Nicolas Boulenger

No one can predict the future. And yet you torture yourself every minute, as if you knew how what you do now will affect your well-being later.

(The intro to another chapter of the book.)

I think I could make something this afternoon.

It's a way of organizing things that has made my life much better these past few years: creating outlets for different kinds of work.

For writing, I have my journal and my website. And once those two showcases were finally up, a lot of things came unstuck for me. I could just write. Same with videos: once I allowed myself to speak up on social media, I could just take out my phone and talk.

Often, the engine stalls for lack of outlets.

I'm still looking for an outlet for making things: music, drawing, films. For now, I only make one film a year. I need to find the one that will let the engine run whenever the urge strikes.

One of the subjects of the book I'm writing.

This former Apple employee had a great idea that Steve Jobs turned down.

In this video, he explains why Steve Jobs was right.

Things don't get complicated because of bad ideas – those are usually easy to spot. It's the good ideas going in the wrong direction. The ones nobody wants to say no to.

I see it in scripts and in creative work: adding a good idea to a story doesn't make it a better story. Quite the opposite: it complicates, dilutes, distracts.

Creating is never about piling things up. It's a clear, pure, personal act, and every moment of it points the way.

The goal of the practice I talked about yesterday is to exhaust yourself.

You realize that what you thought was best for you isn't actually what you want. You don't enjoy the activity itself.

So, to keep producing every day, you have to drop what's artificial (made up by the mind) and find, through action, what's truly aligned.

That's what's happening to one of my clients. Who realized the goal she'd been chasing for years wasn't the right one.

Can you see the value of figuring that out in a few weeks rather than a few years? Or never?

"One gram of shit is enough to spoil a kilo of caviar. One gram of caviar does nothing for a kilo of shit." – Roland Topor

That's why I talk about keeping mornings "sacred".

You make a small concession, you agree to a small meeting, you drift a little from what you'd planned... And it all goes sideways.

This morning, it's a trivial little appointment at the town hall.

But I have to pull the paperwork together. The corner store can't come up with the tax stamp. Which turned out not to be needed.

My whole morning ended up organized around it.

I don't take meetings in the morning.

I don't do admin either.

I meditate, I write, I think. I do the deep work everything else depends on.

It's not a luxury. I earn a better living now that I work this way. It's not the hours that count.

Think about it: one good decision or one good action can unlock your whole life.

So what's a "productive" day? A day where you worked 12 hours straight? Or a day where you changed your life in ten minutes?

Apparently, young people have a hard time understanding why we (the old folks) were so traumatized by 9/11.

Author Jason Pargin explains it to them very well in this short video.

Watch it on Instagram or on TikTok.

Actually, that's it: this system lets me write crap.

Instead of writing long notes on consciousness or obligations, I can jot down passing ideas that aren't worth much – but that are fun to write.

And it makes a lot more sense for me to do that here, on a site I own and control, than on Musk's and Zuckerberg's social networks.

You should do the same.

I swear. Here's the email I just got:

We came across Panique dans l'Espace #05 : Mille ans de Solitude in the official Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Market Catalogue 2025 and would like to invite you to submit it to ORION International Film Festival for consideration.
Use code ORIONIFFFILM30 for 30% off the entry fee.

So these guys are writing to offer me the chance to pay to have my film rejected.

That said, it's a very funny film. Here it is.

This system's not bad.

I write when it comes. Just what matters. No intro, no conclusion, no fluff.

Pretty much in line with my idea of expressing myself freely rather than betting on a result.

Also in line with the note "My New Approach to Social Networks".

I could share these ideas on social media. But it starts at home.

I like it.

More on this soon: it's what I'm setting up for my clients – and what I set up for myself first.

It's doing a small version of what you want to do big in your life, every day, 10 minutes a day. Discovering yourself through concrete, daily action rather than abstract thought.

It's 10 minutes a day. It doesn't get in the way of anything else. There's no excuse.

I just got off a video call with a client who was very skeptical. Then he got it.

"Nobody's going to help me unless there's already something up and running."

Small win.

I'm dropping the dark, mysterious website.

People see my mug on the homepage.

I own it.

I'm writing a book. No more time for a daily journal entry.

