“Are we making any investments ?”

I know for sure that our company does spend money. But it wasn’t clear to me what the difference between an investment and a mere cost was.

I found out the distinction is pretty simple : A cost works only while you feed it. An investment keeps working after you stop it because it has created something that can act on its own.

Electricity, rent, insurance… they’re costs. They’re not useless, they keep you alive, but they don’t make you grow. Stop paying and it all stops. Documentation, reputation, automations… they change the business over the long term.

For this reason, investment sounds more noble. Saying that you’re investing is infinitely more acceptable than admitting that you’re just spending. “We’re investing in our brand” sounds more valuable than “we spend in advertising”. Oftentimes, it’s the exact same thing with a better story attached to it.

Plus, the notion of investment is also safer : if it does not work now, you can pretend it’s just a matter of time. Which you can’t do with something clearly labelled as a cost.

Clearing the blurry zone

The problem is : most costs don’t look like costs. They are often disguised as investments. But that’s a dangerous habit. It ultimately is a way to lower your expectation on the money and energy spent.

Even worse, it makes you believe you are actively building something, that you’re making fundamental progress. When the truth is you’re simply living from day to day.

That is why anyone who’s ambitious about building things, should be an expert at telling costs from investments. And you do that with one simple question :

“What will remain 18 months from now ?”

If nothing remains, it was never an investment, no matter what you called it.

How this extends to life

We people, unlike companies, don’t have a CFO to tell costs from investments. Yet, we do have choices to make on where we spend our money, energy, and most importantly, time.

Our life is filled with simple costs : going to the restaurant, rent, shopping… Nothing to be ashamed of, they’re making life go on. But many of us expect our lives to evolve. This can be attained if we leave room for some investments : learning (skills, languages) sits at the top, but maintaining deep and meaningful relationships, building a sound reputation for yourself are also immensely valuable. All of these things compound over time.

Interestingly enough, very few things are inherently investments. Most of them become investments only if done consistently and with intent. That’s why the distinction is largely dependent on HOW you do it. Consistency turns many simple costs into lasting effects.

Overall, it’s not about turning your life into an endless series of investments. It’s more about you dedicating some of your present time to reduce the effort your future will require.

Just don’t feed the monsters

While you can make your future easier, many times you actually borrow against it.

These are negative investments. Everything you consistently do that negatively compounds over time. Doomscrolling, durable sleep debt, chronic negative thoughts, addictions of any kind… All of which feeds monsters that grow slowly over the years if left unchecked. Monsters that you will eventually have to fight…

Or that will ultimately eat you someday, when it's grown enough.

Paul

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Shouldn’t you ask God for things ? If it is all about God doing His will, what place is left for my own ? God does not need my approval to carry out His will, does He ? Isn’t that a form of fatalism ?

It was too hard for me to accept placing God’s will above my own. To sincerely ask God to do as He wills is hard to do without a deep faith. So I kept my father’s advice somewhere in the back of my mind, without ever really applying it. I did pray, but I was asking for my own will to be done, hoping God would approve of it. In fact, I did so because deep down, I believed my aspirations were best for me.

Later, I realized life is full of reversals. Many times, what initially seems like terrible news makes way for unexpectedly good things. As Chaplin said : “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot”. Slowly, I came to see that I was not always the best judge of what was best for me.

But this still did not explain what prayer was for, if God would make the best decision for me anyway. I remained unable to understand it until I came across a passage in the gospels. Hours before His arrest and passion, Jesus prays in the garden of Gethsemane :

The cup refers to the suffering that awaits Him.

In this episode, which reveals Christ’s deeply human nature, He clearly expresses His will : He does not want to be crucified. There is no stoic pose here, no theatrical detachment, no pretence of fearlessness. Yet He still places God’s will above His own.

That prayer of Christ encapsulates the essence of Christian prayer :

We pray by expressing our will AND submitting it to God’s. His will does not suppress ours. When we say “Thy will be done”, we don’t say it to remind God to do what He would otherwise forget to do. We say it to place ourselves in harmony with Him.

We say : “Here is what I want, but I trust Your wisdom more than my own”.

Unlike what I once believed, this has nothing to do with resignation. The fatalist believes his will changes nothing. The Christian chooses and acts fully, while accepting that he is not sovereign.

Prayer does not replace action. It places action in the right order. And in the end, I came to realize that the real purpose of prayer is not to inform God. It is to transform the one who prays.

Paul

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Three days later, in the morning, he is back. Standing at the door, alive, intact. No departure, no battlefield. She rushes into his arms, overwhelmed with relief. He has somehow escaped the draft and avoided hell. And it feels like a miracle.

The couple resumes their intimate life. He cannot leave the house without risking a court-martial for desertion, let alone return to his former job. She cannot even mention his presence, as all the other men of the village are at the front. He stays at home, idle. He becomes the man who stayed, while others went. As weeks, then months pass, the tension that once held the couple together has quietly and steadily dissolved. And with it, her love for him.

The disappearance of love in that situation is not a moral condemnation. She does not cease to love him because she thinks he is a coward. It is the loss of tension that has killed her love. Duty, risk and absence used to give him a symbolic substance. They would pull him away from his relationship. When he returns, he is only a cloistered fugitive. Symbolic and physical distance have crumbled, along with attraction.

But attraction is not simply about distance or proximity. It begins as a spark. A spark triggered when, from a distance, you sense that something in the other remains out of reach, a form of asymmetry. That spark then turns into an irresistible desire to grasp what escapes you. This makes attraction highly unstable by nature. It needs distance to emerge, but immediately seeks to consume the very distance that made it possible. Physics offers a clear illustration of this. Jump from the tenth floor of a building, and gravity, an attractive force, will lethally pull you down. It violently consumes all the distance between your initial position and the ground.

There always comes a moment when attraction reduces the distance to zero. When you love someone, you naturally want to be as close to them as possible. The completion of this proximity being physical touch, and ultimately sexual intercourse. But even at the point of maximum intimacy, when your skin is pressed against the other’s, something resists. You physically cannot fuse with the other person.

Does this mean attraction is doomed to disappear once closeness is complete ?

Stabilizing attraction

If attraction always collapses inward, is it necessarily ephemeral ? Is there a way to stabilize it ? There must be one : each of us is constantly attracted to the ground by gravity. It appears to be a long-lasting attraction. Why does it endure ?

The answer is simple. When we stand, gravity is not the only force at work. The ground also exerts an opposite force on us. The atoms composing the soil push back the atoms of our feet. That opposing force, known as the normal force, is what prevents gravity from crushing us into the ground. Attraction persists because something resists it. These two opposing forces generate tension.

That is the key point. Attraction does not die when distance disappears. It dies when nothing resists being consumed. Attraction may endure only as long as some tension remains.

Keeping tension high

The same force that allows you to whitstand gravity is also at work when another person’s skin is pressed against yours. It is the normal force that prevents bodies from intermingling. A force that pushes each of you back, and in doing so, forces each to remain themselves.

This is the condition for tension : clear identity. Identity is what defines your individuality. The things that cannot be dissolved into the other.

