Nicolas Boulenger

I decided not to renew my subscriptions to the New York Times and the New Yorker, to see what happens. To avoid getting stuck in my reading habits and find new leads.

So lately, I've felt a bit lost at certain key moments when I usually reach for my phone. (Lunch break: check. Long bathroom break: check. Before bed: check.) A bit like when I quit Facebook & Co: what did I do before? What did I read before my phone ate up my whole life?

I thought about signing up for free newsletters. Haven't found anything convincing yet.

And then, by chance, I hit a gold mine.

I came across (through this Lex Fridman podcast) this incredible article: Meditations on Moloch.

Moloch is a biblical monster Allen Ginsberg used in a famous poem (in English here, in French there, it starts in the second part) to describe what's wrong with the world. Many people think he's describing capitalism, but that's the point: in Meditations on Moloch, the author takes the poem apart and shows that something much darker is hiding in it.

Moloch is the race to the bottom everyone is forced to join even when they know it's bad for everyone. It's having to give up deeply human values to gain competitive advantages, because you'll fall behind if you don't do what everyone else does. It's the force that pushes toward survival ("the subsistence level", he calls it) rather than living, and that, once this temporary period of abundance is over, will enslave us all.

And in this very long, extremely well-written article, packed with examples and references, he lays out a thoroughly Lovecraftian view of the world, in which humans are at the mercy of ancient monsters fighting one another. And one of them, the one that's probably winning: Moloch.

It made me think about human nature, about our times and about what's coming, especially in terms of energy contraction as Artificial Intelligence arrives – one of the monsters that could work for us or against us.

The article grabbed me so hard that I went poking around. The author goes by Scott Alexander, he's a psychiatrist by trade and... he has written reams and reams. Hundreds of posts. I read three or four at random and was blown away by the detail, the intelligence, the originality.

For example, if you have a strong stomach and really want to face the fact that you're mortal, you can read Who by very slow decay, about how doctors deal with the end of life. It's a bit like How doctors die, which I wrote about a long time ago and which he mentions. (The coincidence that made me click: "Who by very slow decay" is a line from the Leonard Cohen song "Who by Fire", which I discovered last week.)

Even better: his blog has a list as long as your arm of links to other writers whose blogs are just as rich: economics, science, rationality, etc... All geeky subjects I'm into. And his hobbyhorse, the thread running through his articles, is effective altruism, which he explains extremely well.

Moral: clear things out to make room for the new.

Have you noticed how the music from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey makes everything strange? No? Well, I have:

(Or maybe it's just the Calvados that's weird?)

The challenge starts like this:

Don't think about elephants!

Bam! Too late. You lose.

You pictured an elephant. Or Dumbo. Or some other pachyderm from your own cultural background. Maybe you pictured a whole herd. Shame on you.

In psychology, this exercise is used to show that we don't always choose our thoughts. An idea can be planted in your brain without your consent, the same way thousands of thoughts are planted every day by the people around you, by the media, by the outside world. You have less control over your mind than you think.

But for a few years now, I've been learning to build up an immunity.

Let's be clear: if you talk to me about elephants, I'm going to think about elephants, like everyone else. But if we held a contest, and there were a machine to measure this kind of thing, you'd see that I can stop thinking about them much faster than you.

That's my superpower: not thinking about elephants for too long.

It may sound trivial (dumb?), but this ability makes for a happier life. Less anxiety, easier relationships, a lighter way of being in general. But before I explain why, let me show you how. Because it's very simple.

To stop thinking about elephants, all you have to do is:

1. Allow yourself to think about elephants,
2. Accept being interrupted,
3. Never celebrate.

Let me explain.

The first step seems counterintuitive, but it's perfectly logical: if you try to stop yourself from thinking about elephants, you check every thought to make sure there aren't any in it. You see the paradox: it's the checking that keeps the idea alive. Even if you manage to move on, the comparison brings the elephant back.

