Catalonia, the political crisis explained

I’ve decided to share some thoughts on the political crisis that’s going on here in Catalonia, related to the movement for the independence of this region, in a video.


Notes: Catalonia is definitely not a unique case, in Europe that are several other regions where some people would want to secede from their respective states: the Basque Country also from Spain, South Tyrol, Veneto and Lombardy from Italy, Scotland from the United Kingdom, Flanders and Wallonia in Belgium… certainly Catalonia is the most explosive case of the recent times, especially for the big wealth of this region.

An example of how Mariano Rajoy hammers on “legality” is in this press conference, while an example of the king Felipe doing the same thing is in this speech.

United States trip, 2017

It’s not long since I returned from the United States, where I spent a period of two months and a half, so here are some impressions that I got from this trip.

I spent most of the time on the west coast, especially in the area of Los Angeles (California), but I also visited Las Vegas (Nevada), New Orleans (Louisiana), and for few days I’ve also been in Baja California, which is part of Mexico.

Before writing in detail about the different places I want to make a general consideration, and that’s that once again I realized how traveling around the world is infinitely more educational than going to school or to the university! I’ve seen so many new places, talked with many new people that reason and behave in a “different” way, and each time I was thinking “really interesting” and “discovering all this is incredibly more useful than the mass of uselessness studied in the classroom for years and years!”.

Inevitably I will compare what I’ve seen with the world I’m used to, that is Italy (mostly) and Spain, as these are the two countries where I spend most of the time.

California

I had a very fortunate perspective of the area of Los Angeles, as I’ve been in part guest of a friend that lives outside the city, on the mountains behind Santa Monica, and in part guest of a friend that lives in the city, in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood. Let’s start with the mountains.

Santa Monica mountains. Quite surprisingly, considering those that could have been the expectations for a trip to Los Angeles, the main and most beautiful character of this period has been certainly nature. I lived immersed in a natural park, in a really unique position one hour from the city center, twenty minutes from the famous Malibu beach, and especially within a two minutes walk from an incredible quantity of wild animals.

Having grown partially in the countryside I’ve seen plenty of animals in my life, so it’s not easy to impress me. But here we’re really talking about another order of magnitude. In the morning I was leaving early for a walk on the trails, and time few minutes after leaving home I was already seeing an extraordinary number of animals. It made me think about what I heard from some elder people, that “once” you would see way more animals in the gardens and in the countryside: probably this is how it was everywhere at that time, I was thinking while walking.

In addition to being many, the animals fascinated me for the type: they had shapes and colors that I had never seen before. Even the most common animals were still a bit different from those of my area. For example the “simple” lizards: in California they tend to be bigger, darker, with pronounced scales. Then naturally there were the lizards that were much less “simple”: I’ve seen one with a blue tail (!) and several times I saw the super cute horned lizard, that deserved a personal video:

Among the wild animals that I met on the Santa Monica mountains there are: rabbits (so many), frogs, turtles, snakes, raccoons, quail, herons, night herons, woodpecker, coyote, “normal” squirrels and ground squirrels, “normal” ducks and ducks with blue bill, coots, grackles, hummingbirds, bobcat, deer, schools of hundreds of baby-catfish, clouds of butterflies. In my typical walk on the trails I was seeing a selection of animals belonging to 5/6 of these species, plus many others never seen before to which I can’t associate a name, unless I use a long description (especially for birds and insects).

Here is a mini-documentary that I produced in this period:

In the video I’ve been able to include only a part of the animals that I’ve seen. I would have liked to include many others but they were too difficult to film, either because they were moving too much (for example the hummingbird that was moving constantly) or because they were too shy and they were running away quickly. I actually noticed this “shyness” in all the animals of the area, and I guess it depends on the fact that the environment was extremely competitive (in other terms: stay always on guard or you will be eaten).

From the video you can see also how is the vegetation the area: very few tall trees or woods, instead there are almost exclusively short bushes and adapted to the dry climate. Many sage plants (that I liked to sniff constantly during my walks).

Malibu. Before getting to Los Angeles city, few notes on Malibu. This is the coastal area famous for being the residency of many Hollywood celebrities, where the houses cost (many) millions of dollars. In theory this should be one of the areas with highest demand not only of Los Angeles, but in the world.

For this reason it seemed weird to me that, at least the times I walked on the beach, a good part of those fabulous houses seemed empty. Clean and in order, but empty. Terraces with no one sunbathing, at most just a housekeeper cleaning around. Even on the beach in front there were relatively few people walking or swimming in the water. The ocean was practically desert, without boats. Weird. Where were the yachts, the millionaires discussing business in front of a drink, the botoxed wives on the beach discussing gossip and laughing at how stupid poor people are, the privileged children taking selfies with friends, the actresses walking their ridiculous micro-dogs?

Could it be that all those celebrities have such a work ethic that they don’t let themselves fool around their mansions, contrarily to me, free in the middle of the week walking around Malibu? The explaination that I found is that actually, even if incredible to think, maybe those fabulous houses are nothing else than second homes for the super rich owners. Owners that were not there simply because they were in others of their houses, or maybe traveling around the world.

Another reason anyway could be that Malibu beach is ugly. This could seem like a strong statement, but that’s exactly the impression that I had. Not only Malibu, I extend this evaluation to all the coastal areas and the beaches around Los Angeles that I’ve seen: the ocean was not attractive at all. The water was not blue, but everywhere a bit muddy and not really transparent. Often in the air there was a mist that made the atmosphere gray. Almost never I’ve been able to see far away the sharp line of separation between ocean and sky: it was always a blurry and grayish transition.

The beaches didn’t show any sign of life: I didn’t see fish in the water (except dolphins far away). Zero shells on the sand. Really a weird contrast compared to the large number of animals on the mountains, within short distance. Not a structure to buy anything, not even a minuscule kiosk to buy at least something to drink. The ocean as I wrote above definitely doesn’t give the impression of being “animated”: very few were the sailboats or the motorboats. I haven’t seen at all fishing boats, cruise ships or large cargo ships. The only ones that I’ve seen “using” the ocean were the surfers -those did- but even them, they were only concentrated around specific areas (for example around Adamson House).

A person living in the area explained to me that this gray and foggy climate of the beaches depends on the geography of the pacific coast and it’s limited to the period in which I’ve seen it (april – may – june). According to him grayness and mist disappear right after, and in summer the beach is much more pleasant for sunbathing and swimming. Maybe it’s like this.

Los Angeles. My impression of Los Angeles is probably conditioned from having spent more time in the best areas, however one thing is certain: the general level of wealth is enormous. It can be seen from the luxury houses, from the gigantic cars, from people’s look: well dressed, well groomed, well put together. In my visit to the Beverly Hills neighborhood I was sure (and amused) of being on the podium of the worst dressed in the entire street. In the Venice neighborhood I saw a sign with an offer of 20.000 dollars as a reward for a lost cat, and I think that is was not a joke.

Upon what is the economy of Los Angeles based? Apart from the obvious quantity of people related to entertainment and Hollywood, I found that a surprising number of people work in the real estate sector. In practice all those to whom I asked “what do you do” replied real estate agent, or something related to buying and selling houses. It seems that the real estate market in the city is hot: I heard that a property put on the market is sold often within a week, and this despite the prices are always in the range of millions.