Instead, I'm setting up this "microblogging" system to share what catches my interest throughout the day: ideas, links, images...

Yes, I'm doing what Musk and Trump did: starting my own social network. (Which I should call "Trou Social", after Trouville. But no.)

When you're aligned, here's how it goes:

From the outside, you're a workhorse. You do what nobody else can, and people admire your willpower and your drive.

From the inside, it's a breeze. It doesn't happen by itself, no, but the doing is easy. The hours fly by and nothing hurts.

I think the goal of a life is to build that alignment.

One that exists only for you – nobody can impose it on you, or offer it to you. It's a personal quest.

Few people find it.

Few people look for it.

Many have given up – or never started.

They take it for granted that work is suffering. That hurting yourself to survive is normal, that you have to accept it, that it's everyone's lot.

Some are even proud of it. Their identity comes from the effort they put in every day to do what they don't like. And they look down on those who don't do the same.

Others have found their alignment and can't understand why everyone doesn't do as they do. If running at dawn changed their life, anyone who doesn't take it up right away deserves whatever happens to them.

Sometimes they convince a few people to imitate them. Who then think: if it's so easy for them, why is it so hard for me? I must be useless.

Because alignment doesn't transfer.

It can't be compared, can't be sold.

It's different for everyone.

You build it.

The only message you can pass on, it seems to me, is this:

It exists.

Yes, for you too.

It's not about changing everything overnight, but if you don't look for it, you'll never find it.

That's what my character keeps saying in the film I just shot at Off Courts.

It's also what several friends told me after the screening. A triumph.

The secret? I gave it away in this video several days before the shoot. At that point, I had no idea what I was going to do. I was lost.

And I decided that was fine. That I was going to let go completely.

I wouldn't worry about the result, or about anything. I'd let it come.

It's a way of working I've already brought into several parts of my life, and into an earlier film in particular, but never this far.

I'm not aiming at anything anymore. I'm not controlling anything. I'll make the film events push me to make, and that will be fine.

Then, on the morning of the session I was due to shoot in, I met my guardian angels.

I didn't go looking for them. They sat down next to me and offered to help.

And they're the ones who made the film.

Without them, nothing would have happened.

If I had chosen to "take charge", to "put a team together" and to "find the right people" in order to "do what I had in mind", I wouldn't have pulled off a quarter of what we did together.

Of course, I "directed". The story comes in part from me.

But I could never have expressed myself like that without being surrounded by that efficiency and that kindness. And that, I didn't choose. I had nothing to do with it.

So yes, I made a film, sort of. But actually, no. It made itself.

My real job was to let it happen.

Watch the film here.

My technique works.

When people tell me "I subscribed to your newsletter and I'm not getting anything", instead of admitting the truth (I haven't sent any), I go on the offensive:

"Is your email set up correctly? Did you sign up for the right list? Does your annual income exceed a certain threshold? Do you really deserve to receive my newsletter?"

Because, you see, from watching the powerful of this world, I've figured something out:

Success is built on other people's guilt.

It's very hard to manipulate people who never question their right to exist on this planet.

So you have to start by planting a doubt.

Here are the steps I've identified in the champions of the field:

1. Start by inventing an obligation or a standard. It doesn't have to be justified, as long as it's almost impossible to meet.
2. Repeat it on a loop, by every means available, over a long period. If you have access to media outlets, all the better.
3. When you need to control someone, show them how they're in violation of this very important standard you made up.
4. Use the resulting guilt to make them do what you want.
5. Enjoy.

It works fast on the most fragile – the poor, the sad, the ones who don't fit in.

Once you have those on board, you can use peer pressure to bring in the rest.

That's why, to maximize my hold over you, dear reader, I invite you to answer this short survey, which will tell me about your main insecurities so I can manipulate you better.

(No need to reply by email, just speak your answers out loud: this message comes with an AI device that listens and interprets your answers automatically.)

Back-to-school survey

I often find it hard to speak freely because...

Have you noticed that your life is more or less organized like this:

1. You pass judgment on a situation, positive or negative,
2. You put a plan in place to fix that situation,
3. Did your plan fail or succeed? Back to step 1.

Where's the harm, you might ask?

After all, it's a self-correcting process: with each iteration, things get a little better. So why not organize ourselves this way?