To get around the trap, the goal is to accept the next idea, whatever it is, without judging or comparing. Elephant? Fine. Tiger? Car? Cheese? Great. Everyone's welcome. That's what I call "accepting being interrupted": by shutting down the anti-pachyderm checkpoint and taking in whatever comes, no questions asked, you restore the natural thread of thought, the famous "stream of consciousness," which, when you don't hold it back, never lingers too long on any one subject.

The third step is the decisive one:

Not celebrating means not trying to check whether you've succeeded. And so not rejoicing over a possible victory. Because the same paradox would kick in: to confirm the victory, you'd have to compare your current thought with the forbidden one. And boom: there's the elephant again.

That's the deeper meaning of "moving on": no longer feeding the memory you're avoiding. Not comparing the present with the past you no longer want. Agreeing to be somewhere else, entirely.

Why does this make life easier? Because what works for elephants works for anxiety, for jealousy, for anger. For example, here's my three-step recipe for getting rid of anxiety:

1. Allow yourself to be anxious,
2. Accept being interrupted by another emotion,
3. Don't try to celebrate the end of the anxiety.

Here again, the last step is the one that matters: after the battle, you'd like to rejoice over the dragon's death. To shout that there was a monster here and you slew it. Except all it takes is saying its name for it to come back: wherever you look for anxiety – even to check that it's gone – you'll always find a little.

Hence the importance of moving forward, of moving on without looking back.

After that, it all depends on what you want out of life: to exist as the Great Dragon Slayer in a world infested with them? Or to live as an ordinary nobody in a world where they don't exist? Because both are possible, and the choice is entirely yours.

I'm rediscovering Leonard Cohen: The Partisan, yes, but also "Who by Fire," which speaks to me quite a bit in these days of Zen exploration.

Who by Fire, by Leonard Cohen

I'm struck by the freedom of the meter.

Humming Leonard Cohen in the shower is harder than it looks: you end up with syllables to spare and beats missing, stumbling at the end of a line, fooled by how simple the delivery seems.

That's the strength of his songs, I think: simplicity. No needless adjectives, no forced rhymes, no imposed meter. You're surprised by a line that stops sooner than expected ("I took my gun and vanished"), by a word repeated when you don't expect it ("Oh the wind, the wind is blowing. Through the grave the wind is blowing"), or by the constant shifts in meter that create a music within the music, as in "Who by Fire."

That freedom creates surprise. Surprise gives weight to every idea.

I've always assumed – without giving it much thought, honestly – that songs were an extension of music. First you learn the guitar, then you look for something to sing. Listening to Leonard, I realize a song can be an extension of literature or poetry: first you write a text, then you find the music that makes it resonate.

On the page alone, you can't make the reader pause on a word or hear the emotional color of a line – except by adding more words that dilute the whole. So a song can be seen as staging a text in space (and in time). Through rhythm and delivery, each word gets the place and color the author had in mind, which the page alone couldn't convey.

Anyway, coming soon: Boulengerie, the album. Get ready.

I'd been letting myself go a bit, so this weekend I'd planned to get back on track.

Zero sugar: no more pastries, cakes, or dark chocolate. Zero alcohol: no going to the pub – or only for a Perrier. Two real meditation sessions a day: it's true that in Paris, between my son and my appointments, I often rush through them – back to it.

While I was at it: no more phone. I'm off Facebook and the rest, but I spend hours on Reddit and YouTube. Uninstall! (Even if it means reinstalling later...)

And why stop there? I went as far as running the following experiment:

For forty-eight hours, whenever I felt like doing something that wasn't necessary... Well, NO! I didn't do it. The point wasn't to deprive myself or suffer for nothing, but to study how I respond to frustration, see how my brain reacts under pressure, watch the thoughts and emotions that come up when I break my habits.

I called it my Stoic experiment.

Lately, I'd been thinking about the role of effort, discomfort, and discipline. In particular while listening to Chris Williamson's podcast with David Goggins on pushing past your limits, rereading Marcus Aurelius and his Stoic buddies, thinking back on some of the Buddha's teachings on the nature of experience, listening again to Joseph Goldstein's talk on the end of the passions, but also, simply, by taking a cue from people I admire who seem to handle effort differently.