What kind of shops populate the streets? To confirm the wealth of the city there are in fact beauty salons and yoga gyms. There is a crazy mass of restaurants of every type, competing ferociously. Interestingly I noticed several “psychic” shops, something that definitely you don’t see in Europe, where instead the many more churches take care of catalyzing the spiritual desire of people. One peculiar (and comic) thing are the many ads on the streets with pictures of lawyers with a resolute expression, that offer assistance for trials regarding car accidents or various injuries. It definitely seems that the United States are overcrowded by lawyers hunting for easy cases, to obtain reimbursements of all types.

I believe anyway that especially in Los Angeles live a particularly high number of entrepreneurs, self-employeed, investors, wanna-be actors, artists, or people that don’t work at all. To these categories in fact belong almost all the people I talked with. In the streets of the city the only ones that can be noticed doing “visible” work are the mexican workers, that here and there take care of the gardens of rich people or do construction work. Actually I haven’t seen a single worker around that wasn’t mexican.

The fact that many people don’t have an employee job turn into a mistery the fact that there’s a crazy traffic on the streets of the city, for which I found that Los Angeles is “famous”. I was also stuck in the jam for hours and hours. And yet I was looking at that stream of cars around me and I was wondering: where are all these people going? Why do they move? The congestion is perennial and often even at inexplicable times, like at late morning.

A couple notes on the people of Los Angeles and surroundings, since it’s in this area that I chatted more often with local people, and here is where I spent most of the time.

Maybe I’ve been lucky, but I’ve known many people with interesting stories and pleasant to conversate with. Obviously living in wealth make it easier to be relaxed and well disposed, but still it impressed me how people in general seemed well adapted to society. Seeing people moving so much at ease between beautiful houses, beautiful neighborhoods and beautiful shops, seemed to me kind of… weird. Where was the torment? Where were the worried faces of my little town in Italy? Where was the dysfunction? Almost everyone was saying hi to me with kind words and seemed genuinely well disposed. When I was talking with people, I wasn’t detecting all that chronic pessimism and that negativity that instead I detect often talking with the people of my town.

I’m sure that even in Los Angeles, after all, people have their gnawings and their problems, but in general I really noticed a great social interface in people. My idea in fact is that “rich people” often are not rich by chance, but they are for the mentality that they have and for their way of doing things. Instead of just complaining using the typical italian formula (“everything sucks – they’re all corrupted – they don’t let you do anything”), in Los Angeles I think that the formula is instead “let’s see what type of business could work today”. There’s definitely a more possibilistic mindset and much more spirit of initiative than in Italy.

The crisis of Hollywood. It’s not a mistery that Hollywood is going through a huge crisis, in terms of revenues but even more in terms of ideas. I actually realized this already at home, since now it’s been years that many movies that arrive in the theaters are total garbage: cliches seen over and over, old movies “remade” and reproposed as new, movies with no plot filled only with murders and fears, movies dragged on with “sequels” or dragged back with “prequels”. Producing something new… would be too much eh?

In fact I actually almost completely stopped going to movie theaters: too many times I felt insulted to have to pay both to see movies that are so bad, and to have to watch 20 minutes of commercials before the movie itself. It happens only rarely that I still end up in a theater, if the proposal comes from some friend, and in that case my approach is wary but possibilistic: “mah let’s take a look, maybe it’s time to reupdate my evaluation of Hollywood…”. No, each time the evaluation gets renewed: the movies that arrive in the theaters are still garbage. Last confirmation from the movie Life with actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds, that I had the displeasure of watching: if I was a famous actor no price would convince me to take part in such crap.

Anyway getting back to Los Angeles, I was curious to search for evidence of the crisis in the homeland of movies itself, and I saw it. To confirm the total lack of ideas, on the manifestos of the city they were advertising: the emoticon movie (seriously?), the smurfs movie (an animated cartoon that I used to watch as a kid 30 years ago), the n-th episode of Pirates of the Caribbean with the tired face of Johnny Depp, the second episode of Guardians of the Galaxy, and in particular many advertisements of not movies anymore, but of series of fiction on-demand, that people watch privately at home, instead of going to the movie theaters.

It didn’t happen during this trip, but I would have been damn curious to have a conversation with some producer or actor of Hollywood, to find out if they confirmed my impression: that movie producers at this point have become extremely selective in choosing which movies to produce, since many now are generating breadcrumbs compared to the past, and actually many cause even losses (the so called “box office bombs”). So they don’t invest anymore in risky new things, but they only recycle things that already worked in the past. An example is the constant hammering on movies with superheroes.

Then there’s a second big doubt with which I arrived in California, hoping to find a solution, but instead I brought it back home, since no one gave me a convincing explaination. The doubt is about the reaction so extreme and averse that Hollywood has toward the current president Donald Trump. I get it that California and Hollywood in particular have a liberal orientation, but yet this to me is not enough to explain a level of outrage that is so high, especially in the specific of Hollywood. Almost all the actors are flaming against Trump in the interviews, on the social media. A level of aversion too strong to be explained only by the fact that “Hollywood is liberal”. There must be some aspect that I’m missing, economic or who knows, that probably a person who’s inside Hollywood could explain to me better.

Actually in this period in Los Angeles I happened to see a couple of famous actors, but I didn’t bother them. This happened in the Starbucks coffee in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood, where I liked to go for coffee in the morning. The pleasure actually was deriving from the walk to get there and for the chance to study the customers, definitely not for the coffee itself. In fact here are some of my thoughts on coffee.

Coffee. Americans have no clue what “coffee” means. I mean that the philosophy itself of coffee that they have, as an italian I can’t define it in any other way than wrong and to be contrasted ruthlessly! 🙂

In Italy if you enter a bar and ask for “a coffee” the transaction is simple and effective: the bartender puts an espresso in front of you without too many questions, and you pay approximately 1 euro. Easy. In Los Angeles when I asked for “a coffee” in the Starbucks they asked me strange questions: if I wanted a cold or hot brew, what level of roasting, how many “shots” I wanted, if it was to take away. Each time we didn’t understand each other and I was ending up with a different coffee at a different price (always too high). The fact is that Starbucks has dozens of options on the menu, all of them apparently having something to do with coffee, but none decent. They’re all concoctions of caffeine, chemical additives and sugar.

Anyway there’s an interesting situation regarding this famous chain of coffeehouses, that explains why it had so much success: they simply found a huge niche in the market that was empty. A really gigantic one. It’s weird to think about it, but in many areas of the United States no bars existed before Starbucks. In other terms there were very few places that corresponded (even if vaguely) to what an italian bar is, a place where you can go during the day simply for a coffee, to socialize or to read the newspapers. Before in the United States there were mostly only restaurants, places where to have complete meals like lunch and dinner. This explaination comes from the friend of Santa Monica and it seemed very valid to me.

Of course at Starbucks they reinterpreted the concept of bar their own way, producing a “creature” of which some aspects are definitely questionable (the coffee itself indeed), but evidently they found a formula that in the United States works well, and not only there. Also there’s a couple of positive differences from the italian bars, they don’t sell neither cigarettes nor lotteries. Exactly the fact that cigarettes are not so easy to find everywhere in the bars, like it’s in Italy instead, contributes to the fact that an extraordinarily reduced number of people smoke in the United States. This in addition, I guess, to a campaign to demonize smoke that probably went on in recent years.

