stop fighting yourself, and you take on every step like a dance to music only you can play.

Last tip:

The only way this method works is if you do it now. Waiting for a future milestone creates a cycle where there is always a new reason to delay. You always have a reason to perfect the plan, to wait for the perfect moment. “Sometime in the future” almost inevitably turns into “never.” If you start now, you stop fighting yourself and start discovering who you truly are.

That’s it.

These are the two poles for finding the way to unlock your true self.

Thank you for reading.

— Francesco

I failed.
But I learned.

Let’s go in order.

Three months ago my girlfriend came home from a class at Rocycle, a spin studio a few minutes from my house. Not her first time — I already knew she found it challenging, and that she enjoyed it.

This time, though, she had an idea. “You’re a musician,” she said, “and you like cycling. You’d be perfect as an instructor.”

It didn’t take much to convince me. I checked LinkedIn — there was an open instructor position right here in Brussels. So I built a CV just for the occasion (I normally have a corporate one, for the actual career) listing my two years as a referee, my time teaching piano, my old kickboxing titles as a teenager. And a cover letter, where I talked about wanting to align my life with my own nature — which, if you’re reading this, is probably something you want too.

A while later, an email from HR: send a video showing you can introduce yourself confidently and keep time to a song.

I was happy. I sent a video of myself playing the opening of Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer, introducing myself, then drumming the beat on my desk through the rest of the piece.

The next day, another email — inviting me to the audition two weeks later. First phase: follow the coach alongside the other candidates. Second phase: become the coach yourself, on two songs of your choice.

I was convinced I’d already passed. The audition felt like a formality — they’d already seen I could keep time, and fitness wasn’t a concern, since I go to the gym every day and run twice a week.

So in the two weeks before the audition, I did nothing special. I actually went down to Calabria to visit my parents and ran every day — but never touched a bike, and never gave a second thought to which songs I’d bring.

The morning of the audition I flew back to Brussels. Made myself a plate of pasta, ate it, brushed my teeth, put on shorts and a t-shirt, and walked into the club, shoulders back, fully confident.

I’d cycled for years. I felt fit. I’d never taught a class in my life, but that didn’t seem like a problem — I could ride to a beat, move, let the rhythm carry it.

I walked in 5 minutes before schedule. The instructor greeted me with a smile, told me to change my shoes, and pointed me toward the room. There were three other candidates. They all looked tense, charged, ready. I didn’t know it yet, but each of them had at least two years of experience in the club behind them.

The instructor walked in, closed the door, reminded us how the audition would unfold, wished us luck, got on her bike, and started the music.

Within minutes I was lost in vocabulary I’d never heard — latch, hover, settle, up, resistance — describing movements my body didn’t know how to execute. I pedalled as best I could, glancing sideways at the others to figure out how to respond to her commands. My face shifted from the relaxed confidence I’d walked in with to the creased surprise of someone realising, in real time, that he was out of his depth. The songs kept playing. The minutes kept passing. I got more tired — mentally before physically.

When it was the candidates’ turn to lead, the others gave a slightly weaker version of the instructor — but fundamentally, they led the way she did, just with their own style.

When it was my turn, I completely improvised. I tried to imitate the moves I’d seen in the minutes before. It was too late.

The next day, another email. This one read: unfortunately, you didn’t pass this stage.

I didn’t make a big deal of it, but it stung. Simply because I could have made it. I didn’t lack ability. I lacked information.

And the strange part is, I had two weeks to go get some. I just didn’t think I needed to.

The confusion almost everyone carries

We talk about talent like it’s a substance some people have and others don’t.

It isn’t. What looks like talent is almost always accumulated information — repetition, correction, and time, compressed to the point where it looks effortless from the outside.

A footballer isn’t world-class because of raw ability. He’s world-class because as a child he played eight hours a day instead of two hours a week. The hours produce specific knowledge a casual player simply doesn’t have.

That knowledge isn’t mysterious. It’s just information nobody else bothered to acquire.

Information is free. That’s what makes it brutal.

Nobody is hoarding it. Nobody is keeping you out.

The people who beat you almost never had access to something you didn’t. They simply went and got it while you assumed you already had what you needed.

This is the part that should unsettle you, not comfort you. If the advantage were talent, you could blame your genetics and move on. But it’s information — which means it was sitting there the whole time, available, and you didn’t pick it up.

Confidence is not a measurement

This is where most people get stuck.

You can feel ready without ever having been tested. Nobody corrects you in daily life the way a coach, a competitor, or a real deadline corrects you. In the absence of feedback, your brain defaults to a comfortable assumption: I’m fine.

That feeling is not data. It’s the absence of data.

The first time you’re placed next to someone with real information — hours you don’t have, corrections you’ve never received — you find out where you actually stand. Not where you assumed you stood.

Nobody rewards potential. Only demonstration.

You can have the raw material for something and still lose, because the room doesn’t reward what you might become. It rewards what you can already show, right now, under pressure.

Potential is invisible by definition. Information is the only thing that makes it visible.

Where this insight can become useless

The dangerous move, after reading something like this, is to feel like you’ve already done the work.

You haven’t. Understanding that information beats talent doesn’t give you any information. It just tells you that you’re currently missing some.

The trap is mistaking the insight for the labor. Reading about reps instead of doing them. Feeling inspired by the framework instead of going and acquiring the specific, unglamorous knowledge your gap actually requires.

So here’s the only useful question

Not am I talented enough.
Not do I have potential.

But: what information am I currently missing — and what is the smallest, most boring way to start acquiring it today?

It’s not an inspiring question, I know. It isn’t supposed to be.

It’s just the only one that actually closes the gap.

In the halls of the conservatory, Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier is a rite of passage. You can’t avoid it — not that I wanted to. Bach "slaps," as they say, both to play and to hear. But the complexity is staggering. His writing is intricate, originally composed for the harpsichord — the ancestor of the modern piano. Without the ability to lean into a forte or pull back into a piano, the music relies entirely on the clarity of the lines.

When you study a prelude or fugue from scratch, you aren’t just playing; you are solving a physical puzzle. You find yourself obsessing over fingering, calculating exactly when to lift a wrist, and fighting to make one voice sing while another recedes. Mostly, you find yourself stumbling. You repeat the same four measures dozens of times. You cannot move to the next fragment until you have dominated the one beneath your fingers. Through repetition, the goal is to get to perfection and relaxation at the same time.

Living in an apartment, my window for practice was narrow. After going to school in the morning, I couldn’t start before 4 pm, and by 8 pm, I had to have a new fugue “ear-ready” for my Monday lesson. Bringing a Bach fugue from total silence to a recognizable melody in a single afternoon is one of the most satisfying acts imaginable. Watching your fingers move and hearing a sound emerge that you’ve only ever known through a speaker is a private miracle.