Also: through the counterexample of people close to me whom I see sinking under the weight of their addictions.

The theory goes like this: since no one escapes suffering and discomfort, you have to learn to live with them. Better: make them allies. We don't control outside circumstances, true, but we can control our relationship to them. That's where there's room to grow, and ground to experiment on.

First takeaway from the weekend: it's hard. Anyway.

The moment you turn down the cake, the YouTube session on the couch, or the little end-of-day beer, that moment is extremely hard to get through. Everything inside you screams: "But why?! We've always done it this way!" The weight of habit bears down and the body rebels: hunger gets sharper, or tiredness, or the urge to drink. It takes an effort that seems out of all proportion to the actual size of the obstacle.

And a minute later... nothing.

The discomfort and the difficulty are gone as fast as they came. No trace, no aftereffects. You feel neither better nor worse, as if the obstacle had never been there.

Then, as you let each new urge pass, it gets easier and easier – across the board. You end up wanting less, being less attached to getting what you want. With no goal to reach in the future, you become more available to the present: you take in what is, instead of constantly comparing it to what should be.

The upshot: you realize that the rest of the time, you act on very short-lived impulses that have no bearing on long-term happiness. Worse: giving in to an urge reinforces the "I want / I get" mechanism, which makes the next assault harder to resist. Letting go is a muscle you train.

Second takeaway: you find yourself in situations you've never been in.

When I forbid myself from collapsing on the couch for another YouTube session, for a while I feel a bit stupid. What do I do instead? If I don't lie down, do I stand? Sit? But... where? At my desk? On that chair in the corner nobody ever uses? But... TO DO WHAT?

A habit is the permission we give ourselves to surrender, body and soul, to a familiar activity that raises no questions. As soon as you break the routine, nothing goes without saying anymore and the questions come back. Everything becomes new and mysterious. What if I played the xylophone? Cleaned the windows? Remind me: what did we do for fun before phones?

Because let's be honest: a YouTube session is twenty minutes minimum – and there are several a day. A beer is often two beers, and it means getting there, friends, and chatter. As for sugar, it's like food in general: a whole ritual that involves shopping, cooking, eating, doing the dishes, and so on. Often with the radio or TV on.

So it's simple math: when you stop all that, you get time back.

Hours, literally.

That's why this weekend, without really noticing, I started drawing again, made music on my Pocket Operator again, visited a retirement home and a cemetery, read much more than usual, and my journal is full of flashes of insight on the meaning of life and the nature of existence.

I recommend it.

Song of the moment. I love it because it doesn't really have a chorus, the lyrics are nostalgic, and it builds to a big finish. It's not exactly new – 2007 – but I only discovered it recently, after This is the life, which I've always liked.

What the two songs have in common is... how can I put it? A mythology tied to music and adolescence. The bands, the nights out, the parties, the festivals... When you're young, it's not just culture or a stage of life: it's a world. It's the world. (This is the life!)

Going to see my actor friends' plays when I was in acting school put me off low-budget theater, and even theater altogether. These days, either I go to the Comédie-Française to see the classics, or too bad: I watch Netflix.

So it was more for a night out with friends that I tagged along to see Arthur Viadieu's I Wish I Had Been Jeff Bezos at the Théâtre de Belleville, with my buddy Bob Levasseur. I wasn't expecting much. And it runs an hour and a half.

It's become my favorite play in the whole world.

Everything: the subject, the writing, the staging, the acting of the whole cast. I didn't want it to end. I laughed, I was moved, I learned things. It restores your faith in creative work. Bravo, friends.

So don't miss them while they're at Belleville.

UPDATE: Missed them? They're back at Belleville in October 2023!

Of course, you've known this song for ages. Because you're cool.

But did you know that Dan Klein, the singer of The Frightnrs, died of ALS? I find it does something to you to listen to a song knowing that:

1. The singer died before his first album came out,
2. He knew he was going to die when he recorded the track,
3. We're all going to die.

So yes: it's reggae. But New York reggae, I'm told.