Obviously, other than Starbucks in the streets there are also independent bars scattered here and there, that don’t belong to the chain. I’ve been in several ones both in Los Angeles and in the other places visited in this trip. The weird thing though is that many of these independents didn’t seem really interested to compete with the colossus. I happened to enter in bars that didn’t have coffee (“we don’t have it, we only make it in winter”… eh?) or that had already “finished” it after lunch () or that were completely closing -the bars themselves- at three in the afternoon, which is exactly when you want to cheat with caffeine against the afternoon sleepiness. Really bizarre.

Anyway even today, between the many Starbucks and the independent bars scattered here and there, it seemed to me that there are still large areas of the country uncovered. More than once with my friends we had to drive for quite awhile, consulting the map on the telephone, searching for a bar where to have a coffee break.

Food. Regarding the grocery stores. Obviously I wasn’t expecting to find food with the high level of quality and freshness that can be found in many italian supermarkets, but nevertheless I found that spending a lot of money in Los Angeles you can bring home some fairly good food. Which makes sense considering the scenario of this city, where people are richer and more focused on health than in the average of the United States.

Fruits and vegetables of good quality can be found quite easily, even organic. But the problem is there and it’s in the animal foods, that means cheese, fish and meat: almost nothing is fresh. You see a bit of fish but it always looks like few days old. Among the cheeses the choice is very limited, and those of higher quality are all imported and really expensive. Fresh bread, what we italians call a “filone”, doesn’t exist at all, only shelves with packaged bread and often with chemical additives. Among the peculiarities of the supermarkets, in comparison with the italian and spanish ones, I noticed enormous sections of dietary supplements and pills of all types, and cashiers that were more kind and professional. Of course the kindness of the cashiers is part of the work interface, but it’s still nice to find it.

Regarding the restaurants instead, where in this period I went much more often than usual (that is almost never). As said in Los Angeles there are cuisines from all around the world. I tried some new interesting foods, especially from the asian cuisine. But I also realized that, more than in Europe, in the food of the restaurants there may be dangerous additives and of their presence is difficult to be aware, as there are no detailed nutrition labels to consult.

For example, once on the menu of a restaurant I saw the indication “without sodium glutamate” on a item, that made me wonder: so in all the other foods without this indication… here they can add the glutamate without any problem? After this episode I raised the level of guard, and yet despite this later during this trip (when I was in Louisiana actually) I got distracted anyway and made a severe error: I added a sauce to my food as condiment, and only later I thought about checking its label. Among the various “ingredients” that I had gulped there was aluminum…

A sharp difference with the italian and spanish restaurants: service is very fast everywhere. Almost every time you sit at a table, and immediately comes the waiter with the menus and to get orders for the drinks. Few minutes to consult the menus, and the waiter is already back with the drinks and to take the orders for the food. Everything happens so rapidly that often I had to ask for additional time to choose, more than once. The mechanism is exactly opposite to that of Italy and Spain, where instead in the restaurants often an eternity is needed before you get served.

A weird thing that happens in the american restaurants is that waiters come constantly during the meal to ask if “is everything ok?”. Once or twice would be even ok, a nice sign of consideration, but sometimes it happened even 4-5 times during the same lunch and the scene became frankly ridiculous. I wonder if in the United States the restaurants, that as I wrote above are in a ferociously competitive sector, depend a lot on the online reputation built with the feedbacks of the customers, so they have developed almost a sort of terror of receiving negative feedbacks.

Last note, which is a known fact: tips. Each time you eat in a restaurant you have to waste time to calculate the percentages. A really inefficient mechanism that they have in the United States, and that fortunately is not common in Italy and Spain. Sure in theory tips encourage a better service, but this really doesn’t justify the waste of time. Also to contribute to slow down the payment phase, I noticed that the american banknotes have all a similar color (a pale beige/yellow), so it’s difficult to distinguish a 1, 5 or 10 dollar bill without analyzing them. Weird that each bill doesn’t have a different color.

Agricolture. To me it seemed that California has a really favorable climate for agricolture, but I’ve seen this potential used only minimally: very few cultivated fields and very few vegetable gardens near the houses. I saw many wineyards, they definitely make wine, but for example I’ve seen almost no olive trees, and I have the impression that they would grow well here.

Anyway it seemed to me that many californians are focused on doing landscaping in their gardens but only for aesthetic reasons, planting definitely many beautiful flowers and ornamental trees, but that instead they’re not focused at all on planting fruits and vegetables near the house, that they prefer to buy in the grocery stores, at high prices and imported. In front of the houses I noticed that often they don’t even plant the minimum necessary, like at least a vase with herbs to cook with.

Nevada

Las Vegas. Las Vegas is like you would imagine it: the crowd, the lights, the casinos. Definitely interesting to see once in a lifetime, but obviously not the agitation in the middle of which I’d like to live long term. This is valid for the center anyway, there are peripheral and residential areas of the city where I’m sure you can live a much more “normal” life. Arriving with the car, already at first sight I’ve seen that the level of general wealth of Las Vegas is certainly lower than in Los Angeles.

The most interesting thing of the casinos was noticing that everything is scientifically designed to milk the visitors to the maximum. The typical casino (I’ve been at the Excalibur) is not a simple structure by itself but a combination: a tall building in which at the ground floor there’s the actual casino, and at the upper floors there is the hotel. So the guests of the hotel are forced to go through the casino to get in and out of the hotel.

The ground floor where people gamble is big, labyrinthine and on purpose lacking directions, getting lost is easy and you always end up spending more time between the slot machines and the gambling tables. There are no clocks on the walls to remind you that time is passing. If you sit at a table to gamble (I did it at  blackjack table where I lost 20 dollars) there are waiters coming periodically to offer you free drinks. Obviously being a bit tipsy makes you lose inibitions and helps you gamble a little bit more.

Another fact that I noticed is that the hotel where I stayed had definitely a low price considered the great standard of the rooms. Even in this I’ve seen something astute: they attract visitors by making the stay in the hotel affordable, because they know that then the guests will leave the real money in the casino, where the effective part of the milking happens.

Both in the casinos and in the streets of Las Vegas, I noticed a difference in the look of people compared to Los Angeles. Here I started to see more people with bellies, here and there obese, and in general not as well put together anymore. As one of my friends had anticipated to me, with whom I had commented on the good shape of people of Los Angeles: “don’t worry, in Las Vegas you will see many more people that look typically american”. Despite this, even in Las Vegas the marvellous fact seen in Los Angeles continued to be true: almost nobody was smoking cigarettes.

Steve Pavlina. During my visit of Las Vegas I had the chance to meet Steve Pavlina, a blogger that lives right in this city and who accepted my invitation for a coffee and a chat. Actually only my friends and I drinked the coffee, Steve had just started since few days a water only fast, that he ended up prolonging up to 40 days (!).

For me it’s been really a special event, Steve is a brilliant man and his work has been very useful to me during the years, in fact I thanked him sincerely. He is without any doubt one of the people that influenced my philosophy of life the most, and actually the fact itself that I was there, to be able to travel in the United States for a period long months, came also from having put into practice his ideas on passive income. His popular article “10 reasons not to have a job” has been a main contributor to make me realize that the employee job I had years ago was a total joke, and in fact actually now no day passes by that I don’t bless the decision of nuking it.

There are also another couple aspects that made me happy about this chat. The first is that I was absolutely at ease in the conversation, an achievement considering that this is exactly the type of events that at times make me anxious, to a point that I even develop one of my proverbial panic attacks. The second is that also another of the friends sitting at the table belonged to that “club” of people that are special for me, that inspired me and helped me a lot in life. You know the saying “surround yourself with people that are more intelligent than you”? Well sitting at the table with these two, that I reunited myself, I thought smiling: “that’s exactly what I’m doing now, yes I’m doing things well!”.