The subversive act of slowing down

In a world increasingly shaped by AI, doing things slowly and imperfectly feels almost subversive.

Why struggle for hours when a model can generate a flawless version in seconds? Why practice a language the hard way when instant translation exists? Why write by hand when the machine can polish your thoughts into elegant prose before you even finish the sentence?

The answer is hidden in the struggle itself.

When silicon can perform every task with superhuman efficiency, the value of human effort shifts. It moves from the quality of the output to the quality of the doing. The process becomes the point — the quiet, private shaping of the self that happens only when you refuse the shortcut.

This is the Small Game at its most stubborn.

When I cook ragù I don’t do it to impress anyone — although I like when guests say it’s awesome — or to optimise nutrition. I cook it the long way because that’s how care is expressed in the culture I inherited: through patience, through small adjustments made with love and memory. The imperfection is part of the gift.

The same is true for playing music.

A machine can perform any piece with superhuman accuracy and expression calibrated to millions of recordings. It never gets tired, never doubts itself, never feels the small triumph of finally landing a tricky voicing after weeks of failure. When I play, even badly, I am participating in something ancient: a human body meeting an instrument, limited by biology and history, trying anyway.

Feature, not Bug

AI encourages a relationship with life centered on results and optimization.

It is tempting to eliminate friction, but when we always choose the optimised path, we thin out the texture of our days. Life risks becoming a series of polished experiences instead of a lived, uneven journey.

There is a particular honesty in imperfection.

When you work slowly, you cannot hide from yourself. You meet your actual limits, your actual patience, and your actual capacity for attention. You cannot outsource the discomfort. And in that discomfort, something real grows: resilience, taste, and a private sense of mastery that no leaderboard can measure.

The long game of being human

This matters even more as we look toward a future of radical longevity. If we are to live for 150 years, the danger is that we spend those centuries chasing ever-higher optimisation, becoming smoother versions of ourselves while our raw, quirky core grows quiet.

Doing things the slow way is a form of remembering. It reminds you that you are still the same DNA-carrying creature who once learned to walk and speak by trial and error. It creates a sanctuary where the "performed self" cannot follow. No algorithm is judging your progress; no audience is waiting for the highlight reel.

Next time you feel the urge to let AI finish your sentence or suggest the "best" way to spend an hour, try resisting. Write the awkward paragraph by hand. Practice the difficult passage until your hands ache. Cook the meal and let it be uneven. Walk the long way home without filling the silence.

You may not produce anything impressive. You may waste time by any modern standard. But you will have spent that time inside your own life, shaping it with your own imperfect hands.

In a world that wants to do everything for us, the act of doing it yourself is the deepest source of meaning left.

It won’t go viral. It won’t be perfect.
It will be yours.

Thank you for reading this letter.

— Francesco

Why did they use that tone? Why didn’t they answer when I asked? What if I should have said...

You replay conversations like surveillance footage. You build entire scenarios from tiny fragments. One expression, one delay, one message becomes a full psychological investigation.

You are stirring the pot of your own thoughts like a wooden spoon in a thick ragù. Reducing reality into something denser and heavier than it actually is.

We call this “thinking.” It isn’t. It’s a massive, useless leak of mental energy. It’s trying to push a reinforced concrete wall with your bare hands and wondering why you’re exhausted.

The Sapiens bug

Our brains didn’t evolve to be happy; they evolved to keep us alive. For a Sapiens in the wild, “overthinking” was a competitive advantage. The primate who whistled through the tall grass died. The one who obsessively simulated the puma behind the bush survived.

But the modern world has hacked this survival mechanism.

In the wild, problems were binary and physical:

• Predator? Run.

• Hunger? Hunt.

• Cold? Build fire.

Today, our threats are abstract and infinite: career identity, reputation, dating ambiguity, financial optimisation. The brain keeps searching for a level of certainty that reality can no longer provide.

You are applying a “survival” level of cognitive load to “social” uncertainty. It’s a hardware-software mismatch.

Why overthinking feels endless

The mind lives inside unresolved loops because modern life rarely offers clear endings. The conversation stays ambiguous. The email remains unanswered. The future refuses to become stable.

So the brain keeps simulating.

Many intelligent people mistake this for preparation. They believe that if they think enough, analyse enough, optimise enough, they can reduce uncertainty to zero.

But reality is probabilistic.

Past a certain point, more thought stops producing clarity. It becomes friction. A cognitive treadmill disguised as intelligence.

This is why your best ideas often appear during a walk, in the shower, or while staring out of a train window. For a brief moment, the simulation pauses. The nervous system exits the loop.

A brain built for movement now spends entire days rehearsing possibilities.

Not because humans became weak.

Because modern life transformed survival into abstraction.

The email replaces the predator.
The social signal replaces the tribe.
The uncertainty never fully ends.

So the brain keeps hunting pumas that are no longer there.

Subscribe now

What is one tiny, irreversible action you can take in the next ten minutes to close a mental loop you’ve been stuck in all week?

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading this letter.

— Francesco

You open a book. Three pages in, your hand reaches for the phone.

You sit down to write. Four sentences in, you open a new tab.

You start to think through a hard problem. Two minutes in, something easier appears and you take it.

You tell yourself you’ll come back.

You don’t.

This is not a discipline problem

It’s an architecture problem.

Modern life has been engineered to make switching cost nothing and staying cost everything. I’m not saying it was a conspiracy, but that’s the way it is.

The feed is always open. The notification is always ready. The next thing is always one gesture away.

Your brain, which evolved to conserve energy and seek stimulation, is doing exactly what it was built to do.

The environment just changed the options

Every activity has an entry cost.

The disorientation of not knowing yet. The friction of a mind finding its footing. The gap between where you are and where the task requires you to be.

This cost is real. Your nervous system accounts for it before you begin.

For most of human history, it didn’t matter. Your options were limited. Switching was expensive. Staying was the default.

Now staying is the hardest thing you can do.

Here is what nobody tells you about attention

The cognitive value of any activity is not distributed evenly across time.

In the early phase, returns are low. You are struggling. Discomfort is high. Nothing feels like it’s working.

Most people exit here.

But if you stay — past the resistance, past the boredom, past the moment your brain sends the first signal to switch — something changes.

Comprehension deepens. Patterns emerge. The thing you are doing begins to reveal its internal logic.

This is the region of highest cognitive return.

It exists just past the threshold of difficulty.

And almost nobody reaches it consistently anymore.

Two things pull you out before you get there

The first is boredom.

Modern culture treats boredom as a problem to be immediately solved. It is not. It is a threshold. The sensation that nothing is happening is usually the sensation of your brain consolidating something it hasn’t finished processing yet.

Exit here and you take nothing with you.

The second is anxiety.