And when you hear the first notes of his winding, melancholy singing rise*, I think that, like me, you'll be won over:

Till Then, by The Frightnrs

** I never chose to love so sweet a rose, I suppose I was just made that way.*

I spend so much time writing on a computer (novel, screenplay, journal, emails, etc.) that I recently started practicing my typing. Every word per minute I gain will pay me back a hundredfold – that's my evil plan.

During one of these typing sessions, I noticed something: I get much better scores when I'm not trying to go fast.

More precisely: when I focus only on accuracy (zero mistakes, going as slowly as I need to), I become both faster (in words per minute) and more accurate (in errors per sentence). In other words: I type faster when I take my time.

Hence my question: in how many areas am I inefficient (or just plain bad) because I'm trying to go too fast?

And come to think of it, why go fast?

It seems we can't help it: it's a conditioned reflex. As soon as we've mastered the basics of an activity, the next step is to want to pick up the pace. Find the technique, the trick, the gadget that will make us faster and more productive. Above all, don't waste any time.

You see it everywhere. At school, the best students are the ones who shine under time pressure. In sports, the medal goes to the fastest. At work, the first one there wins the contract or the promotion. It's so ingrained we don't even think about it anymore.

But lately, I've been organizing the resistance.

If you think about it a little, you realize there are lots of activities where speed isn't as necessary as we imagine. Roughly speaking, unless you're an ER doctor, a firefighter, or a sprinter, you've gotten into the habit of rushing through everything.

So the next time you're working, walking, or cleaning, ask yourself this magic question: "Could I do this much, much more slowly?"

This way of looking at things has transformed my daily life.

The idea that I could get a task done "at my own pace," with no thought for speed or efficiency, makes every activity much more pleasant. I procrastinate less. I'm less anxious at work. I calmly consider things I would never have dreamed of taking on before. And when I notice some background stress, I can often trace it back to an underlying pressure to perform.

But above all, this philosophy has another benefit I didn't expect: slowing down has made me much, much faster at everything.

Change the world, maybe not. But at least you'll stop bugging me.

1. No more "bon appétit" at every turn

At the table, with your family, with your friends: knock yourself out.

Even if Nadine de Rothschild's etiquette manual says it isn't done ("what's next: 'enjoy your grub?'" as a dinner guest pointed out), it's part of French culture, of your freedom of expression, and besides, how else are you going to break the ice with all those people you have nothing to say to?

On the other hand, when you see, sitting on a park bench or at a café terrace, someone you don't know from Adam, whom you'll never run into again in your life, and who is just taking the first bite of their sandwich while reading the paper... Why bug them?

True: it's always nice to connect with another human being.

But apart from making them choke on their food to mumble a half-hearted "thanks" before you vanish from their life forever, what have you accomplished? What did you get out of the exchange? Why the spring in your voice and that smug little smile as you walk off down rue d'Amsterdam? (You know who you are.)

2. No more unwanted croissants

If you're a waiter and I order a coffee, there's no need to ask me "And wouldn't you like a little croissant with that?"

No. I don't want anything. Keep your junk.

If I'd wanted something, I would have said the words. I would have said "with a croissant," or I would have asked for "the breakfast deal." I need no help figuring out what I want or putting my wishes into words.

Now, I know: your boss probably makes you do it. But let me tell you a secret: nothing forces you to follow stupid orders when your boss isn't standing right behind you. And I refuse to believe he goes through the security footage reading your lips to check you're suggesting the right pastries. (If he does, get out of there.)

What's next? Ordering a glass of water and having the waiter whisper in your ear, "wouldn't you like to go for a little pee first?" At least I'd find that funny.

3. Start now

Let's end on a positive note.

Whether it's meditation, exercise, or looking for meaning in your life, start now. Get on it today. Right now. Don't even finish this paragraph. Go.

Above all, don't wait until you've "finished such-and-such project" or until you're "in a better frame of mind."

There are two reasons not to wait:

1. Without balance, your project is probably headed in the wrong direction, and finishing it will only drag you down further. As for a better frame of mind, it will only come if you do what it takes. Start.
2. If you put off what makes your life better until later, "when you have time," your good resolutions will vanish along with your free time. And that's exactly when you need them most.