Two things bother me.

First, step 2 is unconscious.

By that I mean that during the execution phase, we're not present.

Instead of being available to the world and to whatever comes up, our eyes are fixed on the objective.

But that objective is a concept. It's a view of the world built in the past. One that's still relevant – or not. Achievable – or not. In our best interest – who knows?

It's an intellectual decision, based on a judgment (step 1), that takes precedence over the present. Following the objective becomes more important than following the flow.

"But we can adjust," you'll say. "If we see we're heading in the wrong direction, we can always change objectives."

Can we, really? In any case, it's frowned upon.

Someone who changes objectives too often is seen as ineffective, inconsistent, unreliable. Weak. "They can't handle obstacles." "They give up too fast." "They can't see a mission through."

Our society values those who pursue the objective in spite of the present. Those who stay the course despite the warning signs. Despite the alarms, despite the crises, despite the deaths. ("A real leader.")

That's why, when we fail, we're often pushed to question step 2 – and that's the second thing that bothers me:

We blame ourselves for doing it badly, for poor execution, for not being strong enough, brave enough, persistent enough. It's our fault.

Whereas for me, the devil is in step 1:

In the judgment. In the intention. In the desire for control.

If my life has gotten better over the past 7 years, it's because I've worked on that step.

I still judge (of course), but less. And not the same things anymore. And as my judgment began to change, so did my actions.

By accepting more, we put an end to certain hollow crusades. We spend less time in our heads, straining toward an imaginary future, and more time here and now.

We let ourselves trust the present and whatever arises naturally.

"Succeeding" and "failing" lose a little of their authority over our lives.

And honestly, it's restful.

If you're not doing exactly what you want with your life, something is wrong.

Of course, emergencies happen.

Three days, three months or three years where you have to grind it out. Handling money, family, health. That's normal.

But too often, the emergency becomes the long term.

The fix you put in place to survive becomes the direction.

The odd job becomes the career.

The temporary support becomes the life partner.

The illness becomes the identity.

The temporary emergency becomes the permanent excuse.

Out of weakness? Out of conformity? Out of comfort?

No: because deep down, we don't know what we want.

We've gotten used to saying yes or no to whatever we're offered.

To being happy or unhappy about whatever comes our way.

To updating the routine and calling it change.

But building something new, from nothing, from the inside?

That's very rare.

And I'm not talking about entrepreneurship. Most entrepreneurs are following a template too.

This isn't about money or success either.

Not about making a living, not about finding love, not about changing the world.

What is it about, exactly?

That's the real question. The starting point.

If you could do whatever you wanted, what would your life be about?

Or, more honestly:

Since you haven't found that yet, what are you going to put in place to build it?

Spoiler alert: thinking won't be enough. This isn't an intellectual decision.

You'll have to find it in action.

So what's your plan?

You're not free two days a week or five weeks a year.

You're not free only when there's nothing in your calendar.

You're not free just at the beginning or the end of a life.

You don't wait to be free.

Either you're free all the time, at every moment, or you never are.

"I have to finish this, and then I'll be free."

No.

If circumstances are keeping you from being free, freedom isn't what you're looking for: it's permission.

Being free can't hinge on outside circumstances – by definition.

It's an inner decision. Recognizing a state you're already in.

It's choosing to drop the illusion that you're not free.

It's a decision you can make at any moment.

It takes no effort, no preparation.

It's instant, effective immediately.

It's performative: making it is enough.

It costs nothing, to anyone.

So go ahead. Now.

If you wait a second, you'll wait your whole life.

To keep it short: I no longer care about technical quality.

Like a lot of photographers and filmmakers, I used to worry a great deal about "preserving image quality".

You shoot in "log" or in "raw", at full resolution, to keep as much room as possible for post-production. That's where the real decisions get made.

Now I decide everything as I shoot, with no way to change it later.

Format, color, framing: all of it is locked in on the spot. I don't retouch a thing.

Then when I get home, I delete 98% of the photos straight away. Immediately, no agonizing.

Even the ones I used to keep because they were "not bad".

Either I feel a pull I can't explain, or it goes.

And yes, that means I've given up film. I think I was shooting it out of snobbery.