The uncomfortable awareness that you are not good enough yet. That the task is harder than you thought. That you might fail.

This feeling is not a warning. It is a location.

It means you are at the edge of your current capability. Which is the only place where capability expands.

Both feelings invite you to leave.

The entire internet is built to answer that invitation.

The only thing that keeps you inside is metacognition

The ability to watch yourself think. To notice: I want to switch right now. But I know this feeling. This is the threshold, not the verdict.

Without it, the exit is automatic. The phone is open before you decided to open it. The tab appears before you chose to look.

With it, there is a gap between the impulse and the action.

That gap is small.

It is also where everything important happens.

But metacognition is not enough on its own

The environment is not neutral. It was designed by people whose incentive is your exit. Relying purely on internal awareness to resist external architecture is like trying to eat less by thinking harder in a room full of food.

You also have to change the room.

This is not a metaphor. Put the phone in another room before you sit down. Close every tab that isn’t the one you need. Use tools that make switching harder — a full-screen mode, a locked session, a timer you’ve committed to not stopping.

These feel like small things but they are not.

Every additional second between the impulse and the exit is a second in which your metacognition has a chance to intervene. You are not suppressing the urge. You are buying time for the part of you that knows better to catch up.

The goal is not willpower. It is friction — deliberately placed, in advance, before you need it.

Most people are becoming very good at the wrong things

Reacting. Scanning. Switching. Skimming.

These are not failures of character, but behaviours the current environment selects for and rewards.

The cost is invisible and cumulative.

Not one lost insight. A thousand of them. Each exit reasonable in isolation. Each one quietly reducing your capacity for the kind of thinking that only sustained attention makes possible.

You are not getting dumber.

You are getting shallower

And the tragedy is that the depth was always right there — just past the moment you decided to leave.

The solution is not complicated.

Stay longer than feels comfortable.

Treat boredom as a signal that you are close, not finished.

Treat difficulty as confirmation that you are in the right place.

The highest returns are not at the beginning of the curve. They are at the end of the part most people never reach.

The threshold is real. It is uncomfortable by design.

Crossing it — consistently, against an environment built to pull you back — is one of the few remaining advantages that cannot be automated or outsourced.

Your attention is not just a resource. It is a daily argument about what you believe is worth understanding.

Most people are losing that argument without realising they’re in it.

Having emptied the sink and brought the stove to a level of shimmer that wouldn’t make my girlfriend kill me, I threw myself on the couch and opened Spotify.

Before pressing the magnifying glass and searching for anything, the perfect playlist was already waiting for me. Mozart, Haydn, Tárrega. People that had very little to do with the chicken breast and courgettes I had eaten, but exactly the artists I wanted to listen to.

I hadn’t told it anything. I hadn’t named anything. I hadn’t consciously wanted anything.

Spotify already knew.

Now, before you applaud me ironically for the triviality of the observation, there are two things to note: (i) I hadn’t listened to that kind of music for quite a while and (ii) I don’t like ironic applauses.

Here’s what nobody talks about when they talk about algorithms

The threat isn’t that the machine shows you things you wouldn’t choose, or that end up being negative for your mental health. Although yes, the danger exists.

The matter is deeper, and has to do with your intrinsic characteristic of Homo Sapiens. Harry Frankfurt, philosopher, made a distinction that counts here. Humans don’t just have desires. They have second-order desires — the ability to want differently. To look at what you’re craving and decide whether that’s actually who you want to be.

Biologically, this is tied in part to the prefrontal cortex, which is far more developed than in most other species.

You can imagine distant futures, delay gratification, create complex relationships and societies, and act against immediate impulses for long-term goals.

That capacity is what makes you more than a preference profile. And it’s exactly what a perfectly personalised system slowly makes harder to use.

The system doesn’t need to manipulate you

It just needs to make you easier to predict.

When I talk about the system, I’m not referring to anything conspiratorial or Orwellian, but to the mechanisms used by gigantic companies that — rightly — have an interest in maximizing their profits, and therefore their revenues and, therefore, your attention.

The system — allow me to call it this way — observes your impulses. Reflects them back amplified. Removes the friction between wanting and getting. Inhibits the prefrontal cortex from doing what it’s supposed to do.

And gradually, the loop tightens.

You watch what fits your profile. You listen to what matches your history. You date people statistically compatible with your past behaviour. You consume increasingly refined versions of yourself. You eat yourself, you defecate your attention.

Because the process feels personalised, it feels authentic.

That’s the trap.

You become a stable, optimised, legible version of yourself — and you call it identity.

Humans were never supposed to choose their own inputs

Nature is never the same.

Strawberries more or less all taste like strawberries, true, but no two strawberries are the same. Moreover, strawberries, like people, like everything alive and non-synthetic, evolve, grow, and age. What’s juicy today could be manure tomorrow, first picked, then devoured, and then defecated by a fox. What’s unripe today, you could buy at the supermarket tomorrow. A Spotify playlist, on the other hand, is made up of the same songs; which can be listened to by different ears, by ears that evolve, by ears that age, but which always sound exactly the same when you press play.

For most of history, you didn’t curate your environment. You were thrown into it.

You found fruit along the path you walked. You sat next to a stranger on a train who mentioned a book that changed how you thought about your work. You walked into a record shop because it was raining.

None of that was optimised. None of it matched your profile.

That’s exactly why it worked.

Randomness wasn’t noise in the system. It was the system. Another system. It was how humans updated. How new desires entered. How the self stayed permeable enough to grow.

A perfectly personalised environment doesn’t just remove friction. It removes the unexpected inputs that were tacitly responsible for most of your development.

Think about the last time you changed your mind about something important. The last time you became interested in something genuinely new.

Trace it back far enough and you’ll almost always find a moment of accidental exposure. Something that arrived sideways, uninvited, from outside your existing preference structure.

Leave a comment

The algorithm can’t replicate that. By definition. It can only serve you what your past self would have chosen.

And your past self didn’t know what you needed to become yet.

Metacognition is not enough

Even this awareness is becoming a product.

There are now apps that help you “break your filter bubble.” Algorithms that introduce “productive friction.” Systems designed to make you feel like you’re escaping systems.

The loop doesn’t end when you see it. Awareness helps. But it isn’t enough.

To update yourself you need new, disruptive inputs. The kind that don’t match your profile because they weren’t chosen by any version of you that already exists.

I’m not telling you to delete Instagram. I’m not telling you to change your ice cream flavour when you’ve tried them all and you know for a fact that chocolate is the best. I’m not telling you to throw yourself into the sea and let the rocks smash your skull.

I’m telling you that a system optimised for your past self will feed you your past self. Forever. Until you mistake the loop for a personality.

You need to be devoured by something new. And reassemble from whatever pieces remain.