What erodes attraction is not proximity itself, but familiarity. Likeness. Symmetry. The vitality of a relationship can be measured by the quality of its tension : by the presence of two clearly defined poles that do not coincide, and therefore preserve their asymmetry.

That is why the notion of identity deserves attention. Identity does not mean conforming to a masculine or feminine archetype. It absolutely does not mean playing a role or acting distant. It means assuming what is genuinely yours : what you are, what you do, what you are oriented toward. It means accepting friction that may appear when you refuse to twist yourself, to abandon what you should be or do, or to surrender blindly to attraction itself.

Just as our bodies are delimited by our skin, we also need a symbolic identity that cannot be fused with another. Staying true to your identity maintains tension. Proximity is not the problem, as distance between the two poles is dynamic. It contracts and expands, constantly shifting. It shrinks to feel the warmth of attraction more acutely. And it extends to allow contemplation, and mostly, to leave room for the other to move freely towards us.

Paul

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Yet CAC 40 is nowhere near the top growing indexes of the last 20 years. So why choose the French index rather than another ? Familiarity ? Patriotism ? Informational laziness ?

This exposed an internal contradiction that I feel : despite an everlasting love for every square meter of my country, when it comes to investing, I don’t think of France. For one simple reason : I’m looking for performance.

France gives me this contradictory feeling that I call Lucid Love : loving something wholeheartedly, and yet not looking away from its (numerous) flaws. The more I think about it, the more I see it as absolutely vital for sound decision-making.

The natural human reflex is choosing what you love. Or what is closest. This has a name : Tribalism. When tribalism is strong, loyalty outweighs competence. The most familiar is chosen. That behaviour is partly responsible for the slump in which several third-world countries have been bogged down for decades. If your affiliations prevail when it comes to making decisions, these affiliations become servitude.

To escape this, some fall in a different trap : a form of utilitarianism, or what I would call mechanical love. Loving people for what they produce, and not who they are. A form of mechanization of the heart. You can sometimes feel this when people are very specific about relationships, like a checklist of features (salary, height, shape…). Ultimately, this vision turns you into a perpetual assessor whose only religion is usefulness. If something isn’t useful, let’s just dump it.

Lucid love draws a clear line between the two worlds. There are things you love, and things that perform. Sometimes they are the same. Many other times, they’re two different things, and you don’t mind. Your love is not altered by notions of performance. Yet you respect performance, even from your worst enemy. It is a sweet spot between blind tribalism, and a cold performance-only mindset.

It implies there is no restriction to the love you can have for someone or something. And it means there is no guilt to feel for criticizing that thing you love. It also means understanding that some choices are to be made based on love, and some others, on performance and efficiency. But it’s up to you to make the difference between the two.

That balance comes straight from the Christian view of the individual : Jesus never treated people as categories. He addressed each person directly. And he insisted that each person would answer for their own actions. And he paired this with a command to love every neighbour. Actions and outcome matter. But never to the point of cancelling love.

That is why they say “God can only count to one”. And that one is every one of us.

Paul

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Nothing is considered valid per se, by its essence. In the eyes of most, the world does not carry a natural order of meaning. Therefore, anything is a topic for discussion. Nothing feels naturally where it belongs.

When nothing is self-evident, the mind never rests. We do not inhabit our lives, we keep questioning them.

The undoing of the Cosmos

Ancient Greeks called the world “cosmos”. A word that implied a sense of harmony : the world was seen as organic. It meant that each part would function in harmony with the others. The world was celebrated for what it was.

Over time, however, men got tired of this “frozen” vision of a world “perfect” as it was : they wanted to go beyond, they wanted to understand this world. Unable to grasp it as a whole, they had to break it down into individual elements, which is the original meaning of the word “analysis” : to dissolve, to break apart.

As men started breaking down the world, they also unravelled the harmony that once bound its parts together. Intellectuals dissected life as if it were a corpse, and thought they understood it. Descartes split body and soul, object and subject. Control replaced contemplation. Nature was analysed as a set of separate mechanisms.

Too busy with their project, men failed to notice what they were doing : altering their very relationship with this world. What began as an intellectual adventure, quietly reshaped their way of being. The idea of natural order was dissolved. In its place came an atomic solitude, a cloud of fragments drifting in emptiness. As we freed ourselves from order, we also detached ourselves from a shared meaning.

By understanding the world, we unlearned how to belong to it.

From appraising to praising the world

We now understand the world more deeply than the Greeks ever could. And yet something essential has slipped away. Their organic vision offered one irreplaceable gift : a quiet yet unapologetic confidence in life itself.

The absence of natural order introduced conflict where there was complementarity. Husband and wife were set in competition, though they should be mutual servants and beneficiaries. Employer and employee suspect each other, while they should provide for and contribute to each other.

To recover peace, we need to feel that we belong to this order. Therefore, we must rediscover debt that links us. We owe our lives to others, and others to us. We are not self-made, but interwoven in a shared world. To acknowledge this, and to search that order is not submission, it is reconciliation with reality.

Peace will not arise by mastering the world, but by serving it.

Paul

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If you write that, you probably feel the exact opposite. We speak most of what we lack. Deep down in your heart, you certainly feel that nobody cares. That the meaning of your life isn’t so clear. And see this short text as performative, a spell, an incantation, whose primary recipient is the author themselves. You are certainly afraid that things may not matter, and seek solace.

But suppose it didn’t matter, why would it be so dramatic ?

If you think about it, one could perfectly accept that the universe is indifferent to their existence. If nothing matters, everything becomes lighter, you are free to play, love, create without expecting any external validation. You can simply enjoy the moment. Look at animals, a lion spends its life being a lion, not trying to leave a trace or to “matter”. It becomes dramatic the moment you feel the need for things to matter.

And let’s be honest, most of us want our life to matter one way or another. If you dig long enough, you realize the root cause for that is the consciousness of our upcoming death. Not just because “I will disappear”, but because “everything I am, everything I love, all I’ve endured, all I’ve done, all that will be wiped out and gone forever”. Animals don’t care, they don’t know. Humans see their end, and it feels like an injustice : “how could all these things that matter so much to me end up in nothing ?”

Escape routes

Once you have come to this realization, there are two main ways to not end up completely depressed (that are not entirely incompatible) :

1. Finding an external guarantee of meaning : God and religion, History, posterity, children… something above you that validates your worth, the value of your existence.

2. Radical acceptance of the universe’s indifference. Nothing remains, but it is counterbalanced by the beauty of the instant.

Quite visibly, the author of this little text struggles with that second option. They’ve not accepted that they did not matter. No one can blame them, for it is incredibly hard, it demands an internal conversion, a switch from a sense of symbolic survival to a logic of pure immediacy.

It certainly was loneliness and invisibility (a foretaste of our ultimate fate) that pushed them to write this text. An urge to resist this truth that you feel, a desire to exist in others’ eyes, in their memories, in their hearts… and to protest : “No, my life will not be swallowed just like that, without a trace”.

But they are stuck right between the two escape routes : they’ve lost (or rejected) the religious guarantee of meaning, yet cannot handle the vertigo of nonsense. Therefore, they build a small totem out of fear and scrawl : « it matters ». Fragile patch-up job to calm the angst. Embrace the universe’s indifference and say instead : « It doesn’t, and that’s fine ».