Let's be honest, I loved the results. The grain, the character. The nobility of film.

These days, the only thing I care about is the process.

Spontaneity. Deciding on the spot. The irreversible choice that captures the emotion of one exact moment.

So much of what I used to do was built on the fear of regret. Keeping everything "just in case". And in the end, it just piled up. For nothing.

I don't want to pile things up anymore.

After three days of this, I've already learned things about my own taste that decades of raw and film never showed me.

I'm not a fan of photos of people – even when I catch a beautiful moment. Nor much of landscapes.

What I like is material, texture. Corners crammed with detail, dense and rich, with a bit of light here and there.

That's the central question of what I'm exploring in photography right now, but also of everything else I'm building at the moment:

"What do I actually like?"

Image made with "Grigne".

First: AI.

My policy is this: I use AI to build tools, not content.

So for programming, now and then.

For example: I used Claude Code to write the scripts that feed this site. (I write my notes in Obsidian and they sync live.) More on that later.

But now that the site is running, I don't need AI anymore.

Another example: AI helps me code my generative art program (called "Grigne"). More on that later too – it's been a hobby of mine for a long time.

But once the program runs, no more AI.

So: heavy use while I build the tool – a few weeks – then hardly any the rest of the time.

(Yes, I'm still conflicted about this. Feel free to yell at me in the comments.)

But I never use AI to write text or make images.

Not that I haven't tried.

Several times I wanted to see whether Claude could help me write. The things that bore me, for example.

And I found that no, not at all. It doesn't even make sense.

Because this is how my life works now:

• Either I write something I enjoy, that only I can do and that I have no wish to hand off. The activity itself is the pleasure.
• Or I don't write.

Same for images.

The pleasure is in making the drawings, in taking the photos.

Little by little, I've removed from my life (personal and professional) any need to produce content I wouldn't want to make myself.

It's never necessary.

It's actually the main reason I stopped doing video production.

(In all honesty, I bent this rule for my web series Panic in Space! At first I made every background by hand in Blender. Then I caved at the end, when Midjourney got good enough to help.)

I'm not throwing stones at anyone who works differently, of course.

But personally, if you write to me or send me a drawing, I prefer it short, personal and imperfect. Otherwise, no promises.

I've also changed how I approach photography. That's for tomorrow.

I used to want "the best" whenever I bought equipment.

The best notebook, the best camera, the best instrument.

Technical quality looked like the foundation I would build my practice on. ("A good workman has good tools.")

With the idea that if I didn't go for the best, I'd regret it sooner or later.

"If I make a masterpiece on a poor technical medium, it might never get the career it deserves!"

And technique wasn't only about equipment: it was about mastery too.

No drawing until I'd learned the basics of perspective, anatomy, color theory...

In other words: I was creating for an imaginary audience that would judge the result. On purely technical grounds.

That audience exists, of course.

It's the audience of teachers, judges and critics.

All the people who suffered through technical training for too long to let anyone else off lightly.

But when you create for them, you end up dodging a far more important question:

"Do I like it?"

This line, this story, this image... do I like it?

Can I set technical correctness aside and simply notice whether... I feel something? A pull? A joy?

Once you start building your work around that question, everything changes.

Technique is no longer the foundation. It's a consequence.

Equipment and know-how are no longer painful prerequisites. They're extensions of the gesture.

I learn because I love it. I practice because I enjoy the doing.

Knowing full well that if I share this work, some people will criticize it.

But others will enjoy it.

And those others are my audience.

Strange light on the beach yesterday.

I think there are two kinds of suffering.

The first comes from "acts of God".

Everything outside our control: accidents, illness, loss, disasters large and small.

Some say we should call that "pain" instead, precisely because there's nothing to be done about it.

To set it apart from the "suffering" we create for ourselves:

The extra layer of misery, entirely optional, that we inflict on ourselves without noticing.

It builds slowly. It piles up.

And I believe its main cause is this:

Not expressing who we are.

Every time we act against ourselves. Every time we let the intellect take over and overrule what our "deeper self" wants.

Every time we don't follow joy.

Yes, yes: it isn't always easy.

Sometimes we mistake joy for pleasure, for desire, for wanting.

Sometimes we're sure joy has it wrong and that intelligence is "the voice of reason".