That’s how humans become heroes. By getting bitten by a spider. By fighting a cyclope. By falling in love. By having to save someone.

Something from outside the system reaches in and changes its functiong.

Swim further out. Try the pistachio again. Turn the phone off and go for a run. Let yourself be surprised by something you didn’t curate.

The solution is simple:
introduce randomness.

Give yourself a chance to become a hero.

Subscribe now

Thank you for reading.

— Francesco Lappano

Immortality still sounds like mythology dressed as engineering. But aging itself is beginning to look negotiable.

AI-driven biology, personalised medicine, continuous monitoring, cellular repair — the conversation has already shifted from “is this possible?” to “how soon?” and “who gets access first?” Living to 120 or 150 no longer feels entirely absurd.

And yet.

The biology is the easy part.

The hard part is that you will still be running ancient software.

The same nervous system that evolved around scarcity, short horizons, and the pressure of limited time. The same threat-detection machinery that lights up at a harsh email the same way it once lit up at predators. The same attachment system that bonds deeply precisely because it evolved in a world where everything was temporary.

You can extend the container. You cannot update the organism that lives inside it.

My grandparents lived lives with a recognisable shape.

Youth. Work. Family. Decline. Arrivederci.

There was sorrow inside that structure, but also clarity. Time imposed pressure. Choices carried weight because the horizon was visible. You married because life was finite. You forgave because death was in the background like a quiet metronome.

What happens when the metronome slows down?

What happens when someday becomes dangerously elastic?

Here is what finitude actually did for you — and what its loosening will cost.

It created urgency. When time is visibly limited, the present moment has weight. You do not endlessly defer the conversation, the apology, the commitment.

It created depth. Short timelines encourage intensity. You love someone fully because you have no guarantee of tomorrow. A 150-year life may teach people to protect themselves from emotional intensity in ways shorter lives never required. Relationships optimised for stability. Experiences designed to minimise irreversible damage across extended decades.

It created meaning through sacrifice. To choose one thing was always to not-choose everything else. That constraint is the engine of identity. When the horizon stretches indefinitely, the cost of each choice decreases — and so does its weight.

It created a relationship with death that organised everything else. The awareness that the music ends is precisely what makes you listen.

I think about this when I sit at the piano.

A short prelude demands immediacy. Its beauty comes partly from limitation. The emotional tension resolves quickly because the piece ends quickly.

A long sonata is different.

Themes disappear and return transformed many pages later. Early mistakes continue echoing through later movements. Resolution takes patience. A heartbreak at thirty may still quietly shape the emotional atmosphere of your nineties. A decision made at forty may continue unfolding consequences at one hundred and twenty.

The music becomes richer. But also heavier.

The question is not whether we can extend the music. It is whether, across all those extra decades, the music will still sound human.

Here is what does not change.

You will still be triggered by the same things. Rejection, scarcity, exclusion, threat — these are not cultural habits. They are the deep grammar of the organism. A hundred extra years will not redesign your amygdala.

You will still require meaning, not just time. The existentialists were right about this, and they wrote before longevity was even a question. Time without direction is not a gift. It is a different kind of pressure.

You will still need to know what moves you — not in the abstract or philosophically, but specifically. What triggers you into aliveness. What triggers you into shutdown. What your body does before your mind has caught up.

The most dangerous version of a longer life is one spent accumulating experiences without ever understanding the organism having them.

We are the hinge generation.

Old enough to remember when death felt structurally certain. Young enough to possibly witness its timetable begin to loosen.

That creates a strange double vision. Part of us still lives inside the old human rhythm: finite time, visible aging, clear endings. Another part is already adapting to a world where biological limits may become increasingly negotiable.

But the end will still be there. Even if it moves.

And the question it asks you — what did you do with the time you were given — does not become easier with more time. It becomes harder. Because you will have fewer excuses, and potentially more boredom.

So before the timetable shifts, you need to know yourself as an organism.

Not as a project or as a brand. As an animal with specific sensitivities, specific hungers, specific fears — operating inside a modern environment that was not designed for any of them.

What actually makes you feel alive, not what you’ve been told should?

What are you avoiding, and what does the avoidance cost you?

Where does your nervous system say yes before your mind has decided?

These are not self-help questions. They are survival questions for a species that may soon have to navigate timescales it has never faced before — with hardware that has not changed in a hundred thousand years.

The music may last longer.

But you are still the instrument.

Thank you for reading this letter.

— Francesco

Not complicated or ambiguous. Stupid.

Six years before, I had read Sapiens. A book that did something simple and irreversible: it showed me what I was looking at when I looked at people. Animals. Evolved, yes — but animals. Running ancient software in environments that software was never designed to read.

So when I arrived at the firm and watched my colleagues chase positive feedback from someone they didn’t respect, chase a promotion inside a system they hadn’t really chosen, work late for recognition that would last three days — I didn’t need time to figure out what I was looking at.

I already had the frame.

These were animals chasing status signals because status signals kept you alive on the savannah. Responding perfectly to an operating system that hadn’t been updated in a hundred thousand years.

I understood it completely.

What I couldn’t understand was why nobody else seemed to notice.

The behavior I’d found stupid wasn’t a character flaw in those people. It was a mismatch. An ancient organism in an environment the organism was never built for.

Understanding that didn’t make it less stupid.

But it made it legible.

Subscribe now

What your ancestors solved

Find food. Build shelter. Navigate danger. Maintain relationships. Read the land.

Not metaphors. The literal terms of survival.

The feedback was direct. The stakes were real. The effort meant something because the outcome was visible, tangible, and close in time. Your body understood what it was doing and why.

This is the environment your nervous system was built inside. Not in a decade. Not in a century. Over hundreds of thousands of years of continuous pressure, your brain was sculpted by exactly these kinds of problems — concrete, embodied, social, consequential.

It became extraordinarily good at solving them.

Then the problems changed.

What you solve instead

Clear the inbox. Hit the metric. Manage the calendar. Optimize the funnel. Attend the meeting about the meeting. Respond to the Slack message about the email about the document that summarises the call.

These are not bad activities. They are often necessary. Some of them require genuine intelligence, sustained attention, and real skill.

But your nervous system doesn’t know that.

Your nervous system runs a continuous, mostly unconscious evaluation of every situation you encounter. It is asking, at a biological level: does this matter? Is this real? Does solving this mean I survive, belong, or contribute to something larger than myself?

For almost all of human history, the answer was obvious. The problems were legible to the organism. The body understood what was at stake.

Inbox zero does not register.

The Q3 report does not register.

The optimized funnel, the managed calendar, the moved needle — none of it trips the wire that tells your ancient brain: you did something real today.

And so you finish the day productive by every external measure, and still feel, somewhere underneath the tiredness, that nothing quite happened.

The exhaustion no one names

There is a specific kind of fatigue that modern life produces but rarely diagnoses.