Paul

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Why? Why give it all away? What could possibly be worth that sacrifice? To that, they have one simple answer : they are searching for God.

At first, I did not really understand (there actually was not much I understood at all). I used to think they were simply a bunch of guys, living in silence, who somewhat just wanted to have their peace.

The very evening I arrived, it was about dinner time. I roughly had time to drop my bag, and directly headed to the refectory, along with other guests staying at the monastery. At the entrance, some were let in, while others, including myself, were left outside. All of this through discreet gestures, no words exchanged. I had no idea why they did not let us in. Why would they separate guests like that ?

They had us stand in line and wait against a wall. Then a monk appeared and stood in front of us in silence, carrying a carafe, motionless. Then came the abbot. He said a few kind words to me, and then warmly shook my hand. I was then invited forward : the silent monk poured water over my hands, and the abbot handed me a towel. After that, they made me enter the refectory to have dinner.

That short welcome ritual contained in itself the essence of monastic life : silence and spirituality in action.

I. Silence

To most, monks’ silence is like an absence of life. It is quite the contrary.

They choose it in order to be fully open to what surrounds them. You notice it instantly when you speak to a monk : they listen in a unique way. They are entirely present, focused on what you are saying, intending to catch every nuance of your words. Their silence is all but a self-inflicted punishment, it is a doorway to a deeper grasp of the world and of the divine.

I also quickly noticed that every monk wears a watch. Seven times a day, the bell calls them. When it does, they abandon any ongoing task to gather in the abbey, to sing and pray in Latin. This preordained rhythm turned out to be incredibly calming. It rids you of all the very practical thinking you usually have to do in a day. It echoed a conviction I had just reached in my own life, which I wrote about :

The same rhythm, repeating itself, on and on… When I mentioned this with a monk, he replied : “Our external lives are settled so that more can happen in our internal life.”

II. Spirituality in action

Silence and schedule are the visible part of their lives. But what I ignored is that monks have an ambition, a goal. That goal is Becoming the Ultimate Christian.

It took me a while to notice that every single aspect of their behaviour had been worked on. You can feel humility in their walk, always silent and cushioned. Their head inclined towards the floor and the softness in their gaze show gentleness and serenity. The respect, fraternity and benevolence with which they treat one another (and guests) is tangible.

One evening at dinner, the guests’ table had been left without spoons. Soup was served, and while the monks began eating in silence, we sat, unable to. I watched one of them, usually calm and serene, suddenly grow restless as he noticed this. He stood, moved quickly to his brother in charge, and insisted that we be given spoons right away. It was unbearable to him that we should go hungry while he ate.

The monks’ reason for being is to be living embodiments of Jesus’ message. They pray seven times a day not only to imitate Him, but to let His words sink deeper into their lives, reshaping them slowly, relentlessly. This is how monks search for God.

Jesus said : “The Kingdom of God is in the midst of you”. The monks have understood that, and they know that the Kingdom of Heaven is not some faraway paradise to be reached after death. It is something to be built here and now. To welcome the stranger is not a courtesy, it is the Gospel in action.

They are here to be a flame that never goes out. A flame that bears witness to the commands of Jesus, passed on through their behaviour, and over more than a thousand years. A flame to let ordinary people like me understand what being a Christian can mean.

In the end, do they find God ?

They do not find God as once finds evidence. But they find Him by slowly letting their lives become a reflection of Him.

Paul

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We all pursue, one way or another, happiness.

And believe that we need to do things in order to be happy. “When I do X, Y, Z… I’ll be happy”. Which means that there is — and will always be — something between happiness and ourselves. Once we do these things, we are satisfied for a few hours or days, and then return to our basic state, which demands more actions to fulfil ourselves again.

These things that we (think we) need to do in order to be happy, are not pathways to happiness, they are in fact obstacles that stand in our way towards happiness. Which is why he who wants to conquer his own happiness through actions will never experience it, for he will always push it further away. Happiness isn’t a heroic conquest. We place obstacles on our way, because we fail to understand that happiness is always at hand. We unconsciously avoid happiness, by consistently procrastinating on it, believing we cannot reach it right here, right now.

But If you don’t learn to be happy today, You won’t be tomorrow either.

Man is not made to be spontaneously happy

From the very moment we exist, we start wanting things. Our nature dictates us to be active. We want things to move, to improve, to be different. Simply being seems unbearable to us. We are, by nature, at war with the state of affairs.

For being, simply being, means contemplating emptiness. An emptiness that terrifies us. Because it shouts : “You are nothing”. And there is something in our soul that absolutely refuses to acknowledge this. Our ego falsifies our actions’ motivation, pretends we want to do X, Y, Z to be happy, while it is often just a way to evade its own vacuity. This is why we pull out our phone the second we’re alone in a room. Emptiness is unbearable.

Without a conscious effort, we cannot encounter durable happiness.

Happiness is today

This is why Naval Ravikant says happiness is a skill. One must decide to be happy. The ability to renew this decision every day is a skill.

A skill rooted in the idea that happiness will always come from the inside. That we must refuse to let the external world decide in our stead whether we’ll be happy. (Misery often stems from the distance between what is, and what we want it to be). He who accepts the darkness of this world stops postponing his happiness.

For the key lies in saying yes to emptiness. Overcoming our ego’s resistance. For such is the definition of happiness : saying yes to what is.

Not because everything is perfect or painless, but because you’ve stopped demanding that it should be. It can be Spinoza’s calm yes, Nietzsche’s radiant yes, Buddha’s detached yes, or Montaigne’s tender yes. But it is always a reconciliation with reality. Happiness is when your desires stop warring against life.

Ok great, but…

How does it work ? Let’s say I decide I want to be happy right now, then what ? Should I just do nothing and drop any ambition ? If it does make me happy, won’t I start being unhappy as soon as I make an action ? Is happiness the end of action?

Saying happiness equals inaction is incomplete. Inaction is only a step towards happiness, not the final destination. It is valuable simply because most of our actions are evasion. Inaction erases those actions and brings stillness, but the final goal is clarity.

Philosopher Simone Weil writes: “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

She knows most of our actions are driven by ego — the need to prove, to possess, to dominate, to use. Right action begins when we stop willing and start looking. Looking at things without trying to bend them, to dominate them, to use them.

To her, one can silence their ego by giving the world their whole attention. When you do so, you seek accuracy, precision, truth, not recognition or control. From this silence may arise rightful action. “Virtue is what descends into the soul when it has given way to silence.” — also writes Weil.

The decision of being happy, brought forward by Naval, is not about convincing yourself that you are happy. It is a decision to make space, and to pay deep attention to what happens around you. This is how doing may reconcile with being : when action flows from what you’ve seen in silence. When it’s no longer an escape, but a continuity with your state of happiness.

Evasive actions make you think : “I’m doing this because otherwise I’d feel bad.”

Rightful actions make you say: “I feel good. Therefore, I do this.”

When you cook for someone you love, it’s not to be thanked or to be distracted, it’s because it just feels right. Which is what Weil meant when she said : “What one sees clearly, one cannot not do.” Sometimes, once you have given pure attention, acting becomes as natural as breathing.

When an action makes you feel this, it is no longer an ordinary desire, it is a call.