For example: I meditate and write in my journal every morning. Sometimes I skip a day or two – it happens. But never – no, never! – when I have an important or busy day. On the contrary: that's when it counts, and when I need all my mental energy.

On hungover mornings when I'm eating junk food in front of Netflix, it matters less.

A quick word on how I build my websites, because my method is:

• Extremely slow,
• Very tedious,
• Not secure at all,
• Impossible to share / scale,
• A huge waste of my life.

If you want to do the same, here's how.

In prehistoric times, I made static HTML / CSS sites. And it was fun. I'd learned HTML during an internship at a web company, and I had a great time making psychedelic sites where everything moved thanks to carefully placed GIFs (these days I say "jghif," to keep both camps happy).

I should have stopped there.

Then I got into Wordpress. And let's be clear: Wordpress is very good. A very mature environment, a solid code base, a very active community around an open-source model, with paid options for those who want them. Whatever your business, in 90% of cases, Wordpress is a good solution.

I should have stopped there.

But when the time came to build a website for my company ChezFilms, I wanted more control. Over the look, the categories, the navigation. I started with a static HTML site: simple, clean, fast. The key info about the company, some showreel films, an email address, and that's it.

And that's where I screwed up. I got sucked in.

I thought: "What if I made just a tiny little database to log my films?" After all, with over 60 films to my name, it made sense to be able to browse the projects by client, by industry, by genre, etc. So I hooked my site up to this database in PHP.

But to fill this database and keep it up to date, I needed an admin console. So I coded that too, still in PHP: a quick way to enter films, crews, and projects, tailored to my needs. Version 1 only handled films. For version 2, I extended it to other types of posts: photos, articles, videos, etc.

And before I knew it, I had coded a new Wordpress.

A much, much, much worse one, obviously. But – I have to admit – very well suited to my needs. So if you go to ChezFilms, it's still my code running the site. (Update: no, that's no longer the case!) The console also handles invoices and quotes.

Then... I got fed up. Since the beginning of the year, as you know, I've been focusing more on the content than on the container.

So I started over from scratch with Drupal.

It's a framework that lets you build a site from A to Z, but in more depth than Wordpress. The architecture is extremely modular, so you can do whatever you want with a minimum of code. And there are ready-made templates. That's what I used to build this version of the Boulengerie, and what I'll use to build the next version of ChezFilms.

And after that, I promise: we'll stop there.

Distance walked this morning: 8.9 km

Number of children dropped off at daycare: 1

Desire to work: 0

Written in my journal: 1,231 words (7,287 characters)

Money spent on coffee and drinks: €11.40

Number of very important meetings this afternoon: 2

Number of meetings postponed with no new date: 1

Number of meetings pushed back an hour: 1

Number of times I told myself that in life you really shouldn't plan anything well I mean you can plan but the most important thing is being able to dance with chaos when nothing goes as planned: 2

Number of women I passed sobbing outside the Bataclan: 1

Number of times seeing the name of an actress I vaguely know on the poster of a hit play made me think so hard about how important it is to grow your network to succeed that I read the Wikipedia article on graph theory to think more deeply about the connections between us and imagine how we could automate the process of finding the people who are right for us: 1

Number of times I felt like I was wasting my time and not doing what I should be doing: 4

Number of times I told myself "oh well, I'm doing what I'm doing, stop judging": 3

Number of times it helped: 2

Number of phone calls received while writing this post: 1

Number of meetings postponed with no new date that now have a date: 1

Success of this morning on a scale of 1 to 10: 10, hands down.

There are certain gazes we have internalized.

A parent's, a teacher's, a friend's, an idol's. Someone who mattered at some point and who has become an invisible, permanent filter on the way we see the world.

Without realizing it, we react for that person.

We unconsciously imagine what they would find admirable, ridiculous, welcome, inappropriate. We pretend to like, to hate, to be amused, to be offended. We act against our instincts to win the approval of someone who isn't there.

We end up wanting to control our thoughts. To justify the sudden impulses that go the wrong way. The ones that wouldn't go down well.