Louisiana

New Orleans. Really interesting to see New Orleans and Louisiana after spending a lot of time in Los Angeles. The contrast was strong: I went from one of the richest areas of the country to one of the poorest.

I ignored the characteristics for which New Orleans is famous (almost always I travel to destinations on which I gather very little information in advance) and I discovered them only once I arrived there: for example that the city has a reputation for the live music, the art, the creole cuisine, the particular architecture. I didn’t even know that such a large percentage of the population was composed by black people. I guess that many are descendants of the slaves that once were working in the sugar cane plantations. The plantations still exist and I’ve seen them driving around Louisiana with a car.

Several things hit me. Definitely a drastic change in the look of people. Many more people seriously obese, and unfortunately an impressive number of people with physical problems, crooked, with limps or on a wheelchair, especially among the blacks. Quite a lot of people drunk in the streets and not looking lucid at all. I think that in New Orleans it’s easy to “get caught” by the theme of pubs, restaurants, jazz music to listen with a beer in front, the parades, the life of the tattooed “artist” that smokes and uses some drugs, and many end up feeling the effects on their physical and mental health. Another factor anyway is certainly diet.

Louisiana is one of the fattest states of the United States and you can tell. A couple times I took notice that inside the restaurant my friends and I were the only non fat clients. In fact the cuisine of Louisiana may be famous, but with me frankly it’s been a disaster. I would summarize it like this: all fried. There’s fish but it’s mostly low quality fish: shrimps that I suspect come almost always from farms, crawfish (similar to shrimps) that in addition to giving me the same suspicion when you eat them you have to throw away 90% of the body, catfish which is a bottom feeder fish. For an almost-vegetarian like me there’s the combination “white rice and beans”, not exactly something I would order at the restaurant but that at least could have filled me, but I found out soon that the beans were cooked in “gumbo” stews with meats coming from who knows where. Then of course there is more: the “Jambalaya” that is an ipercooked mix of rice vegetables and meat, a polenta called “grits”, and for the tourists the alligator sandwitch. Nothing anyway that seemed not harmful for health. Among the few exceptions maybe the oysters.

Even the grocery stores gave me several indications. First of all there seemed to be very few of them: in entire neighborhoods they were completely missing. Among those that I’ve seen many contained the word “dollar” in the name: family dollar, dollar general, dollar tree, to clearly signal the intention to deal with customers that don’t have too many dollars to spend. On the shelves a very sad scenario: processed products, packages, chemical additives, almost nothing fresh. Organic fruits and vegetables a remote mirage, at least in Los Angeles spending a fortune you would find them. I found myself buying some packaged water sold in those plastic containers with the shape that we italians associate to bleach and detergents. And the taste itself of water was bad. Really.

I’m a bit critical also about the musical and artistic scene of New Orleans. My impression is that jazz was born around here, but then got lost in the way a bit. Most of the live music to me seemed in fact the result of alcohol, smoke and frieds: little inspiration and lots of noise. Many bands in the streets were not playing nothing else than “covers” of already existing songs, producing worse versions compared to the original (here too, producing something new… would be too much eh?). The artistic reputation of the city refers essentially to vintage markets, decorative objects, less conventional dressing choices of people. Definitely interesting to see, but doesn’t resonate much with my concept of “art”.

One thing that I really appreciated of New Orleans however is the architecture, many neighborhoods are really cute. The typical house is a “shotgun” house, long and narrow, made of wood, with pastel colors. Under the roofs there are some wooden brackets with curls and floral patterns, and just those increase the charm of the houses significantly. Many buildings anyway seemed to need some fixing, especially new paint on the facades. This is a business that I think would work well in New Orleans, where in general I noticed a particularly low number of shops or businesses of any type (beside the shops related to tourism in the center).

I’ve also been in the area hit by hurricane Katrina in 2005, but I haven’t seen evident signs of the distaster. There were however several empty lots of land. I figure that at this point after many years the wreckages that had to be removed were removed, and many people moved away.

Other areas. I had the chance to see also other areas of Louisiana, traveling with a car. The landscape is definitely particular: all flat, with a very jagged coast, swamps, under a burning sun and with a strong humidity. In fact my level of physical energy in the two weeks here dropped drastically compared to normal.

In the countryside and on the coast the houses presented something new compared to those of New Orleans city: many were elevated on stilts, even several meters high. Clearly to avoid floodings. Many seemed unused anyway. I’ve also seen the old plantation houses, these days almost all of them turned into museums. The agricolture of the state seems to continue to consist only and exclusively in sugar cane: I haven’t seen anything else planted anywhere. There should be rice fields somewhere, considered both the favorable territory and the strong presence of rice in the local cuisine, but I haven’t seen them. Here and there I noticed large industrial factories, I think they were oil refineries.

One of the most interesting things was to see the swamps, another natural scenery very different from the one at home, and from the one seen in California and Nevada. In the swamps I’ve seen for the first time wild alligators, motionless on the trunks or near the water, waiting for preys. Weird actually to find myself with these animals, in “theory” dangerous, blended like this with naturalness in my same landscape. Those that I’ve seen anyway were relatively small, I’ve seen even some really cute baby alligators. I think anyway that underwater there may have been large alligators, few meters long, those that after all wouldn’t mind eating a person. I didn’t dive in to check.

In the car with my friends we drove along the coast toward east, until we saw even a little piece of the state of Mississippi. Even here the ocean (this time the coast faces the Gulf of Mexico) looked to me frankly “ugly” and a bit sad, even if it did have a sort of melancholic appeal. Only a stripe of white sand under the burning sun, no bushes, no shells, no fish, no boats. Almost no people on the beach. Weird.

Baja California

For few days I experienced also a little piece of Mexico, in the peninsula of Baja California that is a little under Los Angeles. Definitely another interesting contrast.

I had in mind this silly image of the small mexican town on a hill, the señores with mustache playing guitar, others sleeping under the sombrero hat for the siesta, the black haired girls with colored gowns, kids playing, smiles, cactuses. It’s not exactly what I’ve seen. Obviously I wasn’t expecting that Mexico would be doing as well as the United States, but I didn’t think that they were doing as bad as I’ve seen. Frankly, I thought they were doing a bit better.

Tijuana. Certainly to contribute to this impression was Tijuana, the first mexican city you meet as soon as you cross the border. Just few miles above there’s San Diego, that is still part of the United States and appears rich and in order, few miles below there’s Tijuana, that is already part of Mexico, and it appears as a tangle of shacks, favelas, messy traffic, run down cars, beggars. The shift in scenario is really drastic and sharp.

My vision of Tijuana anyway happened just on the way, from the car. We didn’t stop, also because everybody in California agreed in saying that “it’s not safe. Maybe you go and have no problems, but better to stay somewhere else.” I don’t think anyway that Tijuana represents the typical mexican city, probably it’s a bit “worse” for the geographic position, right near the border with the United States, that probably made it a crossroads for various types of smuggling, among which certainly drug.

Ensenada. This is a coastal town where I spent three days, and Ensenada already seemed to me definitely like a tranquil and safe place. It does have a certain touristic vocation, considering the souvenir shops and the restaurants, even if actually I haven’t seen many american tourists. Considering the low prices, the coast that is not bad, and that it is within reach for californians, there could be more, but maybe they don’t trust coming even here.