Paul

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Why not purge French society of all its noxious elements ?

It is an incredibly seductive, simple and natural idea. When you see people behaving poorly, you wonder, “Why not just remove them ?”. To wish for a so-called purge is to wish for simplicity and clarity in a world that offers mostly ambiguity.

But the more you think about it, the more you understand why it may not be such a good idea :

1. Once unleashed, fire burns indiscriminately. An individual may decree who is noxious and who isn’t. But when a group takes over that judgment, it is only a matter of time until this mechanism gets weaponized against more and more people.

2. This desire for a purge betrays an almost pathological obsession with purity and absolute control. It reveals a childish vision of society, and a refusal to acknowledge the immanent presence of aggressiveness within it. A conflictless society is an illusion. Long-lasting societies are the ones that channel the tension, not erase it.

How do such “extreme” thoughts come to my mind ?

It came to me after I read about a teenager stabbing another to death, and then being sentenced to… eight years in prison. A sentence that seems to say that life is negotiable. That murder can be administratively diluted. A teenager can kill another one and walk free before he turns twenty-five.

That sentence is entirely compatible with French law. But French law was born from the ashes of sacredness and moral absolutes. Nothing is sacred, everything is negotiable. It seems that something in the moral structure has collapsed. Or perhaps, that we have collectively agreed to pretend it never existed.

The civilization of amortization

The French Republic is that schoolteacher who wants you to succeed, but just not too much. It wants you to have good grades to flatter its own ego, but withholds real knowledge to ensure you never outgrow it. This quiet sabotage has a name : equality.

Since the Revolution, inequality has been seen as a mortal threat to stability. Which is why France lives in constant fear of liberty. For liberty makes inequality inevitable.

Freedom and equality aren’t twins. They are rivals.

To keep things from spinning out of control, the Republic lightens the burdens of the weak with subsidies, with lenient justice, and holds the strong in check, through progressive taxation and bureaucratic drag.

This produces frustration on both ends. But this frustration is not an error. Because the goal lies elsewhere : mitigating the risk of internal disorder.

Like any living organism, a political regime seeks self-preservation above all. Totalitarian systems do so through violence. Modern France does the opposite: it suffocates conflict under layers of softness. It keeps the pot from boiling by keeping the flame perpetually low.

This is the civilization of amortization. A soft control structure in which everyone is both protected and paralysed. A civilization that doesn’t pursue true justice (of any kind) per se. It does only as long as justice aligns with stability. Otherwise, it is largely willing to walk all over it.

To believe or not to believe in the tragic

The civilization of amortization has both advocates and critics. The difference between the two is not political. They differ in their philosophical, if not metaphysical, views of the world.

The “amortizer” believes in comfort.

He is no lover of power or glory. A cautious humanist, willing to sacrifice greatness for comfort and humanity. The world is harsh enough already, let’s make existence as comfortable as possible for the greatest number and ease their suffering. He sees the flaws of the civilization of amortization, but also sees it as a system of dignity : you might hear him say : ”We don’t let people starve on the streets !”.

His views are actually legitimate. They may stem from experiences of devastation (the welfare state is a child of WWII), and a side of Christian compassion (in which the most fragile individual is as good as a king).

Others (like me), believe in the tragic.

They also see the world’s ruthlessness. Yet they discern an underlying sense of order beneath it. The suffering on our paths are not just things to avoid or erase, but obstacles to overcome that lend meaning to our lives. There is no bliss without hardship. No beauty without struggle. That is just the way it is. It is the essence of human adventure.

They do not believe in this ideal, sweet, equal, and safe world. And say : “I want my life to have meaning, not to be easy”. And if it’s easy, it probably won’t have any meaning at all.

This is the legacy of the Greeks — Aeschylus, Sophocles, Heraclitus — and of Nietzsche. The spirit of tragedy. Its characters are faced with the unrelenting will of the gods, which simply can’t be thwarted, and they end up being crushed. Tragedy teaches that no one, king, queen, or warrior, can escape hardship.

I honestly wish the civilization of amortization would bring eternal peace to human societies. But deep down, I believe that it’s like trying to hold back a river with a dam.

After years of good service, the dam is full of small cracks (massive debt, declining international power, confiscatory taxation, internal violence…). It holds, until it doesn’t. And when it breaks, it kills, reminding us that the river was never tamed.

On the day that the civilization of amortization collapses, it might not look much better than a purge.

Paul

Instagram

It tells the story of Austrian Lieutenant Anton Hofmiller, who is invited to dinner at the castle of a wealthy Hungarian family. As the music plays and the mood turns festive, he asks the daughter, Edith, for a dance. The room falls silent. She bursts into tears. Only then does he understand his mistake : Edith’s legs have been paralysed for years. Embarrassed and ashamed, Anton flees. The next day, he sends flowers to apologize.

At that point of the story, I didn’t understand yet what the author Stefan Zweig meant by “Impatience of the Heart”.

As I kept reading, I saw Anton gradually, month after month, get closer and closer to Edith. But not because he wanted to. At first, it was because he felt an urge to make amends for his mistake. But as Edith rapidly grew attached to him, it became totally impossible for him to push her back, for fear of breaking her frail heart, and her already weakened morale. Escaping the family’s castle becomes all the more difficult as Edith’s father, starts to insidiously suggest that leaving Edith would seriously deteriorate her health.

The book has an alternative title : “Dangerous pity”. Anton’s pity built him a cage. its bars being made of shame, guilt and pity.

Pushed even forward by Edith’s relatives and his own guilt, Anton ends up proposing… But soon after, he clumsily tries to postpone the marriage, he becomes blunt with her, and at some point, decides to do what he has always been doing : he flees. To Vienna. At this point, Edith understands that she has been living a lie. And kills herself. Only after this tragic event does Anton finally recovers lucidity. And has these words :

“For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.”

The whole time, Anton is moved by pity. But it is a worthless and devitalized kind of pity. A weak and sentimental one, “which is no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness; a pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one’s own soul against the suffering of another.”

Anton’s story is an expression of how much damage weakness can cause. For me, it is a constant reminder to avoid acting out of weakness.

Anton should have simply apologized and taken his leave. But he just hated the idea of not being a good guy, and thus kept taking the wrong choice.

Many times, life is also about saying no. Rejecting people.

While building my company, I have had to fire people and always hated doing it. Yet every time I did, it was for the greater good of the company, or sometimes even the people themselves. You don’t want to be working in a place in which you’re no longer wanted.

Being nice saves costs on the moment. But the bill often comes way later.

That’s why you must do the hard thing and speak the truth. Even if it means someone will think you’re an asshole.

Paul

Instagram

Jokes aside (not sure if it actually is one…), this winner-loser distinction is an unsettling one. From my personal experience — growing up in France — when people hear about this, they feel an instant urge to dismiss that duality. They have a gut-level rejection of this concept. They will deploy massive efforts to argue that it is nonsense — that it pits people against each other and stems from a narrow, America-imported meritocratic mindset, in which everything is reduced to money.

Why such vivid reactions ?