Sometimes, several gazes merge into an indistinct mass that no longer has a name. A many-sided presence that judges, and becomes part of us. That's the danger: when the origin of the gaze disappears and all that's left is a permanent judgment from who knows where. We try to score points in a game with no opponent, one we can't win.

The first remedy is to notice it. To recognize those moments when the superego overrides instinct, when the heart says something the brain opposes by reflex. As if the impulse itself were taboo. Where does this judgment come from? Is there a presence behind it all?

Then, to remember that these gazes are inner constructions that no longer have anything to do with the people who caused them. Judgments we keep up between ourselves and ourselves, with no anchor in reality, and which we can choose to get rid of without asking permission.

Yes, it's a cliché, but one I've recently become aware of in a very personal way.

I've noticed lately that I'm quicker to get annoyed after long stretches of work on the computer. Because of bugs? Not at all. Because after a long interaction with a digital slave that responds to the slightest click, carries out my orders without arguing, without judging, without getting tired, and which also shines with its speed, its visual harmony, and its constant availability, I'm much less inclined, when I return to the land of the living, to put up with the slowness, incompetence, and bad faith of the world.

Think about it: back when our ancestors cared only about the land and the seasons, nothing in their daily lives – nothing! – jumped at their command. Everything depended on human, animal, or natural force. Nothing was instant.

So here's my theory: the day we invented the light switch, humanity lost a little of its calm.

NB: I realize computers also get on my mother's nerves, but for exactly the opposite reason: the total lack of control over what's happening on the screen. Every time I see her using a computer, it reminds me of this meme:

Using Microsoft Word.

Moves an image 1 mm to the left.

All the text and images shift.

Four new pages appear.

In the distance, sirens.

Since I stopped halfway through the first episode of Wednesday (I tried to get to the end, I promise, I even stopped and started again), I'll take the opportunity to tell you what I really loved about Barry Sonnenfeld's The Addams Family.

First, yes: it's a hard kind of story to handle. It's a trap for a screenwriter. When you follow a family where everything is upside down, where evil is good, where up is down, and where every value is reversed, the audience can have trouble identifying with the characters. If they love sadness and failure so much, what drives them to overcome the obstacles the film puts in their way?

Sonnenfeld's version had found a good balance. And more than that: it had managed to turn the whole thing around.

Without losing any of the spirit of the series, the film had brilliantly portrayed what many psychologists, sociologists, and Zen masters would describe as the perfect family.

Yes, really, I promise. If you don't believe me, I encourage you to rewatch the film from that angle. I couldn't list all their virtues, but here are a few, in no particular order:

They're a close family, with several generations living under one roof; the parents are in love and constantly declare their devotion in public; they're cultured, live surrounded by books, and speak several languages; they follow their passions without judging others and without caring what anyone thinks of them; they talk openly about death and cultivate a bond with their ancestors, from whom they draw part of their identity; they love to laugh and party, and they dance extremely well; the children's upbringing is built around play, dialogue, and trust; for all their wealth, their culture is never about money or possessions; and for all that sets them apart from others, they're never afraid of strangers and are extremely inclusive, even with those who are nothing like them and judge them harshly.

And when the sky falls on their heads, they stick together with dignity.

That was the strength and the irony of the film: the real role model was the Addams family. Not the Perfect Family judging the rest of the world on its way to church. (Though some of its members find redemption thanks to the Addamses, as it happens.)

I didn't expect the same from the Netflix version, of course. But I felt they tripped over their own feet. They took what was incidental in the film and made it the heart of the series. And they didn't know how to handle the reversal of polarities.

Of course, everyone will tell me the good stuff is at the end of the first episode, which I didn't see. Or in the following episodes, which I won't watch. But don't worry: I saw Wednesday's dance online. So I didn't miss everything.

Our habits are both a blessing and a curse.

A blessing because they spare us from reinventing the wheel all the time. We let the daily routine carry us: the same actions, in the same order, produce the same results. You can't question everything every morning.

A curse because they lock us in. Once they're set – for years, for decades – they're extremely hard to change. We do what we do because we don't know any other way.