In Ensenada I’ve seen and eaten a bit of fresh fish (even if also the fish seen in the market near the harbor didn’t look super fresh, at least not like the fish I see in the markets of Italy and Spain). In the harbor there were many fishing boats anchored, but in the morning I was seeing only two or three heading to the ocean, the others were all idle. The culinary “scene” didn’t seem sensational, even if it’s in Ensenada that I had both the best coffee and the best dinner of the entire two months and a half of this trip. Purely by chance, the coffee was in an italian bar and the dinner was in an italian restaurant.

In the streets I noticed some peculiarities, the first rather curious is that many pharmacies were promoting with a certain emphasis that they were selling Viagra. I wonder if it’s because men around here are particularly focused on sex, or if the sale is intented for american tourists that maybe can buy the drug at reduced prices. I noticed also a large and definitely unusual number of signs with job offers, on shops both in the town and in the surroundings. I found it weird considering that the economy in the area is visibly all but “in ferment”. I tend to think that they’re jobs where they pay such a misery, that for local people having them or not makes almost no difference.

Among the things that I discovered in this trip there are the mexican television shows. They’re really… worth a note! Something that made my jaw drop in front of the tv: captivated and horrified at the same time. The words “trash” and “dreadful” don’t even give a close idea of what they broadcast around here.

Apparently the concept of entertainment in the mexican show is a large group of people amassed inside a tv studio, with grotesque costumes, that dance, trip each other, pinch each other on the arms, put elastic bands on the face while they sing karaoke, wink, wave, with the camera that spans from one person to the other, with the background of festive music. Actually one of my friends made me notice that one of the characters of the Simsons cartoon, Bumblebee man, is portraying exactly one of these characters of the mexican shows. I’m rather shocked anyway: I swear that I won’t complain anymore about the italian trash shows, since the worst of them is still broadcasting high philosophy compared to the mexican ones!


Notes: Some time ago I reworked the article “10 reasons not to have a job” into a personal form, producing a version that can be found at this link.

Related: Trolled by the Balkans

Labor in the future: humans or robots?

A fascinating question to reflect on is: who will work in the future, humans or robots?

Will robots take charge of almost all the jobs? And in this case, what else will humans do during the day, with all the free time available? Or the scenario will not change much: even if in a more robotized society, humans will continue to work most of the time anyway?

The two different scenarios correspond to the change, or the persistence, of the very concept of job that exists today, and of some structures, in particular the monetary system and the production of energy. Easy to understand that if the necessity to earn money vanishes, and if the necessity to pay the energy vanishes, more easily also the necessity to work vanishes.

I want to try to analyze the two possibilities. On the first one I can offer a personal point of view, considering that I’m living with it already: I don’t have a job and I have a lot of free time. In this case, it must be evaluated what will happen if the percentage of people that live like me, today a minority, will grow in the future. However I prefer to start from the scenario that is more familiar and therefore easy to imagine: the one in which humans will continue to work most of the time.

Humans will continue to work

It seems obvious to me that technology will keep on being developed, so inevitably the trend that has been going on for awhile now will continue: i.e. humans will continue to be gradually replaced by robots in their jobs, since the robots in most cases are more precise and efficient.

For many people that tried to predict the future, this argument meant automatically that will come the day when humanity will be freed from labor. But I’m not sure of sharing this optimism. To me instead, it seems better not to underestimate the possibility that, as human jobs will switch to robots, more and more fake jobs will be invented to keep the humans busy.

With fake jobs I mean unproductive jobs, that don’t generate concrete resources, or superfluous jobs, that generate resources in excess that later are thrown away. Actually many jobs of both types exist already now, and keep the humanity busy already now. So what I’m talking about is nothing else than a continuation of the phenomenon already in progress, that could survive and get amplified.

Today very evident examples of unproductive jobs are seen in the banking sector and in politics, while of the superflous jobs the evidence has become internet, that by now is definitely ultra-saturated, because it’s flooded every day with new contents created by armies of journalists and authors, contents that however reach an audience that is more and more microscopic. Even many of today’s schools are factories for superfluous jobs, dedicated to provide the students with a lot of knowledge that they will never use -so they’ll throw it away– in adult age.

It’s plausible that the future will present a picture in which, even if in the context of a great abundance of resources generated by robots even more advanced and efficient than the current ones, humans will continue to have very little free time, because they’ll be very busy with jobs invented… exactly with the purpose of keeping them busy.

Someone could ask: jobs invented by whom? A conspiracy theorist would probably answer “by the estabilishment”, and there’s definitely no doubt that the estabilishment gets benefits from having the majority of people busy working, with little free time. In this way there’s a more ignorant and tired mass, easy to manipulate. However I believe that in large part it’s people themselves that tend toward these useless jobs, with no much need of some “secret agenda” to push them.

To understand the reason it’s sufficient to observe how people behave when they have free time: the majority, actually, is not at all at ease with free time.

Free time is a trigger that can cause an increased level of consciousness, and a high level of consciousness often is hard to sustain: questions hard to be answered appear, a lot of uncertainties appear. It’s for this reason that often people, when they’re not working, do a systematic job to actually lower the level of consciousness: eating junk food, watching television, going shopping, drinking alcohol.

In addition to this spontanous tendency, as anticipated above, two determinant factors are money and energy. If a financial system similar to the current one persists, many humans will continue to find themselves in a situation with great abundance of resources (abundance that will probably become more extreme thanks to the robots), but they will be able to access those resources only through money, that they will try to earn by working. Similarly for energy: if it will not become abundant and easily accessible for everybody, humans will continue to work to pay for it.

Also, a whole series of new artificial needs could arise, to which many new artificial jobs would reply. Here a number of more or less distopyan scenarios can be imagined, for example a planet where despite robots will have solved the problem of producing the essential resources, humans will be absorbed anyway by a gigantic industry of entertainment, made of virtual realities and videogames, inside of which they will continue to work many hours per week.

The idea sounds rather disquieting, but actually it wouldn’t be anything else than the acutization of what happens today. In this sense we could say that the future is already now. The only difference would be that, if today the percentage real jobs vs artificial jobs is something like 30% vs 70%, in the future it could lean even more toward the artificial jobs, and become something like 5% vs 95%. Within the small percentage of real jobs that will survive in the future, probably there will only be jobs in which the “human factor” (imagination, creativity, emotions) is an advantage not challenge-able by robotic efficiency.

So as a quick recap, in this first scenario many humans would continue to work also in the future, either to escape from free time or because they would continue to believe that they have to work. This implies that they would continue to adopt the concept of job that exists now (it’s “job” if it’s compensated with money), and implies that they would continue not to realize that by working for money, in a financial system similar to the existing one, they basically play a poker game rigged to their disadvantage.

It’s the scenario I’m less attracted to, because it involves a very unaware future humanity, but it still holds some positive aspects, especially for that minority of people that will decide not to work. In fact, since everybody else will be busy with their jobs, for those who will have more free time there will be more opportunities available, less competition, less traffic, less lines, and so on.

Humans will stop working

The second possibility comes from a more radical transformation of consciousness, and I believe that it’s also the most likely scenario. In fact, I would tend to give for a fact that we will go toward this scenario in the future, if it wasn’t that the question “but then why it didn’t happen already?” makes me cautios. My impression is that a transformation will take place, but much more slowly than some people predict.