When that happens, the backlash usually doesn't come right away. For a while, we can tell ourselves "we did the right thing".

But over time, these departures from joy add up.

In the end, they build the identity we keep propping up and that weighs us down.

They're behind the morning anxiety. Behind our hesitation when the answer is obvious.

They paralyze pure action and trap us inside our heads.

The only long-term cure:

Act according to your nature.

Express who you are.

Follow joy.

I built this interactive timeline for two reasons:

1. To get a sense of our place on Earth. On the geological scale, humans arrived so recently that our presence is barely visible. And yet so much has happened over the last millennium, the last century... even within my own lifetime! I tried to reconcile these two scales with an exponential zoom that lets you move from one to the other with a swipe of the finger. The result floored me.
2. To answer the people who say "the climate has always changed, this is nothing new!" That was my original goal. To get a clearer picture of why we're in this mess by looking at how atmospheric CO2 has evolved. And unfortunately, it's very, very clear.

Click the little square in the top right to go fullscreen, then drag the slider to zoom out through time ⬇️

Interactive timeline: geological time scale and CO₂ concentration.

On the geological scale, did you notice:

1. Before us (the Cenozoic), and before the dinosaurs (the Mesozoic), came an even longer period (the Paleozoic) when life suddenly exploded (the "Cambrian explosion"), then 90% of species vanished.
2. The first eon, the Hadean, when the planet was molten, looks short. But it lasts as long as the Phanerozoic – the era of "visible life".
3. It's called that because fossils finally become visible in it; at first, geologists thought it marked the beginning of life itself. Then we realized the first life forms were much, much older.

On CO2, you can see:

1. The famous "hockey stick" graph: CO2 spiking in the industrial era, whether you go back 1,000 years or 10,000. That's what has everyone worried.
2. You have to go back around 10 million years to find a comparable CO2 level (where the red dotted line, marking today's level, crosses the graph).

Unlike my previous experiment, which I hand-coded, this exploration was vibe-coded with Claude Code: the code was generated step by step, across a dozen or so versions that are public and visible on github.com.

The data comes from the International Chronostratigraphic Chart (ICS, v2024/12) via the Macrostrat API.

I think that's the goal.

Society pushes us to be all kinds of things:

Family, work, friends, hobbies, vacations…

As if we switched personalities each time.

And each personality has its own rules and goals.

"When I'm with family, I always want…"
"In a professional setting, you must never…"
"On vacation, it's out of the question to…"

Nowhere can we be fully ourselves.

Everywhere, we have to hide something. Or pretend.

And I think this way of living is counterproductive.

It diminishes us everywhere. In our private life as much as in public. It keeps us from finding our mission and fulfilling ourselves.

The main gap, for me, was between my personal accounts, where I talk about alignment and presence, and my professional accounts, where I talk about narrative strategy.

The two are deeply connected, of course.

But for a long time I was afraid of coming across as a "charlatan" to my professional clients, and as a "salesman" to my personal followers.

I was stuck.

But over the past months, weeks – and especially the past few days – everything is merging.

Presence. Alignment. Freedom. Message. Communication. Private life. Work. Mission.

I see how every aspect is necessary at the same time to help the people I work with. And to be myself.

Above all, I see that the clients and followers who only wanted one part of me, without the rest, no longer have a place in my life.

I can say it with certainty now that I've met so many people who accept me whole.

One thing, though: these people didn't appear on their own.

They came into my life when I started showing up as who I am.

That was the beginning of the work.

It's what I hear a lot of people say in the comments when I talk about presence, the future, or habits:

"You have to find a balance."

Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?

Taking the idea on board without going to extremes – who could argue with that?

Me! I think it's the wrong approach.

It's the cheap way out. The refuge of the lazy, of anyone unwilling to question themselves.

When a new idea comes along, and you realize it matters, the goal isn't to go 50/50 with the old one.

"I discovered that killing was wrong, so I found a balance: 50% genocide, 50% gardening." That doesn't work.

It's often an excuse to hold on to your most toxic old behaviors without changing what matters most.

If an idea changes everything, you have to let it change everything.

By that I mean: you have to do the work of following through on what it means for your life, your behavior, your day-to-day.