A habit takes no mental energy. By following the same path, the same automatic moves, we put part of our daily life on autopilot so we're free for the rest. But when we want to change – quit smoking, start exercising, stop biting our nails – the effort burns energy we can no longer use elsewhere. Everything else gets that much harder.

We are the sum of our habits.

Many traits we think of as part of who we are are actually habits we could change. What psychologists call "the declarative" ("that's just how I am, I love this, I hate that, I always do such and such, etc.") is often an excuse for a way of doing things we don't have the energy to fix.

And there's comfort in fatalism. It's easier to say "that's how I am" than to try doing things differently.

James Clear describes this link between identity and habit in Atomic Habits. How cultured we are today, he says, is the result of our reading habits over the past ten years. Our health, the result of our eating and exercise habits over the past ten years. Our finances, of our work and saving habits over the past ten years.

And the person we'll be in ten years, the result of the habits we build today.

But what I find fascinating – and what has really helped me grow these past few years – is recognizing that we know almost nothing about where our habits come from.

Most of the time, we have no idea how our habits started. The older they are, the less we know. And since they control a large part of our lives, that amounts to saying that, by and large, we don't know why we do what we do. Worse: when someone asks, we make things up, we invent excuses that mix "that's how I am" with hazy stories about the past, beliefs, society... Anything but admit we don't know.

Think about it: why do you eat three times a day? Where does your relationship with work, success and failure come from? How did your addictions start? Your passions? Why do you listen to this music, watch these shows, trust this group over that one?

Where does it all come from? Your parents? School? Television? Work?

And above all: if you don't know how or why these habits took hold, how can you tell whether they're actually good for you?

Not so much resolutions as broad principles I've been exploring for a few years now:

1. Gain clarity Without clarity, every decision, big or small, is at the mercy of our irrational fears and unconscious anxieties, and ends up leading us in the wrong direction. Clarity is the first thing we should be looking for. Before work. Before love. Before brushing our teeth in the morning. But here's the thing: to realize how important it is, you already need a bit of it. That's the paradox. Unless...
2. Want to grow It sounds simple, almost childish, but it works. Call it what you like: faith, grace, resilience. If you truly want to grow, to gain wisdom, to become a better person, you find a way. Even if that way isn't visible yet or – harder – if it isn't the one you had planned at the start. But you have to really want it. Like: really, really. Then no paradox, no excuse, no obstacle holds up. That's true faith.
3. "Where?" before "How?" "How?" is the question everyone is obsessed with. "How do I do this? How do I get there?" So much so that in the end, we don't go where we want to go, but where we know how to go. We let ourselves be guided by the "hows" we learned at school, at work, on TV, instead of asking the only question that matters: "Where?" "Where do we want to go? And why?" The wrong direction, even when you head there very fast or very efficiently, is still the wrong direction.
4. Direction before position Where you are doesn't matter. At rock bottom, on top of the mountain, halfway up the slope: it's temporary. What matters is the direction (the rate of change, engineers would say): are you going up or down? Growing or falling? By shifting your inner slope a few degrees, you change both the person and the destination. It isn't necessarily visible right away, but in the long run, that's what makes the difference.
5. The solution is always inside The problems we have are a function of who we are. If a genie snapped his fingers and made all our problems disappear tonight, we'd be happy for a day, and then, in less than a week, we'd build ourselves the same ones again – or similar ones. So there's no point blaming outside circumstances: they have nothing to do with it. Look for the inner causes that are the source. That famous inner slope pushing us up or down.
6. Problems before solutions In business, we're told, you should never bring a problem to your boss without offering a solution at the same time. In life, that's nonsense. Spotting problems is the first step toward solving them. It's called clarity. Once the obstacle is spotted, mechanisms will kick in to get past it. It's denial that keeps difficulties alive.
7. Get to know yourself Since we aren't handed one at birth, it's urgent to invest in writing our own instruction manual. Observe yourself. Practice introspection. How does anger arise? Jealousy? Fear? What deep reasons drive our actions? What irrational fears control our impulses? Identifying the inner mechanics lets you free yourself from them and so, in time, be more deliberate in everything.
8. Beware of thoughts Nothing truly important is intellectual. Thinking can be playful, social, productive, but the pillars of a life can't rest on logical reasoning. Our brain makes up problems when it can't find any. By nature, thought is never at peace. You have to let that machine run without worrying about it too much and look for balance elsewhere. In that sense, thought is a bit like television: it only becomes harmful when you believe it's telling the truth.
9. Beware of numbers Same with numbers: they're never where they should be. Cholesterol too high, salary too low, temperature too cold, interest rate too steep. By their very nature, numbers measure what's missing or what's too much, so they're a constant source of dissatisfaction and imbalance. Better to focus on what can't be measured: the joy of seeing someone, the pleasure of an activity you love, the beauty of the sky.
10. Live in the present It's a worn-out phrase, but it's also the key to the safe. Only the present exists. The past is memory – often selective and distorted. The future is imagination – often filtered through the anxieties of the moment. So not living in the present means living in your head. Being a prisoner of your thoughts, your opinions, your memories. Why not, after all. But every now and then, it's always a good idea to take a trip to the "here and now." To stay in touch with the world, with others, and with yourself.