In this vision, people will abandon in mass the things that today are considered jobs. Willingly or not, unemployment will come for nearly everyone: some will abandon their jobs consciously and voluntarily, others instead will be pushed into unemployment by the robots, by profound changes in money (maybe from fiat to cryptocurrency), by entrepreneurs that will make energy abundant and accessible, by smaller and more efficient governments.

Those that will be pushed into unemployment, probably, will try more than the others to keep alive a market of fake jobs, that unlikely will disappear completely. The others however will have finally surrendered to the obviousness: in a world that is highly technological and abundant of goods and services, easily produced by the robots and accessible to everyone, the old concept of job doesn’t make sense anymore: its motivation to exist, simply, disappeared.

So all these people will find themselves in front of the same question that I faced already few years ago, when I quit my job: what do I do during the day? Until today, for many people this question would probably sound as threatening: they would associate it immediately to the question how would I avoid boredom? It’s from here, in fact, that begins the search for distractions, for activities that “keep us busy” (as many existing jobs are, at this point).

But what will happen in the future, if people will look inside this boredom, instead of trying to avoid it with entertainment? In fact, if fake jobs will have lost any credibility as option of partial time-fillers, extending the television fictions and the videogames to the whole time could feel as unsatisfactory for many people. Even traveling in the real world, an activity that many fantasize to do “if it wasn’t for the job”, if done constantly could not dissipate the feeling of a lack of purpose.

What do I do with my time? is a difficult question -even existential– since inevitably it originates other questions in chain: what do I do with my life? and so what is the meaning of life? In front of this last question a huge number of people could land in the future, a lot more than today. And from the great variety of answers that will come, the planet and the society could really be transformed in unpredictable ways.

It’s possible that, after several reflections, many people will reach a conclusion similar to the one that I reached: unless we decide to live life waiting for the manifestation of some “divinity” or “superior authority” to reveal to us a universal meaning of life, valid for the whole humanity (something that maybe, probably, will never happen) it makes sense that we assign it by ourselves, individually, a meaning to our life. The meaning we choose is exactly the meaning of life, the “right” one.

This choice will be crucial to decide if even in the future we humans will continue to do something during the day, rather than becoming an almost completely inactive species, fed by robots. Those who will take the time to decide how to use their life, will have the motivation to act.

But at this point, these actions will be part of a totally new concept of labor, profoundly different from the previous, just because the motivation that generates it will be profoundly different. The motivation will not be anymore obtaining the “old” goods and services, at this point redundant and not really interesting, but it will be an impulse coming mostly from the inside, and not anymore from the outside.

To such a substantial change in the motivation that will generate labor, probably a substantial change in the fields toward which labor will be addressed will follow. Hard to imagine, in fact, that in a scenario where labor will be highly optional and humans will decide to work following a process of introspection, the efforts will be employed to produce souvenirs or irrelevant education. Possibly those that will get a strong momentum will be new fields like genetic experimentation, space exploration, and in particular the research on how the mind works.

So, the one I’m describing here is a scenario in which humans would stop working -but for what is the old concept of work-. However many of them could stay active by adopting a new philosophy, and according to it they could more often start to feel to want to “work”.

My journey

I’ve been lucky enough to reach the question what do I do with my time? well prepared. Unemployment is something that I searched for and that I wanted strongly. The reason for my determination came in fact from having taken the time to decide what was the meaning of life, for what I wanted to use mine.

The answer that I found, that went through refinement with time anyway and that is still being refined, is that the meaning of life is love: the love that we give and the love that we receive. Secondly, the meaning of life consists also in exploring and understading better the universe, enjoying the beautiful things that exist, and producing new beautiful things.

This type of vision had effects in many areas of my life, and obviously also on my practical concept of job. The concept I had before became obsolete and not proposable anymore. Working has become adding something beautiful to the world, and having high quality. To me favoring quality over quantity seems necessary at this point, considering the degree of saturation reached by the human production in many many areas, both of material and immaterial products.

I find that for me it works well, to keep this general principle in mind: in fact whatever is the specific project I decide to work on (be it writing an article, producing a documentary, building a house…), it always reminds me why I’m doing it and how to do it. This doesn’t imply certainty of good results, but I find that it motivates me to act. It’s a principle that created and creates with ease activities to insert in my time, when I feel that I want to “work”. To be honest it’s difficult at this point to label it as working time or free time, as the boundary between the two has inevitably become very blurry.

Picking up a paper in the street is work? Taking care of the garden is work? Even when people ask me what is your job? I’m not really sure what to answer, even if lately I solve the doubt by using the quick and elegant answer “entrepreneur”.

About how much to work, in these latest years I felt like working on my projects just few hours per day, a small amount of time that anyway made me obtain several results that seem good to me. The reason why I didn’t work more are essentially two: the first one is that, actually, I don’t want to miss all the beautiful things “out there” in the universe (there are so many) working most of the time.

The second reason comes from one of my biggest internal conflicts, explained well by the famous allegory of the cave by Plato. In short, I have the impression that some of the most valuable things I have to give to the world (e.g. the useful information I found) often are not of any interest for the world, so spending many hours working on them maybe doesn’t make sense. At the same time, I’m not sure I want to work a lot on something for which there is more interest, but that I don’t “feel” is my strength. This is a doubt I haven’t solved yet, but anyway I believe that it belongs to many other people, so I don’t feel lonely in the conflict 🙂

Actually, I believe that is right through this type of internal “journeys” (introspection, as I wrote above) that the redefinition of labor could pass in the future. If jobs will survive taking a new form, abandoning the current one -often grotesque- of fake jobs, such form could be influenced by processes like the one of disidentification by humans with their job role. So here we’re talking of “reviewing” the relationship with the ego, a relationship not easy… at all.


Notes: While fascinating, this topic is to say the least theoretical and philosophical. The article could have some contradictions, however I believe that it contains several useful points.

Related: The function of labor, What is your work ethic?

Trolled by the Balkans

I have spent most of the last two months traveling, of which some weeks in the Balkans, that I’ve decided to describe in this article. The two friends I was traveling with and I were curious about this part of Europe, that we expected to be the most authentic and “different” compared to the Europe we’re familiar with.

We were certainly not disappointed: the result has been a very interesting trip, even if frankly I’ve seen some of the most absurd places of my life. In fact often during the trip we joked saying that we were constantly trolled by the Balkans, that were presenting in front of our eyes some scenarios that were so weird and inexplicable that we were left uncertain and with the feeling “what the heck are we seeing?”.

This is the video that I produced, that contains some of the things seen in the countries I’ve been to: Albania, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia.

General impressions I had during the trip

There is an impressive amount of unused land in these countries, that is not farmed or used for pasture. It’s surprising to think that many people kill each other to live in arid areas of the middle East, while here in the Balkans there is so much fertile land that no one uses. The little agricolture and animal farming often are translated into food with quality that varies from “ok” to “dreadful”.

I perceived a general vibration of obliviousness and sleepiness, mixed to a certain disinterestedness for the environment and the people around, that especially in the inland Balkans produce insanely irregular neighborhoods, chaotic traffic, rows of street vendors and shops that offer all the same products (empty, and I don’t know how they carry on).

Even if here and there there are churches with delightful proportions, and some of them appear in this video, the sense of aesthetics and art is missing a lot. The difference for me, coming from Italy, is really dramatic. I’ve seen entire cities where apparently the idea of decorating a neighborhood with a fountain or a garden has never been taken into consideration.