It is not the fatigue of having worked too hard. It is the fatigue of having worked hard at things your organism does not recognize as work.

There is a difference between being tired after a long hike and being tired after a long day of email. Both deplete you. But one depletion comes with a residue of satisfaction — the body knows it did something. The other leaves a strange flatness. You are drained but not fulfilled. Busy but not alive.

It is not just that modern knowledge work is mentally taxing.

It is that it is metabolically confusing. You are spending real biological resources — attention, glucose, cortisol, time — on problems that produce no signal your nervous system can interpret as meaningful expenditure.

You spend yourself on things that do not spend you back.

Why nothing feels like enough

This is the mechanism behind a feeling most people know intimately but rarely articulate.

You achieve something. You finish the project, hit the target, get the promotion. There is a brief moment of relief. And then — almost immediately — the horizon resets. The satisfaction doesn’t land. You move to the next thing without ever quite feeling the weight of the last one.

This is often diagnosed as ambition, or restlessness, or a personal failure of gratitude.

It is none of those things.

It is a calibration problem.

Your brain’s reward system evolved to respond to outcomes with clear survival relevance. The meal after the hunt. The shelter before the storm. The resolution of a real threat. These produced genuine, lasting satisfaction because the organism understood, at every level, that something important had been secured.

Modern achievements rarely produce that signal. Not because they aren’t real, but because they aren’t legible — not to the part of you that decides whether to feel satisfied.

So the loop never closes. The feeling of enough never arrives. And you keep moving, not because you are greedy or broken, but because your nervous system is still waiting for a problem it recognises.

What follows from this

If the problem is a mismatch, then the first step is accurate diagnosis.

Not: what is wrong with me? But: what kind of creature am I, and what does that creature actually need?

The answer is not the same for everyone. But it tends to involve the same categories your ancestors navigated — real physical effort, direct feedback, genuine relationships, problems with visible consequences, work that produces something you can hold or witness or share.

Not instead of modern life. Alongside it.

You cannot change the economy you work inside or the tools your industry runs on. But you can choose, deliberately, to also spend time solving problems your nervous system recognises as real.

Build something with your hands. Cook a meal from raw ingredients. Have a conversation without an agenda. Move your body until it is genuinely tired.

These are not wellness habits.

They are proof-of-life signals to an ancient organism that still needs to know, at least occasionally, that it is doing something that matters.

The thing no one tells you

The people chasing the approval of someone they didn’t respect weren’t weak or shallow. They were animals doing exactly what animals do in environments that reward status signaling. The system was optimized for a particular kind of behavior, and they were responding to it perfectly.

The problem was never them, and it was never you.

It is an environment that hasn’t yet learned to build for the kind of animal that still needs, at some level, to solve something real.

Recognising that doesn’t fix anything. But it stops you looking for the fault in the wrong place.

And sometimes, that’s the first useful step.

Thank you for reading.

— Francesco Lappano

Though you might not do them and just keep writing lazily.

1. The Hero with a Thousand Faces

I bought it1 three months ago and it completely changed the way I approach writing. don’t fool yourself: you can’t write for an audience bigger than your middle-school girlfriend if you haven’t studied the patterns behind mass storytelling. This book lays out the mythological structure of the archetypal hero’s journey, and it applies to virtually every kind of story. It’s theoretical and analytical, but it teaches you that writing isn’t just inspiration — it’s structure. It has influenced countless modern authors, directors, and artists, most famously George Lucas, who openly used the Hero’s Journey to build Star Wars. This isn’t an affiliate link, but I’m sharing it anyway: if you want to take your writing seriously, this is the best place to start.

2. Read more

It sounds banal and everyone says it, but it broadens your perspective and sharpens both your technique and your instinct. Reading widely and consistently does two crucial things: (i) it expands what you see and (ii) sharpens how you say it. You absorb structure, rhythm, storytelling tricks, and emotional precision without even realising it.

For the past ten years I’ve read every single night before bed. Before that, I was already devouring books like a madman. But I don’t just read passively — I read like a writer. I take tons of notes. I’m not as interested in form as I am in content, but sometimes I notice purely narrative choices that I then promise myself I’ll reuse in my own writing. At a certain point, those notes reach critical mass. That’s where something new is born.

3. Make it a routine

It looks like the most obvious advice in the world, yet it’s the hardest one to actually follow. Anyone can write when they’re inspired. The real game is writing when you’re not. When you’re tired, when you don’t feel like it, when the words aren’t flowing. Consistency beats motivation. The secret is to make writing like brushing your teeth or having coffee in the morning. It doesn’t have to be long. Even 15–30 minutes every day will destroy years of occasional weekend bursts. I protect my writing slot fiercely. Some days I write well, some days I write garbage. But I show up. And after months and years of showing up, writing stops being something you “try to find time for” and becomes something you simply do. That’s when real progress begins.

4. Reread

Most people think their first draft is “basically done.” They’re wrong. The first draft is just raw material. It’s clay, not sculpture. Michelangelo didn’t create the Pietà with the first strike of his chisel — and you won’t write anything powerful with your first pass either. Rereading is where the real writing happens.

Use a ruthless eye. You’ll often feel embarrassed by what you wrote. Other times you’ll be surprised by how good a line or idea is. Both reactions are valuable. Read it as if you were a stranger who paid for it. Does it hold your attention? Is the rhythm off? Does it make you feel something? Are you bored halfway through? Be brutally honest.

Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Guide them through their journey. Don’t make them stumble.

5. Write in different formats

Write as much as possible. For years I only wrote for myself, in a notebook that I would have cut the hand off anyone who dared touch. Today I write on Substack, I write letters, I write notes, I write articles. If I limited to just one single format, I’d freeze up the moment an idea doesn’t fit that container. When you’re comfortable writing in many different formats, ideas flow more freely and you never miss a moment. Having the freedom to write when and how you want — even using a restaurant napkin as a surface — means that at some point you’ll end up with a body of work that can become an essay, a chapter, or a book.

6. Finish what you start

Leaving things half-done is easy. Finishing is hard. But it’s only by reaching the conclusion that you truly learn. Every story is worth telling, even if it seems stupid to you, even if you feel like it’s already been written hundreds of times by people better than you. But don’t leave a draft hanging forever. Don’t be afraid to write it. I’m full of drafts — some just titles, others disconnected sentences. But I value every single one of them, because I know that from those I can create something that transfers value to the reader.

7. Live

« Comment peut-on écrire si on ne vit pas ? » (Jean-Paul Sartre)

You can’t think of becoming a writer if you haven’t first become a human being. Ernest Hemingway didn’t write about war and the sea because he was a dreamer, but because he got shot at and hauled in fish bigger than himself. If you stay locked in your room staring at the screen, you’ll only produce copies of copies. Go out, make mistakes, take hits, and face your time. Writing is not (only) finger work — it’s scar work.