You have to accept that it works its way into every corner and, in the end, affects every part of your life.

Yes, it can take time.

No, it doesn't happen overnight.

Yes, in the meantime, you'll pass through all sorts of intermediate balances between the person you were and the one you're becoming.

But these intermediate balances aren't the result.

Let alone the goal.

When you're steering toward a light on the horizon, you don't stop at its reflection in the puddle at your feet.

You look into the distance. You set off without knowing the way.

And the adventure begins.

Click the words to reveal your day, then download your image. They mustn't overlap or touch the edges!

Yes, I coded this myself. No, not "vibe-coded".

I typed every line myself to learn JavaScript. Yes, with help from Claude when I had syntax questions, since it's a new language for me.

The goal isn't to make New Age mini-games – even if that's always fun.

For a while now, I've wanted to dig deeper into certain subjects: analyze the data myself, understand what the newspapers don't say.

Then build clear visual representations to share my point of view.

At first, I wanted to do this with the languages I already knew (C, Python, Lisp, etc.).

Then I realized the value of a language that was instantly shareable. One that lets you create animations and interactions right in a browser, with nothing for anyone to install or download.

That's the real power of JavaScript.

Publishing a chart is good.

But when the visitor can read the original data, interact with the chart, and make the experience their own immediately, that changes everything.

Oops, I did it again! A second "podcast", longer this time.

(French only again, sorry.)

The note-taking software I mention in the video is Obsidian.

It's free. All your notes are very light text files on your own computer (→ no need to be online, you can work on the train) but they can still be synced across your devices (I pay the €4/month subscription to support them because I love what they do).

The big advantage is that you can create links between notes, a bit like on Wikipedia. And there are plenty of plugins to handle your calendar, your tasks and make everything look nice.

Markdown is a way to add titles, subtitles, links, images (...) while keeping a text file that weighs nothing and can be opened by any software.

It changed my life, I recommend it.

Anyway, this is my second podcast episode.

I haven't listened to it but... I'm happy with it. I had a lot of fun making it.

And if you have a topic or a question you'd like me to answer...

Ask me.

I watch videos by Hank Green, an American YouTuber who talks about social issues.

I like him. He's at his desk. He talks naturally, and he's really engaged. The video is edited to cut the dead air.

It looks simple to do.

I think to myself, "I'd like to do the same thing."

I fire up OBS (software for filming yourself). A light.

I hit record for a technical test.

I talk a bit to test the sound.

I end up talking for 18 minutes.

I post it on YouTube without editing:

As it happens, I talk about improvisation (and old age, god knows why).

Honestly, I didn't even watch it to the end.

I watched the beginning. I thought it was pretty good. With one or two slightly labored bits.

But never mind, it'll do.

I don't know if it's a one-off test or the start of something.

We'll see.

I recently wrote a note saying that, one way or another, all your obligations will sort themselves out by magic.

Do I really believe that? Yes. Really.

But it still takes work.

That's the part that can be hard to grasp.

We expect magic to work... like magic. You wave a wand and "poof", it happens.

But no. Work is required. That's what separates magic from "magical thinking".

Magical thinking is hoping something will happen just because you want it badly enough. With no personal investment.

It's an approach I sometimes see in entrepreneurs who are stuck spinning their wheels:

The idea that their business will take off one day, just like that, without them changing anything. That the gears will unstick themselves. That one morning, what didn't work the day before will work for no reason.

Often, they're inspired by other entrepreneurs who supposedly took off that way, overnight. "By luck". So why not them?

Except it's never luck.

I've now worked with enough people to say this without a shred of doubt:

Luck, like magic, requires work.

It's prepared, learned, built.

Enough books have been written on "making your own luck": the entrepreneur who spends their time where opportunities live isn't "lucky" when they seize one. It's the reward for a long stretch of work that no one else saw.

Same goes for magic.

Saying "Abracadabra" at the last moment isn't enough.

You have to have let go of a certain kind of control beforehand.

You have to have made some room, inside and out.

You have to have accepted walking a path you can't see.

You have to have made yourself available to the dance, the play, the present moment.

And accepted that you're part of something bigger than yourself.

Otherwise, magic doesn't happen.

Or worse: it does.

But you don't see it.