In return people seemed rather friendly everywhere, and all these places gave me the impression of being safe, where street crimes and robberies are not common events. Also, even if currently I would definitely prefer not to live there stably, I’ve seen a lot of potential in the Balkans: who knows how they will transform in the future?

Specific impressions on the individual countries

Albania: a very, very strange country. The most inexplicable thing are the thousands (many thousands) of unfinished buildings scattered everywhere, built without any criterion. I don’t think that the concept of urban plan exists in Albania. You see a thirty floor skyscraper without windows -abandoned- next to a gas station -abandoned- next to a series of five multicolor condos in ruins -abandoned- next to a roman empire style villa without windows -abandoned-.

There are mosques scattered here and there in the industrial areas, in the countryside, on the mountains, that is hard to imagine they’re ever reached by anyone. In the countryside you see cement bunkers, skeletons of houses that could be inhabited, but with toys and puppets hanging on a rope from the balconies. In the rural areas donkeys are used a lot to transport materials, small ones, like mini-donkeys. In the cities, surprisingly, cars are rather high level, in fact I think I’ve seen many more suvs in Durres and Tirana than in Rome.

Among the best trolls by Albania: seeing two men playing cards on an improvised table, at the side of a highway and under the sun, in the absolute middle of nowhere and very far from any town or city, that make you wonder: a) how did they manage to get there since they don’t seem to have a car b) why there c) why are they playing cards few feet away from the border of the highway, at risk of being hit by a truck. At least go a little bit further and in the shade!

Greece: in this trip we only visited the north part of Greece, that seemed to me depopulated and with a rather dry ladscape. The cities I’ve been to, for example Ioannina and Kastoria, left me the impression of sleepiness I was mentioning above, of not having charisma. Thessaloniki, much bigger, is without any doubt more animated, but too touristy and chaotic for my taste.

One thing that surprised me a bit is that everywhere, especially in the lesser known and more isolated towns, it seems like there are no ancient buildings. I’m used to the picturesque towns of Italy, full of castles, towers, stony buildings and with a medieval appearance. In the north of Greece instead I haven’t seen any town that would suggest a long history. Many small towns are simply groups of houses with the aspect that I would define “normal”: with facades in cement, built recently. And the ancient houses, where have they gone?

Surprisingly, at least for what I was expecting considering the previous trips to Athens, it wasn’t easy to find quality food in the north of Greece. In the supermarkets there was a predominance of processed foods, and little fresh fish. Even finding a restaurant where to eat a real meal has been difficult. In Ioannina for example it seems like there is only a plethora of coffee-bars, where they serve drinks and snacks, but very few restaurants.

Misteries: in the countryside we noticed here and there small fields of tobacco and cotton. What do they do with such small harvests? The tobacco maybe is smuggled, but the cotton? Another mistery is the exaggerated number of pharmacies. In a small town with very small population we counted five, almost one next to the other.

Macedonia: after the break of “normality” in the north of Greece, close anyway to the Europe I’m familiar with, the trolling took off in Macedonia. It’s here that I’ve seen some of the weirdest scenes of the Balkans.

The absurd way of routing the electric wires to the buildings, of which I already had a taste in Albania anyway: large tangles of wires hanging on top of the poles, from which webs depart in all directions. I wonder: if there is a damage at one of the wires, how does the repairman find it in that mess? Again I’ve seen many unfinished and unused buildings (but not as many as in Albania) and an architecture with a style “slightly” inhomogeneous.

One bizarre thing is that several times I observed people trying to find what were the typical traits of people from Macedonia, and I didn’t succeed at all. In Albania, for example, I had found a certain recurrent scheme in the facial structures. In Macedonia instead I’ve been to a couple of cities where, no matter how hard I tried, there was no way, until I surrendered to the evidence: everybody seemed to be completely different from everybody.

In Macedonia I’ve seen one of the highest levels of obliviousness regarding aesthetics (the historical visit to an art gallery containing “artistic” posters that I commented -even if with arrogance- of being able to scribble with a pen myself, maybe while I’m chatting on the phone) and regarding the “concept” of food. The quality of fruits and vegetables seemed ok to me, the problem was to find protein: lack of fresh fish everywhere (anyway forgivable for a inland country) and especially good quality meat (there’s a lot of processed meat and predominantly pork). I’ve never noticed organic food in the supermarkets I’ve been to.

Serbia: I’ve seen very little of Serbia, we just did a raid of few hours with the car, in the south, passing some tiny villages on the road and until we reached Vranje, a town that has very vaguely the appearance of a town on the mountains of north Italy. I haven’t seen enough anyway to notice particular differences from the other countries of the Balkans nearby.

Kosovo: we entered from the south of the country and drove along all the big road that leads to the capital, Pristina. Initially Kosovo fooled us with a landscape full of green and nature, but the scenery changed quickly: the sides of the road gradually started to become crowded with large shops: car dealers, distributors of construction materials, restaurants. An uninterrupted chain of businesses, until the capital, that definitely slows down traffic. All these shops anyway gave me the idea that they had absolutely no customers, and yet they were there: open.

The scene repeated in the city, at Pristina, an impressive quantity of shops of every type, from beauty centers to electronic stores, that seemed open and most of them without customers. I couldn’t understand why they opened those stores and how they were carrying on.

Pristina itself has a wild architecture: skyscrapers mixed with mosques mixed with cement barracks. Here too the tangles of electric wires camp everywhere. It was interesting to discover that the center is patroled by american soldiers, most of them twenty years old unaware guys and with the attitude “we’re saving the world”. Actually, from the little I know about the history of the country, I deduce that they’re kept there walking aroung by America as a warning, after Kosovo has been taken away from Serbia.

To notice, again about businesses, a particular obsession for car washes, seen everywhere, even in the most lonely countryside, but many abandoned long time ago. Also in Kosovo I’ve seen many unfinished and unused buildings. Food situation similar to Macedonia: fruits and vegetables ok and cheap, but a lot of processed food, zero fresh fish and meat mostly industrial. General level of trolling, anyway: extremely high.

Montenegro: according to the statistics the people of Montenegro are among the tallest in the world. Interestingly, as soon as we arrived in the first town in the more internal and mountainous area, we found that everybody did seem taller. We had a confirmation of it even later, looking around in the capital (Podgorica) and on the coast: for some reason montenegrin people are definitely tall.

After the extreme trolling we had by Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo, the feeling I had entering Montenegro has been of a -partial- return to normality. Even if actually I could have suspected it from the name, or do a minimum of research before, I found that Montenegro is almost entirely mountainous, and mountains that are very high. It’s already on the mountains that the quality of the food took a little step forward: in the supermarkets healthy products started to appear, until we reached the coast where finally also some fresh fish appeared (even if less frequently and less cheap that I was hoping).

There are beautiful places on the coast, obviously not those already spoiled by mass tourism like Kotor and Budva, but in general they gave me the impression of lacking character and being a bit “off”. Montenegro is another of those places that transmitted to me a general vibration of sleepiness.

Bosnia-Herzegovina: also in this country we just did a raid in the car of few hours. The area we drove through is one of those that particularly made me have the thought “look how much free land”. I’ve seen entire plateaus without the minimum trace of human presence.

Outside the towns, once again, I noticed the almost total absence of agricolture and animal farming. In the few fields that were farmed I’ve seen basically just tobacco, that I had noticed also in Greece.