I remember Nassim Taleb writing that “an idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion”. I think people are scared :

1. Of questioning whether they themselves could be losers.

2. Of endangering the egalitarian mindset that has been running through French society, for at least two centuries now.

It is intellectually more comfortable, safer, to dismiss the concept altogether, rather than accepting the idea of classifying people into one of the two categories.

But because of Taleb’s words, I believe this duality is worth exploring.

What is a loser ?

I personally was the first to disregard this notion, arguing that anyone can have their own path, their own measure of success, and so on. And I still believe so. We are not all meant to strike it rich or to become a world-class athlete.

However, many times, I saw people I couldn’t help but see as total losers. They had this authentic loser vibe, that you can feel in your guts. They’re not the poorest, they’re not the most unhappy, nor the ugliest. They look fine. But they give this irresistible impression of infinite tastelessness.

Tepid. Complacent. Boring. That’s the smell of a loser.

I tried to put words on that gut feeling.

Interestingly enough, I realized the loser isn’t one because he has failed. But he does fail, precisely because he is a loser. He lacks the internal resources to achieve anything. There is no sacred fire burning inside him. The loser never pushes things. He’s always wishing, sometimes doing, and never achieving. This internal sluggishness is the cornerstone of what makes a loser.

Looking around me, I realized parts of my environment were a breeding ground for losers. And that is directly attributable to the loser culture that exists, notably in France.

This mindset is not just personal — it's become cultural. Let me give you an example.

Loser culture

People today often discuss how to handle failure. Everyone knows and understands that dwelling on past failure is harmful. Therefore, accepting one’s own failure has been emphasized, quite rightly. Yet there has been an overextension of this logic. Now, many people accept failure BEFORE it has even happened.

I recently saw a video from a running influencer. He decided to take part in a trail race. He says he’s doing it for fun, but also to give advice on how to handle the race appropriately, as if he were the “running OG”. After a while — far less than he was physically capable of enduring — he ends up walking. Did he break his ankle ? Did he fall ? Was he interrupted ?

None of that, he simply was out of mental fuel.

That is something I cannot understand. Is he racing or simply strolling ? Montaigne famously wrote : “Quand je danse, je danse.” - “When I dance, I dance”. An invitation to fully engage in what you do. When they dance, men think of how they look. When they sleep, they think of the next day. And when they live, they think about their death.

This lack of presence was already disturbing to me. But it wasn’t what hit me hardest. As I opened the comment section, it was littered with comforting ‘mom-ish’ comments : “It’s okay to not feel good at some point”, “it’s okay to be giving up”, and so on…

A common atmosphere that celebrates giving up. Any negative connotation, any form of shame tied to renouncement is thoroughly erased. But when you’re no longer afraid of losing, your chances of achieving wither.

The real tragedy isn’t in falling short — it’s in never daring to reach.

A matter of love

I said it before : it’s not the failure that makes the loser. Failing doesn’t diminish a man’s worth. No one is above failure. You don’t become a loser because you failed, but because you give up on ambition.

Being a loser comes from the inside. The loser has too little love for victory and achievements. Victory and achievements mean different things to each of us. But what is certain is that they are always a pathway to evolution within our lives.

This absence of love therefore becomes the root cause of stagnation. The loser is like a horse in a pen, with a fence it could probably jump over. It just doesn’t have the energy to try it out, and the curiosity to see what’s beyond. It could leap, if only it dared. Instead, it lingers in its pen, slowly rotting in place.

I recently heard the famous singer Charles Aznavour say : “L’eau stagnante finit par sentir, et c’est pareil pour les humains !” (“Stagnant water eventually stinks — and so do humans !”)

So keep it moving !

Paul

Instagram

Its military might has significantly weakened, its wealth no longer grows, the rest of the world no longer seeks to imitate it — like Japan extensively did in the 19th century. Worst of all, its faith in the future has waned.

Europe does not know where it wants to go, it no longer unanimously believes in something. Like a sick man whose glorious days are gone, counting the remaining ones until he silently dies out in his sleep (and hoping no one disturbs him in the meantime).

Europe once believed in what the future would hold. Oddly, it now seems content with its sickness. It does not want to be cured. Mostly because it no longer truly loves itself. It would rather let the disease consume its whole body.

In fact, Europe wouldn’t mind dying.

What is that disease made of ?

It is made of lies. Lies that Europe keeps telling itself.

At the end of the second millennium, Europe inherited a dominant position in the concert of nations. A dominion achieved through centuries of harrowing endeavours, tireless work, rivalry and conquest, innovation and a thirst for ideals. From this dominant position arose an unconfessed feeling of deep-rooted moral superiority. We Europeans became convinced that we knew it all — and that we were above others intellectually, economically, militarily, and most of all, morally.

At this point, you may wonder : what do I mean by “unconfessed feeling of deep-rooted moral superiority” ?

Let’s take an example : today, it is widely accepted in Europe that “all cultures are equal“. Yet, those who claim this will, for example, unhesitatingly criticize Afghan culture for its lack of gender equality. This means they implicitly use a hierarchy of values. But they will never admit it. Why ? Because they’re just too afraid of being labelled as intolerant — or worse : RACIST.

Fantasy world

We Europeans have decided to live in the world of ideas and moral principles — and we love it. We picked ideas we liked and decided to live by them, regardless of whether they matched the reality before our very eyes. We prided ourselves immensely on inventing human rights, being models of democracy and champions of peace.

As Noam Chomsky explained in Manufacturing Consent, those ideas have been spread continuously through the media. And enforced by the law (see Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech). And they gave birth to the world of the narrative, the world of ideas.

The belief that we have achieved a higher degree of humanity and understanding of life than our fellow inhabitants of the world has spread through our societies. We’ve grown obsessed with decreeing what others should do. — what SHOULD be, in the name of good. We have become excellent at morally assessing other countries, while barely ever looking in the mirror.

Living in the world of the narrative

In Europe today, people are congratulated or condemned based on what they say or think — and they are terribly afraid of stepping out of the moral frame.

As a European, I can say it is a VERY comfortable setup. All you have to do is avoid saying anything that challenges the fantasy world. Even better, you can just stop thinking altogether, a foolproof way to ensure that no one bothers you. If you want, you can also actively participate in the narrative by repeating its principles. No need to back up what you say with actions.

You can declare that Putin is evil and must be defeated, independently of whether you have the means to defeat him, and without even considering sending your children (or yourself) to the front (warlike Europeans are ready to fight to the last Ukrainian).

You may also declare that we must eliminate all fossil fuels and shut down every nuclear power plant — without having any credible alternative — and people around you won’t even burst out laughing.

Your own state may be consuming more resources than the vast amounts it already extracts from working people every year, yet no statesman will be held accountable for this.

Claiming pride in your culture is completely okay — unless you are European. Then it is quickly equated with xenophobia.

We Europeans live in a world where military power doesn’t matter, energy doesn’t really matter, and economics ? More or less the same. And as for cultures, they do not matter at all.

No one is held accountable for what they say (and sometimes even what they do). No one asks you to be courageous. You are not required to accomplish challenges. You do not even need to live up to your words. And the less you think, the better.

Today, life is still sweet in Europe.

But when is reality going to come knocking at our door ?

Europe is not exactly a sick man, it is that man falling from a skyscraper, reassuring himself : “Everything’s fine so far !”