Writing well is a skill. Start by taking one of these points seriously, and your writing will improve.

— Francesco

Subscribe now

To answer, I’ll start with the perspective of someone who knows more about the topic than you or I do.

“Goods and services will become close to free. [...] You’ll have, I don’t know, tens of billions of robots — they will make you anything or provide any service you want for basically next to nothing.”

— Elon Musk on Ted Cruz’s podcast “Verdict”, March 2025

Elon Musk has a vision of the future of manufacturing that, if true, has devastating implications for society as we know it today. In his vision, the cost of producing anything is basically:

Cost of Labour x Cost of Energy

What he expects to happen is that:

• The marginal cost of labor drops toward zero because AI provides essentially free intelligence and robots provide essentially free physical work.

• The cost of energy (needed to transform and move the mass of production) also drops close to zero via massive solar scaling.

He calls it sustainable abundance: an economy a million times larger than today’s, where robots meet any material need you can imagine.

If realised, physical production becomes like digital goods today: abundant and cheap. Robots and AI drive marginal costs toward zero, flooding the world with goods and services at negligible expense.

But what does life look like when the cost of everything hits zero? What happens to hunger if we can have all the food we want? What happens to desires if we don’t need to pursue them, as they’re already here beside us? Let’s walk through two plausible scenarios — one positive, one negative — and then asses which one is more likely.

Subscribe now

Positive Scenario: The Golden Age of Human Flourishing

Imagine waking up in 2050.

Your robots have already prepared breakfast from local raw materials powered by cheap solar. The house cleaned itself overnight. Your AI assistant has already curated your daily personalised briefing, tailored to your mood as well as the weather conditions you observed when the window automatically opened at the optimal time for your circadian rhythm.

• You have no scarcity-driven anxiety. You are certainly not poor, and neither are your neighbours. Healthcare, housing, transport, and even exotic experiences are effectively free. Universal high income has evolved into universal high living.

• Working is a game. You don’t need money. Actually, money is meaningless. You’ve found meaning in playing games that have no intrinsic economic prize.

• Art, science, and philosophy are at the core of the society you live in. Tech itself provides better tools for meaning: personalized education, simulation for practice, and global collaboration on grand challenges (space, science, art). Your relationships are deep. No time is stolen by early-21st century survival jobs.

• The only thing you still “pay” is energy for truly extravagant requests (building a personal megayacht on the Moon), but the baseline is so high that almost everyone lives like today’s billionaires — only without stress, time constraints, and billions.

Negative Scenario: The Hollow Abundance

Now flip the script. The robots deliver everything, but you and your fellow humans don’t know what to do with yourselves.

• Purpose collapse. As nothing requires effort, you’ve lost the struggle that gave life shape. Depression, addiction to hyper-realistic virtual worlds, and ennui skyrocket. “Why get out of bed when everything is done already?”

• New inequalities emerge. Physical goods are free, but status and attention become the new scarce resources. A tiny elite controls the AI alignment, energy infrastructure, or the most compelling virtual realms. The rest feel like guests in someone else’s utopia.

• Society fragments. Without shared economic struggle, communities fray. Birth rates plummet (why look for a human partner when humanoid robots are more attractive and satisfy all our needs and wants?). Culture stagnates into endless remakes because risk-taking feels pointless.

• The system is fragile. A solar flare knocks out the energy loop, or an AI misalignment creates subtle control mechanisms. Suddenly the “free” world reveals its single point of failure: dependence on machines we no longer understand.

  Leave a comment

Which Future Is More Likely?

I think the positive scenario is more likely. The same forces building the robots are also racing to align them toward human benefit. Those who create robots are humans. Moreover, humans adapt: from agrarian drudgery to the smartphone age, we’ve been able to improve our living standards without collective suicide.

The negative risks are real, though. Purpose isn’t automatically supplied by abundance — it must be cultivated through culture, education, and deliberate design of incentives (especially if everything is free and thus money is meaningless).

If we treat AI as just a vending machine instead of a partner in expanding human potential, we drift toward the void.

However, the same technology that makes costs zero potentially gives us tools to design better meaning-making systems — new rituals, education paradigms, and perhaps even “purpose markets” where people trade time and attention on projects that matter.

Capitalism optimized allocation under scarcity via prices, incentives, and creative destruction. In post-scarcity (or near it), Markets will remain where scarcity survives: attention, status, land, energy, authenticity, novelty. Everything else trends towards baseline abundance, distributed through ownership of machines or some form of claim on automated productivity.

New institutions could emerge — reputation economies, purpose-driven projects, voluntary challenges — to allocate human effort where machines can’t provide intrinsic value.

Intelligence will likely mean one thing: the ability to solve problems.That was scarce. So it was valuable.

The economics of post-scarcity are inevitable if robotic labor + abundant energy collapse marginal costs toward zero. But the flavour of that world is not predetermined by machines or their creators.

I still lick my wounds when I think about it. But losing that gain taught me something more useful than the money would have: I caught myself wondering whether a quarter of a million euros would have actually changed my life. And I realised — honestly — that it probably wouldn’t have.

Here’s a thought experiment to test this on yourself.

Imagine you wake up tomorrow and you’re a millionaire.

You’re still half-asleep when a distant sound grows into something strange. You open the curtains. A helicopter is hovering outside your window. The pilot — massive headphones, mirrored visor — is yelling something you can’t make out. Before you can process what’s happening, he launches a duffel bag through your window and disappears.

You stand there, heart pounding, staring at it.

You open it.

You count.

It’s a million euros.

Now stop.

A week later, you wake up still searching for the sound of the rotor blades.

You haven’t quit your job; nor haven’t moved. You’re thinking the same thoughts as — except now there’s a new one underneath everything: one more helicopter and things would finally be sorted.

The money bought you time. Not clarity.

The friction is still there. The same low hum that something is off.

It turns out it was never a money problem.

Subscribe now

The real illusion

The instinct — when life feels slightly wrong — is to add something.

More money. A better job. Better habits. More discipline.

The logic seems airtight. But it’s built on a false premise: that you’re lacking something.

You’re not lacking. You’re misaligned.

And these are not the same thing.

A misaligned life doesn’t look broken. It often looks correct — stable job, decent income, the right social signals. It works from the outside. It just doesn’t work from the inside.

“If everything is fine, why doesn’t it feel like it?”

If that question has ever arrived while you’re doing something ordinary — cooking, commuting, waking up on a Sunday — it’s not confusion. It’s signal.

What misalignment actually is

You built your life around a scorecard you didn’t write.

External expectations, accumulated over years, about what success looks like, what a good life looks like, how productive or ambitious or settled you’re supposed to be by now. You optimised for outcomes legible to others — not for a life coherent to you.