Happy 2023.

Two very bad reasons not to act.

The two main causes of our inaction.

So much so that now, when I feel I'm about to give up on a project, big or small, I ask myself: "Am I giving up out of fear?" If I realize fear is the only (or the main) reason, I push myself. Or at least, I try to examine that fear, to bring it into the light so it doesn't steer my choices from the shadows.

If it isn't fear, I ask myself: "Am I giving up out of comfort?" Is the warmth of my cozy nest keeping me from setting off on an adventure? The nest in question isn't necessarily material: it can be comfortable thinking, attachment to habits, too much satisfaction with what I already have. Same thing there: I try to shake myself up or, at least, to be aware of it. You fall into fewer holes once you've spotted them.

Fear turns us away from the new. Comfort ties us to the status quo.

Don't get me wrong: there are a thousand good reasons not to take the plunge. Sometimes, real courage means not acting. But if those reasons come down to fear or comfort, it may be worth looking further.

As you can imagine, a pagan like me isn't especially concerned with the birth of Jesus Christ. As for New Year's Eve, I'm too much of a snob to want to party at the same time as everyone else.

And yet, I really like the holidays.

Precisely because (almost) everyone celebrates them at the same time. A bit like Sundays. We've agreed to do nothing on the same day, and everyone chooses how. Parks, walks, vacations, bike rides, family, satanic masses.

There's so little we agree on.

I could go over how I got into meditation and everything it has changed in my life, but we'll do that another time. It's a mistake I often make when I start a new site or a new notebook: wanting to "start from scratch" and explain how everything began. But I quickly get overwhelmed by the task and give up.

So let's talk about the present.

One real sign of progress I've noticed in my practice is recognizing more and more mental contents as thoughts.

You probably know that in meditation, you try to step aside so you can recognize that a particular anxiety, fear, or anger is "just a thought" that will pass the way clouds pass in the sky. That simple relabeling is enough to free you from it. When an existential anxiety is brought back to what it really is – a brain fart – it loses its power.

Except it doesn't always work.

While some worries are quickly recognized for what they are – intellectual constructions – others are more stubborn, more insidious. As if, in the game of recognizing thoughts, they didn't count. "That," we tell ourselves, "is reality."

But the thoughts we can't manage to label as thoughts are often the most intimate ones. The ones we're most used to, which we've been carrying around for years, sometimes since childhood. They're part of us, part of our mental patterns, of the way we react day to day. They're like wallpaper stuck to reality so tightly – and for so long – that we can't imagine the world without it.

Progress in meditation, for me, is the process that lets us question those things too.

Day after day, the frontier of awareness expands, and what we thought was the fabric of the world, the essence of things, fate (...) turns out to be just one more element of our inner world. Another brain fart.

Until the day when, torn by an anxiety so familiar we thought it was inescapable, we suddenly find ourselves able to say the magic words:

"That, too, is a thought."