Finding the way out

Our inherited wealth and power that sustained our fantasy world for decades is eroding. The world’s timeless dynamics are still at work today. Our fate is the same as any people in the world. We must struggle, we must compete and we must achieve. We must reconnect with what made Europe : a balanced mix of pragmatism and thirst for ideal.

What each of us needs to do, at their own level, is simple :

1. Give up our idea of moral superiority. We are no better, nor worse than a Chinese, a Brazilian or an Ethiopian.

2. Stop caring about how our ideas come across. Cultivate intellectual independence and judge people based on their actions, rather than speech.

3. Acknowledge raw global competition for energy and military power. Stop playing the moral game — start playing the power game instead (like we used to).

4. Start embracing our inherited traditions. They are the foundation of our self-respect.

5. Restore accountability. The worthy must be rewarded, the detrimental sanctioned.

Otherwise, there will be only leftovers for us.

And no, all this does not mean abandoning morals, destroying nature or scorning foreigners who live among us. It simply means : facing reality.

Will we cast off our illusions and accept to see the world as it is, with a dry eye and a pragmatic, realistic mind ?

Or will we clutch to this delusional world until it collapses — burying us beneath its ruins ?

Paul

Instagram

It is a ball and chain tied to your ankle — potentially for life. Luckily, I got the chance to break free from these chains during my adolescence, thanks to life-changing friendships that started at that time.

I was not an unhappy child, far from it, but I had this constant feeling of not being enough. But all these early years weren’t wasted : they shaped something in me. When a young brain spends so much of its time anticipating what others think, it leaves an everlasting mark. I think I’ve kept from that era a deep interest in other people’s emotions.

That is an inclination that I noticed many people — especially men — severely lack. An inclination for empathy.

But there’s a nuance I want to clarify. Empathy is often reduced to compassion — from the Latin cum patior, meaning to suffer with — as if it only meant feeling what others feel. But empathy is broader than that. There’s a fundamental difference between emotional empathy, in which you actually feel what others feel, and cognitive empathy, the ability to understand others’ thoughts and feelings, without necessarily sharing them.

I’ve found cognitive empathy to be immensely valuable in navigating social life. It seems obvious, right ? Yet, every day, I’m stunned by how many people show zero interest in others’ thoughts.

A quick example : a great friend of mine used to work at Google. She gets LinkedIn messages from guys every week saying :

“Hey, I studied at Blablabla University and would love to join Google too. Do you have 15 minutes to talk?”

A blatantly self-interested message. They don’t try to imply that they may care about her experience. They’re not interested in her, they’re interested in Google.

Put yourself in her shoes for a moment. Wouldn’t you rather read something like this?

“Hey, I just came across your profile — very impressive! If you have the time, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you like (or don’t like) about your current job. Cheers!”

She would of course be much more likely to respond positively to that one.

Let’s not be idealistic. We’re all self-interested — myself included. But by all means, that doesn’t mean we should be blind to others’ needs. Especially since, in any social group, you rise by providing for others. The more someone contributes to the needs of those around them, the higher their position in the group’s hierarchy.

But how can you provide for others when you don’t even see their needs?

As for me, I’ve always naturally paid attention — at times, too much — to what others expect or think. I’m not telling you to be a nice guy or nice girl. I’m not telling you either to fulfil others’ needs for no reason. I’m telling you to seek that knowledge, to be curious about what happens inside others’ minds.

Overlooking this usually results in Social Cluelessness :

Repeatedly experiencing rejection from others, due to an overinflated obsession for our own needs, while being totally unable to account for this seemingly unfair rejection. Slowly condemning yourself to a bitter and poor social life.

All because you never wholeheartedly tried to listen and understand others.

I’m writing this as an invitation : try, sincerely try, to put yourself in others’ shoes. Especially the shoes of people from whom you have expectations — whether in family life, business, or romantic relationships.

It makes a difference everywhere.

Paul

Instagram

You shouldn’t wait for summer. Let me tell you why.

Dismissing these cold, grey days as worthless is a mistake you simply can’t afford to make. Because all you have is time. A finite amount of time. It is your most precious resource. Nothing is more important than the present moment : every instant is an opportunity that is either seized or lost forever.

What does it mean to seize the opportunity of the present moment ? It means you need to literally exploit yourself. Read this post to know what I mean by that :

While you’re at it, also read “Can you hear the wild wind blow ?” to ensure your life isn‘t stagnant water, and “Specialization is for insects” to check whether you’re a modern-days insect (or not).

Last year, I tried to escape winter by setting off to Spain and Morocco for four weeks in late January. I’ll admit it, it was awesome. Feeling the winter sun’s delicate and warm stroke on my face was soul-soothing. Yet after a few weeks in Andalusia, I started thinking :

“This place is absolutely great, but what’s the catch ? There has to be a hidden downside about living in such sunny place.”

There was.

The endless sunshine lulls you into passivity. It tempts you to take it easy, to indulge, to chill and have a beer while watching the sun set.

For cold winter is an ordeal. It’s a test. A test for your resolve and wisdom.

• Wisdom to know that your days are counted, and you should therefore cherish every single one of them.

• Wisdom to see beyond the greyness of winter, and find beauty and enjoyment in its rawness.

• Wisdom to cultivate happiness from within, independently of the circumstances.

• Wisdom to know that life is always about action and to let nothing get in your way.

Life is not about waiting.

I’m not chasing the sun this year. I’m embracing the cold winter and the unique possibilities it is giving. I’ve rediscovered skiing this year, and ventured into hunting. Two worlds to explore. Along with other enjoyable small moments of winter : building a fire, layering up in warm clothes, improving your place…

And when you can make your bleakest days happy, then imagine how cool the sunny ones will get… Don’t let your mood ruin everything. Be active, the mood will follow. Winter is dull only in your eyes. And as for Blue Monday ? It’s nothing more than a concept for those who’ve lost control over their lives.

Paul

Instagram

Before we go further, let’s clarify what value creation means :

Picture a penniless man idling away his time. You, an entrepreneur, start chopping wood and selling it, generating some income. You offer the man a job chopping wood in exchange for a monthly salary. Your initiative allows both of you to earn a living and support your families. While neither of you had anything initially, your work created value for the community. That’s value creation.

Farmers, woodcutters and carpenters are the only ones creating economic value (private sector). They are actively contributing to improving the villagers’ well-being and quality of life.

It certainly doesn’t mean that guards, healers and supervisor (public sector) are useless. They do help maintain conditions that will allow other inhabitants to keep creating value, by protecting them from external threats and illnesses. Yet if they were on their own, they would produce no economic value. They rely on the contribution of value creators.

Recognizing this, the value-creating villagers agree to allocate a portion of their production (aka tax) to support the non-productive workers and the inactive. This allows the guards, healers, and supervisor to perform their tasks while also caring for the elders and children, who are supported as part of the community.

In the end, this is a perfectly balanced economic system. The productive people generate 100 kg of gold worth of value (representing the village’s GDP). 10 kg are distributed as taxes to fund non-productive workers and the inactive population. The remaining 90kg are left to the workers, to use as they please.

What could go wrong ?