The gap between those two things is what you feel every day.

Not dramatically. Constantly.

Before anything else

You are not a role. You are an organism — with drives, rhythms, and constraints that don’t disappear because you’re busy performing a version of yourself.

You don’t have a performance problem.

You have an alignment problem.

So the reflex to add more is understandable. It’s also wrong.

Before you add anything, you need to remove what was never yours to carry.

That’s where it starts.

And still, something feels off.

So here we are.

After years of university, studying, job interviews, listening to mum and dad who had seen it coming but couldn’t have known that Sam Altman and his ChatGPT would come along and blow up the entire job system — here we are with our salaries, our relationships, and our rent.

The feeling is that from the outside everything looks in order, but inside it’s all a mess. Like a bookshelf where every volume is perfectly aligned but the pages inside are all crumpled.

You tell yourself, okay, I risk being replaced by a machine and going broke, but hey, we’re all in the same boat. If I drown, you drown too.

Or maybe it’s just a phase. Sooner or later you’ll have the time and patience to iron every page and actually read every book.

Or maybe you’re just a bit behind. All you need to do is get back to work. You’ll catch up like you always have.

Yet you open LinkedIn and see that guy became Chief Farting Officer, that girl sells courses on how to become an influencer even though she can barely read or write, and you’re still here carefully managing the length of your nails so they don’t exceed the acceptable level of cleanliness but aren’t too short either, because then how do you shell pistachios?

Not to mention Instagram.

Everyone knows it’s all fake — even the platypuses know it. Yet you find yourself watching how good those two look together, what an amazing vacation that asshole is having, and thinking how miserable you are with your thumb scrolling up and down on that screen you wanted more than a bottle of water after a marathon when you were 12, and that today you sometimes want to throw out the window — but then how would you answer your boss’s emails while sitting on the toilet?

Then you zoom out. You remember that at your age your parents were already solid together and, if you remember correctly, had already bought a house, while you live in this hole where you can barely fit the winter coats if you squash them next to each other. They had more structure back then, you say — more direction.

Subscribe now

Instead here we are. Well-educated, independent, but not settled.

And that’s the part that doesn’t make sense.

Because objectively, you’re fine.

So what’s the problem?

You feel like something is missing.

You feel that once you sort out the career thing, go to the bank with your partner and close the biggest milestone the twentieth century ever created — the mortgage — then yes, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll finally be ready to live the serene life your parents promised you if instead of goofing off that Thursday afternoon you had finished your homework.

And yet I say something would still be missing even then. But let’s assume you’re right.

How do you get to that moment? And before you get there, how are you right now?

Leave a comment

If up to today you’ve done all the right steps and you still feel inadequate, this is hardly an execution problem. Because to reach that moment you’ll still have to take all the right steps. Besides, life is here and now.

Maybe it’s a problem of ownership?

Maybe you’ve optimised for outcomes that make sense but don’t actually belong to you?

Career, relationships, milestones.

All valid, all correct. Not all yours.

So even when you move forward, there’s a headwind blowing against you.

And the harder you push, the stronger it blows.

Until, among the leaves, a question whispers that you can no longer ignore:

If everything is in order, then why doesn’t it feel like it?

Maybe nothing is missing.

Maybe, simply, something isn’t yours.

Do you really think people can’t tell when something is written by a machine?

If someone clicks on your article, it’s because they’re interested in you.

Today 90% of content is so similar that people spot the pattern in ten seconds.

Nobody wants to be bullshitted.

Remember that AI produces average content.

Those who develop AI models want you to keep using them. The easiest way is to give you answers that don’t piss you off, don’t bore you, and that you’ll like. Safe, average answers.

A response that actually makes you fall in love would be risky — because the opposite of love is hate, and hate doesn’t make you use the tool more. Better a synthetic answer than a human one. After all, AI isn’t human.

Subscribe now

Language may have evolved partly to attract.

According to Geoffrey Miller, many “excessive” human traits — art, humor, creativity, large vocabulary — evolved not just for survival, but to signal fitness (good genes, intelligence) and attract mates. Language is like the peacock’s tail: expensive to produce (big brain, years to master), impossible to fake over time, and extremely useful for getting laid.1

So imagine a world where we all write and communicate in the exact same way. How do we recognize the people who actually interest us? How do we decide whose voice is worth diving deeper into? How do we tell the interesting from the boring?

And yet here you are — the same person who has zero desire to read yet another piece of crap written entirely by ChatGPT — asking that same ChatGPT to “rewrite this” or “improve that.”

What moves you is simple: you’re shitting your pants.

And I know this for sure because I’ve been washing a lot of my own dirty underwear.

More than a year ago I started a YouTube channel full of fire and excitement. When the results were slow, I panicked and ran straight to ChatGPT. I had it generate piles of ideas, scripts, titles, thumbnail advice, niche suggestions — everything. Initially, everything looked better, cleaner, smarter. In the end I had content in front of me that wasn’t mine at all. When I rewatched those videos I felt invisible. I ended up hating it so much that I deleted them all.

You’re terrified of being different.

You’re scared that if you show yourself as you really are, those who like you will change their minds. You’d rather hide in the crowd and be chosen by default than risk being seen for what you are.

Just like the LLMs, you want to please everyone.

Leave a comment

You’re scared of staying focused.

Writing isn’t easy — especially when you’re just starting and you know you’re not writing only for yourself. Writing demands your full attention.

According to Gloria Mark, our average attention span in front of a screen has dropped by about 70% in twenty years, down to 47 seconds.

Jumping from 47 seconds to 47 seconds, it’s hard to finish a piece that someone actually wants to read.

You’re shitting your pants at the thought of being seen.

Having someone else write your pieces is comfortable. If nobody reads you, you can play the victim and blame the algorithm that favors big writers and forgets beginners like you. If someone reads it and thinks it sucks, you can say “I didn’t write that.”

But if you wrote who you really are — if you showed your mind through your language — you’d be terrified that someone might actually read it. Not the piece. You.

What to do instead

If you have to, start using AI for what it’s good at: assisting/teaching you, not replacing you.

Write the first version alone. No prompts or corrections — just you.

Then:

• Delete every sentence that could be written by anyone

• Replace every “nice” word with a precise one

• Add details that only you could know

• Cut anything that sounds like you’re trying to impress

If it feels slightly uncomfortable to publish, you’re getting closer.

If it feels safe, it’s already dead.

Use AI only at the end — to catch obvious mistakes, refine, and learn from the suggestions so you improve over time. But don’t accept everything blindly.

Writing is a bit like getting naked in front of someone.

It’s not about feeling comfortable. It’s about accepting exposure.

Stay dressed, and nothing ever happens.

You already know exactly what you need to do to reach the life you want.