1. An increase in the Inactive population.
   If the population as a whole grows older (let’s say the inactive are now 40), there will be 60 active people to fund inactive people, instead of the initial 80. The same happens if 30 foreigners settle in the village, do not work, and are supported by the workers. There would be 50 inactive people supported by 70 active ones. This reduces the resources available for everyone, leading to diminished wealth per person, for both the active and inactive populations.

2. Overexpansion of the Public Sector.

   Let’s say the supervisor recruits 10 extra guards from the outside. He still only has 70 productive people working, thus he needs to raise taxes to fund this. Alternatively, the mayor may borrow gold on behalf of the village, creating a debt that will eventually need to be repaid — likely through higher taxes. Both approaches lead to reduced resources for value creators and reduced incentives to create value.

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What remains of that today?

Those workers were not serving; they were working. They possessed an honour — absolute, as all true honour must be. A chair leg had to be well-made. That was a given. It wasn’t to be well-made for the sake of a wage. It wasn’t to be well-made for the boss, nor for the boss’ customers. It had to be well-made for its own sake, for itself, in its very essence. A tradition — arising from the depths of the people, shaped by their history, embodying their absolutes and their honour — demanded that the chair leg be well-made. Every hidden part of the chair, unseen by any eye, was crafted as perfectly as the parts on display. This is the very principle of cathedrals.

Nous avons connu un honneur du travail exactement le même que celui qui, au Moyen Âge, régissait la main et le cœur. J’ai vu toute mon enfance rempailler des chaises exactement du même esprit et du même cœur, et de la même main, que ce même peuple avait taillé ses cathédrales.

Que reste-t-il aujourd’hui de tout cela ?

Ces ouvriers ne servaient pas. Ils travaillaient. Ils avaient un honneur, absolu, comme c’est le propre d’un honneur. Il fallait qu’un bâton de chaise fût bien fait. C’était entendu. C’était un primat. Il ne fallait pas qu’il fût bien fait pour le salaire ou moyennant le salaire. Il ne fallait pas qu’il fût bien fait pour le patron ni pour les connaisseurs ni pour les clients du patron. Il fallait qu’il fût bien fait lui-même, en lui-même, pour lui-même, dans son être même. Une tradition, venue, montée du plus profond de la race, une histoire, un absolu, un honneur voulait que ce bâton de chaise fût bien fait. Toute partie, dans la chaise, qui ne se voyait pas, était exactement aussi parfaitement faite que ce qu’on voyait. C’est le principe même des cathédrales.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Charles Péguy lamented the loss of meaningful work in the lines above. He observed that work had been stripped of its intrinsic value, reduced to a means to an end — usually a mere wage. The essence of craftsmanship, of work done for its own sake, had been forgotten.

And in my experience, nearly every business eventually succumbs to the tyranny of numbers. Please do read this article if you want to dig deeper.

I believe that most of us, like Charles Péguy, recognize this problem of lost meaning. We can all spot an insignificant job when we see one. We even have a name for it now : bullshit jobs. But merely identifying them isn’t enough. Many of the people I’ve known in such roles were fully aware of their situation, yet carried on regardless.

Meanwhile, we continue to celebrate the beauty of true craftsmanship. As I write, thousands are queuing to visit the recently restored Notre-Dame de Paris. They are drawn to the artistry of its meticulously carved stone statues, and so forth.

But when the wise man points to the moon, the fool looks at his finger.

Most people fail to realize that this cathedral actually points heavenward. For there is something divine about a craftsman pouring all their heart into their work. Just like it is demeaning doing work for the sole purpose of its final output. It is degrading to not even like one’s job, and keep doing it regardless.

“Having high standards” is the new thing nowadays. But instead of having high standards for your wardrobe or your life partner, be sure to first apply them to the work you produce, which is your personal contribution to this society. This contribution defines what you are then worthy of receiving.

Neglecting this contribution will ensure you end up as a lacklustre person (“sans-éclat” as my brother likes to say). That should be a relief : none of us needs to become a billionaire, a star or an emperor to have a life worth living. The only thing we need is intensity and commitment.

In other words, do not expect much from this life if you’re unwilling to give it your all. That is the best — and maybe the only — way you can bring a small touch of divine down in this old world.

Paul

Instagram

1. On one hand, it industrialised death : the carnage of WWI, death camps, nuclear weapons, napalm bombings…

2. On the other hand, technology has radically reduced the strenuousness of human existence. Electric sewing machines, chainsaws, cranes, dishwashers…

This duality makes us fear technology just as much as we are addicted to it. Everyone dreads a nuclear apocalypse while clutching their smartphones.

Yet, this dichotomy is misleading. These two aspects are not separate; they are two sides of the same coin.

The same drones that were meant to deliver Amazon packages to our doorstep are now used to bomb soldiers in Ukraine.

Technology means control — control over whatever purpose we assign to it, whether providing clean water or ending lives. It is neither inherently good nor bad; it is a mirror reflecting human intentions. In this sense, 20th-century technology offers nothing fundamentally new—it has simply become a tad more spectacular than before.

And yet, we fall into the trap of believing that the greatest — and perhaps only —threat technology poses is the annihilation of humanity.

But there is another, subtler danger. Consider these lines from Cesare Pavese’s journal, written as a note to himself:

“You have to admit that the magnificent promises of future science terrify you, and that you'd gladly see them come to nothing. Not because science creates murderous weapons […], but because science might one day provide such tools for controlling both the inner life and the physical existence of individuals […] that life itself wouldn’t be worth living any more.

The typical ending of science fiction novels, in fact, is that after describing the tightly controlled mechanisms of such a life, there’s a climax of pure ball-breaking frustration that makes the masses lose it, riot, kill each other, and go insane, all to escape the nightmare. In short, dying (whether by the sword or some death ray) is nothing; living scientifically is what’s truly terrifying.”

Pavese refers to processes that increase control on every aspect of life : lie detector, artificial sperm insemination, mechanisation of labour…

We fear that modernity will crush us, that it will destroy the human soul, but it won’t do any of that. What it will do is reduce life to a machine. To a flat, colourless routine. It won’t bring us suffering — it will bring blandness, a lifeless uniformity, a total lack of momentum.

When life presents us with unpleasantness, technology offers control: it suppresses the unexpected, rejects randomness, and eliminates contingency. It disrupts the vital pendulum swinging between order and chaos — by erasing chaos altogether.

(If you’re unfamiliar with that pendulum I’m referring to, read this publication)

Life loses its flavour, not from an excess of despair, but from a slow, imperceptible erosion.

Yet the Piedmontese writer finds solace in the fact that we are notoriously poor at predicting the future.

“Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality. When we think about the future, we always envision it unfolding according to a monotonous system. We don’t consider that the past is a multicoloured chaos of generations.”

There is no reason to despair. The future will always surprise us. But for now, to counter this slow erosion, we need two things:

First, amor fati — radical acceptance of life’s randomness. Embrace the idea that not everything can or should be under your control. Leave enough room for chaos.

Second, a deliberate choice to nurture parts of your life that remain untouched by technology. Whether it’s walking, praying, contemplating, or singing, these activities become a lifeline — they keep you connected with the organic rhythm of existence. They safeguard you from the mechanical life that would otherwise await you.

Paul

Instagram

Yet, I was struck by the fact that these critical topics were completely swept under the rug during the event. None of the executives who spoke even touched on the subject.

To be honest, that wasn’t surprising. But still, it was unclear why such big companies never mention profitability at events like these. The speeches are all their positive impact, how they connect people together, enable discovery and so on. It sounded like this was their sole goal, and as if they were doing it pro bono.

By not mentioning any of their financial achievements, they left me with the strange impression that you don’t get to see the full picture, only a pretty façade.

Money is the lifeblood of business. Every company in the world values profit. If a company doesn’t make money, its employees will simply be laid off. The daily life of an executive involves monitoring business figures, and listed companies share their results publicly.

So why on earth would they refrain from even mentioning profit ?

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Last Monday at dawn, a seasoned hunter and I set off to the mountains surrounding the Chaudun valley — an abandoned village sold to the state by its former inhabitants in the late 19th century, worn down by the harshness of mountain life. We started a search for a very specific kind of game animal.

Every couple of minutes, we’d stop to scan the mountains through binoculars. After hours of hiking, we finally spotted a group. We instantly slowed our steps, dropped our voices to a whisper, and moved with caution, making sure each step was silent. We kept going until we were close enough.

At around 250 meters from the target, we crouched low, moving even more carefully toward the animals. Then, we lay flat on the sloping ground, we crawled forward, closing the final distance.

My partner removed his backpack and placed it beside him. I rested my rifle on it, setting myself up in firing position. The target was about 200 meters away. All the conditions were met for the shot. I took a breath, held it, and slowly increased pressure on the trigger. The moment stretched on, feeling like an eternity… until the shot went off.

The recoil and the noise were astounding. I rapidly looked back in the rifle scope : Seconds after the impact, the animal fell, lying still. It was done.

How did it feel ?

I had never killed a large animal before. And I never had any sort of bloodlust.

Taking that animal’s life felt heavy, serious, like something solemn. But not something evil. It felt surprisingly natural. There was a strange sense of calm afterward, mixed with respect for the lifeless animal. A sensation that it was meant to be.

We went to the animal, gutted it, and I carried it on my back for the following 6 hours. We later skinned it and cut it up, collecting and preparing the meat.

Why hunt at all ?

Today, a man can spend his whole life eating mountains of meat without ever having to catch an animal, butcher it, and prepare its meat for consumption. Supermarkets display hundreds of kilos of meat readily available, just the end product of a hidden process. These pieces of meat are just the final output of a silent and invisible industrialized death process. Thousands of animals put to death out of sight of the final consumer.

It feels like modern and urban life has turned us into passive consumers, that are fed something they don’t even want to know how it’s been produced. Like young children being served dishes that they would never know how to prepare themselves if they had to. Over time, I have felt an ever-increasing sensation of disconnexion with this world and its most fundamental laws. A sensation of being just a cog in a very large machine.

And as I have already written before : I am certain that specialization is for insects. We humans are meant to be versatile, skilful. For more on this, see my previous publication.

Hunting means reconnection.

To the fundamental laws of nature, to one’s senses, to the people and the wildlife inhabiting the land.

There has to be boundaries to hunting. Respecting animals, limiting the catch, acting with care and without needless cruelty is central. This places hunting at the intersection of our most primal instincts and our sense of human responsibility. A bridge between our core nature, and human civilization that we have been building for thousands of years.

Paul

Instagram

I could understand that sacrifice held deep meaning for Christians. But I couldn’t relate to it. For a reason that I will detail later.

If you're not familiar with the life of Jesus, here’s a brief overview :

Jesus was a Jewish man born about 2,000 years ago in Judea (modern-day Israel/Palestine). He led a humble life until his 30s, when he began preaching in synagogues and performing miracles—raising the dead, controlling nature, restoring sight to the blind…

He preached a radical message of love and forgiveness in a world where retaliation (‘an eye for an eye’) and ‘vendetta’ were the norms. Unlike many religious leaders who restricted access to God to a select few, Jesus taught that the Kingdom of God — a spiritual realm —was open to everyone, especially the poor, the outcast, and sinners. He emphasized that the intentions of the heart were just as important as actions — anger was akin to murder, and lust as serious as adultery. To enter the Kingdom, one needed more than mere obedience to the Law.

He also claimed a unique relationship with God, saying "I and the Father are one". These claims were highly controversial and revolutionary. Besides, he also redefined what it meant to lead. In contrast to the worldly idea of power and might, Jesus taught that the greatest in the Kingdom of God would be the servant of all. He exemplified this teaching by washing his disciples' feet, an act of radical humility. His model of servant leadership was a striking departure from the dominant models of power and leadership at the time.

This revolutionary preaching and its popularity stirred anger from the Jewish religious authority, who arrested him. They whipped him, humiliated him by spitting on him and making him wear a crown of thorns. He was then forced to carry his wooden cross along the streets of Jerusalem, up to his execution place, on a hill named Calvary (Golgotha). Soldiers nailed his hands and feet to the wooden cross, which was then lifted upright so that Jesus hung by his limbs, causing immense pain and agony. He died on the cross, after several hours.

As heartbreaking as this might be, I couldn’t shake the thought: "It's too easy if you know you’re God’s Son." Dying becomes simpler if you know you’re above death. From that perspective, Jesus' life seemed to me like a display of divine power to humans, rather than a true sacrifice.

I used to believe that since Jesus was divine, his death wasn’t particularly remarkable. This thought blocked me from accessing the full meaning of his story.

But last summer, as I was hiking, I stayed for a night in a monastery. The monks gave me a copy of the gospels (tales of the Jesus’ life). I read it carefully during the following days. Something changed when I read about Jesus’ final moments.

Right before his death, Jesus, who is often depicted as having adamant self-confidence, cried out, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani ?”—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me ?”. Why would a divine being say that ? Was Jesus, like any man, afraid of death ?

This realization unlocked what I couldn’t see before. It led me to an old Christian concept called “the hypostatic union”. Jesus wasn’t an ancient demigod like Hercules or Achilles - 50% divine, 50% human. The hypostatic union teaches that Jesus is both fully divine and fully human — two natures united in one person, without being mixed or separated.

This changed everything.

Jesus’ full humanity meant his story wasn’t a preordained divine spectacle running on autopilot. In many ways, Jesus was just a man — with all the frailties that come with being human. That makes the story incredibly more vibrant. He was a man who overcame his weaknesses to fulfil his purpose, while he could have backed down a thousand times under the pressure from the Romans and the Jews. Furthermore, he was a man charismatic enough to gather and inspire crowds. A man of profound love with an uncompromising sense of purpose.

In that sense, I found that Christianity is about living by the highest ideals of humanity : love, humility, courage, and selflessness. Beyond that, his divine nature accepted to undergo the worst humiliation possible, in order to deliver its message, redeem humanity and fulfil its destiny.

From that standpoint, being Christian means you acknowledge that there is a superior being out there, that wants the best for you. That message of hope and divine, boundless love, is at the root of Christian fervour.

Here is what I found out : one may or may not believe in Jesus’ godly character, but his humanity alone is worthy of admiration.

Paul

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