More likely, there’s something you keep hiding from yourself — and the problem isn’t that you don’t know what it is or where to find it.

The problem is that you can’t give it a voice.

Every time it tries to speak, you silence it. And it shows up whenever you’re faced with a defining decision, whenever you’re getting ready for an important appointment, whenever you’re telling a story about your childhood.

In those moments, you can’t afford to listen. The decision demands action, you can’t be late for the meeting, and the people around the table are waiting for the end of your story.

So you wonder why it can’t just show up politely. Knock at a peaceful moment. Bring a cake and a bottle of wine. Sit down in your living room and start talking.

Wouldn’t it be easier to face it that way?

You’d probably want nothing more than to talk to it, recognise it, give it space.

In the past few days, I managed to do that. I postponed a meeting and met it.

It spoke. I gave it my attention. I thought I’d be able to deal with it in a few minutes and still make it to the meeting. I expected to hear things I already knew. To thank it and quickly walk it to the door.

Instead, I missed the meeting.

It made me feel guilty. It cornered me. And then it calmed me down. It put me in front of the truth.

The voice is what’s left of you once you strip away the strategy.

Every form of unhappiness comes from the gap between who you are and who you’ve convinced yourself you need to be.

Let’s break the two apart.

Who you are is largely outside your control.

It’s a sequence of DNA — unique in time and space — that you had no say in. The only way for you to exist was for that specific sperm — out of millions — to meet that specific egg at that specific moment. And it did.

Then everything else followed. A name. A language. A family. A context. School, media, expectations. All of it layered on top of something you didn’t choose.

The problem starts with strategy.

The genes in your mum and dad didn’t just want to exist — they needed to persist. The bodies carrying them were temporary, so they had to find new ones. Reproduction became an objective.

But reproduction requires attraction. So strategy kicks in.

Farting loudly in public won’t get you very far. Better to put on makeup. Hit the gym. Learn the look. Build an image.

Judging by the fact that you exist, your parents did it right.

Truth vs Fit

Wanting to be attractive requires adapting behaviour to what others find desirable. So you learn to optimise appearance, behaviour, and identity to increase social mating success.

That optimisation is not aimed at truth. It is aimed at fit.

But fit depends on context.

Context changes. Your baseline genome doesn’t.

There have been times when slavery was normal. Times when women were said to be worth less than men. Times when white people thought they were superior. In each of those eras, people built their image accordingly. They adapted to their context.

They shaped themselves to fit what was rewarded.

And if your natural inclinations didn’t align with the environment, you had a choice: adjust, or pay the price.

Some people align naturally with their environment. Others compensate by presenting something that is not fully them.

Leave a comment

The more that constructed image diverges from your actual preferences, the more likely you are to attract relationships and opportunities that feel misaligned.

And that’s where the trap springs.

A misaligned image attracts the wrong audience. It creates expectations you cannot sustain. Over time, it locks you into a life built on signals rather than substance.

The result is accumulated tension.

That tension is unhappiness.

And I know it very well.

For years I built a version of myself that was more mysterious, more “serious”, more interesting on paper. I adjusted my look, my way of speaking, even my writing style to fit what I thought people wanted. On the outside it looked like maturity. Inside it felt like disappearing. The more I optimised my image, the more exhausted I became. Every success felt hollow because it belonged to a version of me that wasn’t real. It took me a long time (and painful moments) to understand that I was paying for external approval with my own authenticity.

Then I realised that we’ll never resolve this tension by perfecting the mask. We have to remove it.

So I stopped trying to sound acceptable, simplified my wardrobe decisions, and removed filters. I understood that it’s better to be loved by a few than liked by many.

The moment you move away from optimising for fit and start accepting your true self is the moment the gap between who you are and who you want to be begins to close.

That’s when life finally starts feeling like yours.

The war is now an ugly memory, and you’re putting on your shoes to go by tram to work.

Your job is one of the most respected. One of those that, when you introduce yourself to a stranger and tell them what you do, you already know you’ll get a smile somewhere between admiration and envy.

You arrive at the office. You grab your coffee and greet all the assholes you’ve been surrounded by for a couple of years now. They’re human computers too.

You tell them about your boring weekend between going to church and fixing the water heater. You make it sound like it was fun. They tell you about theirs, without the water heater but definitely with church.

Then you start working.

Calculations. Lots of calculations.

Numbers. Lots of numbers.

You put everything into columns. You’re fast. You’re sharp.

Then you check. Few mistakes.

Then lunch break.

Then repeat.

Then you leave.

Tram. House door. Shoes off.

You are exhausted, but at least your wife is waiting for you with free-range chicken.

Another Monday of the same year, after putting on your coat, you wear the same shoes, you arrive at the office and find a surprise. Waiting for you and your colleagues there’s the boss, with his horrible favourite polka-dot tie, in the middle of the room with a futuristic electromechanical machine that until then you had only seen on some advertising billboard in the city. Patting it like it was his adolescent son, he says it’s an IBM 360. It’s used to do calculations. And it does them much faster than you and your colleagues ever could.

One month later, bye bye, sayonara. The boss, still with that tie you’d like to strangle him with, announces that you’ve been fired.

Subscribe now

In 1964, the machine replaced calculation.
Today, it’s replacing analysis.

Three years ago, I made a career move. I’d been working at Deloitte as an auditor for just a year, and ChatGPT had started to gain popularity a few months earlier.

I thought I had seen the future.

Data.

Everyone was talking about it. The ability to extract insight, to model, to analyse. That was supposed to be the new edge.

I was already fast. Excel felt like an extension of my hands. But I lacked one thing: exposure to real analytical work at scale.

So I moved. New role. Pure analyst.

At the beginning, I felt the acceleration.

Large datasets. Real problems. New tools. I was building something that looked like leverage.

I thought I had positioned myself perfectly. Then something changed.

The tools improved. What used to take hours started taking minutes. What required effort started requiring prompts. What felt like skill started feeling replaceable.

So the real question showed up:

If this becomes trivial, what remains valuable?

I realised I was optimising for something that was becoming abundant.

So I shifted.

I moved from data to above data.

From analysing answers to deciding which questions matter. From solving problems to choosing problems worth solving. From being right to acting under uncertainty.

I stopped measuring myself on output. I started measuring myself on judgement.

The mistake is to compete — even among humans — where the machine is strongest.

The edge is no longer intelligence.
It’s judgement under pressure.
When the answer is unclear.
When the model disagrees with you.
When you’re alone.

These are harder to scale. Harder to automate. And increasingly valuable.

Leave a comment

Intelligence used to be the bottleneck.

Now it’s something else.

I don’t think the winners will be the ones with the best models.

They’ll be the ones who know when not to use them.

In 1964, they didn’t see the machine coming.

You do.