Croatia: Croatia became a very popular touristic destination approximately twenty years ago, as it was cheap and with a beautiful sea. The impression I had from this trip is that the situation has changed a bit: the coast is still beautiful, but I fear that tourism eroded the charm of several places.

It’s in Dubrovnik, despite the gorgeous view that I took in my video, that I’ve seen the final phase, and the most extreme, of the effects of mass tourism: rows of clubs, restaurants “for tourists”, souvenir shops, and sleepwalker tourists wandering in the middle. Very far from my desire of seeing authentic places, but definitely interesting from an “anthropological” point of view, as commented by one of my friends.

From the few days I’ve spent there during this trip, Croatia transmitted to me a vibration similar to the one of Montenegro: beautiful, very beautiful in some places, but skimmed of the touristic buzz a little bit off, and lacking charisma.


Notes: I learned that the puppets hanging from the balconies of Albania are “dordolec” (scarecrows), that according to the popular belief protect the house, the family and the animals from evil eye and envy. -Article originally published in italian on October 31, 2016, this is its translation to english.-

Thoughts

I find that vicarious is a very interesting word, especially because it describes the behavior of a huge number of people.

Living life vicariously means living it not in person, directly, but in a participatory way: through someone else. To the life experiences of this “someone else” the vicarious participates by staying few steps behind -at safety distance- but still close enough to be able to observe his adventures.

A very widespread example are the parents who live life vicariously through their children. It’s very easy to identify them on the social networks because often as profile picture they use -instead of a picture of themselves- a picture of themselves with their children, or worse, of their children only. They don’t see themselves as separate entities anymore: they identify completely with the children. If in a conversation you ask them “how are you doing” or “is there anything new”, they rapidly switch to telling you how their children are doing, or what their children are doing. The joys, the worries, the more meaningful experiences of life are about the children, from whom all the satisfactions and the unsatisfactions are derived.

This behavior of transferring every project on the children as soon as they are born, and at the same time ceasing to try to realize any own project, is so widespread that it’s almost considered “normal”. But unfortunately this concept of parenting, as parasitizing the life of children, is the perfect recipe for unhappiness: both of the children and of the parents.

A second example of vicarious behavior which is extremely relevant are those who watch a lot of movies and tv series. Creating interesting situations in real life often requires a certain amount of work, so they prefer to feel the excitement of a treasure hunt from the comfort of a movie theater, or participate to the flirt between two attractive actors from the sofa at home, maybe without having to care too much about staying in shape.

The approach and the motivation are exactly the same of the previous case: the vicarious parents send the children ahead so then they can be spectators, in this case the actors are sent ahead and of these, even more properly, people become spectators.


It took me awhile to have clear why many people who are into personal development -both the “gurus” and the “practitioners”- don not convince me, and this despite the ideas that they discuss often are actually very valuable.

The reason is that in my view they focus too much on the methods, for example “how to stay in shape” or “how to generate passive income”, so much that they lose sight that these methods are only useful to create the means to reach a goal, but they’re not the goal themselves.

While many enthusiasts of personal development focus for ever on how to stay in shape, how to reach financial freedom, how to develop creativity, there are people that already apply in “autopilot” the methods for staying in shape, having financial freedom, developing creativity, without talking too much about it or almost without even remembering that they do, but then they also take the next step: they use the staying in shape, the financial freedom and the creativity to produce things in the job they do.

For example, browsing the Wikipedia page of many successful people, actors, athletes, musicians, entrepreneurs, often there is some recurrent information that comes out: they pay a lot of attention to the diet, they exercise regularly, they do yoga or meditation, they don’t spend 40 hours in an office for a salary but instead, even if they work in particular sectors (for example the actors), often they have entrepreneurial activities “beside”, and so on.

And yet in the interviews they rarely waste too much time discussing these practices, for them they only represent necessary routines, that they do to put themselves in the conditions to do a good job -in whatever sector they work-.

This to say that even if I appreciate a lot the attitude and the ideas of many people in the sector of personal development, more and more often I tend to take as reference not them, but directly those successful people who already channel the results of their personal development work in the job. So, not the guru who is expert of staying in shape, as much as the athlete who uses his shape in the sport. Not the guru who “talks” about creativity, as much as the director who puts the creativity in his movies. And so on.


I noticed that for many adult people learning insistently new things, without a precise project, represents an escape from doing.

I realized it for the first time at the end of the university, noticing among the other students -who like me just got their degree- the tendency to insist, of wanting to study more. PHD, MBA, various specialization courses. Some were even starting all over again, to take a second university degree. It seemed to me that only few of those guys were doing that following a precise strategy, to become academic teachers. The others simply seemed to want to maintain the status of “students” as long as possible, to delay the moment of doing.

Many years have passed, but I still see this tendency of wanting to stay “students” among many adults: same age as me (35), but even adults well over 40 and 50.

A very common case that I notice today, for example, is learning a foreign language. Several friends and acquaintances come to my mind who, in this period, are learning languages like french, spanish, chinese, german. Almost none of them has a concrete project related to that: “I study french because I want to export products in France”, but has the vague motivation “it’s a good additional knowledge” and “you never know it could be useful someday”.

This phylosophy doesn’t make any sense to me -since to study you spend resources (time and effort) why spending them on something that probably will never have practical effects on life?- but even more importantly it seems suspicious: I think that often people use the learning insistently new things, when adult, as an excuse to tell themselves that they’re making progress in life… while they’re actually stuck at the same place. Learning is an easy escape, because it’s an activity that has good reputation in the society, and it’s generally seen as important and commendable.

I think that there comes a moment in life, when we become adult, when it’s time to “reverse the flow”: to stop to focus on absorbing constantly new notions, decide what we want to do in life, and do it.

Doing it often means very different things that just having fun learning notions. It means to put in practice what we already know. It means finding the courage to leave the job we hate to start doing the other job we know is the right one. For a writer it can mean the discipline of staying every day at the computer writing for some hours, without being distracted by social networks. For an athlete it can mean the discipline of training in the gym every day, and repeat every day the choice of giving up the processed food in favor of the healthy food.

In fact maybe these are the only two things, that we should really learn when adult: courage and discipline.


It took me a long time to understand what meditation consist of, but finally I think I got it.

Actually I think that on this topic there is a lot of confusion, so many people “think” that they’re meditating, while they’re actually doing something else. After having made several unsuccessful attempts in the past myself, today I think I’ve understood enough to be able to provide my interpretation.

Meditating means being here and now, a concept that is rather famous today. The problem with the here and now is that it’s a damn difficult status to sustain. I used to see it in my attempts of meditation in the past. I used to free my mind from useless thoughts and finally I would start to absorb the reality around: the green of the plants, the buzz of the insect flying behind me, the noise of a distant car. But time few seconds and I was lost in thoughts again: what do I eat later for dinner? …tomorrow I have to write to the accountant… And so on.

Each time, when I returned to here and now realizing that I just got lost in my thoughts, I would take it as a defeat, and I would give up for the frustration. Until I realized that, instead, this is exactly the practical mechanism of meditation.

Getting lost in thoughts is inevitable for an untrained mind. And the mind is always at work projecting useless thoughts: ruminations of past events, anticipations of future events, putting labels to everything we see.

But the real game is, once we get lost in these thoughts, to awaken and return here and now. Get lost and return here and now. Get lost and return here and now. Get lost and return here and now. Many times, in a similar way to when we train our muscles at the gym. I heard the journalist Dan Harris make this comparison, and it seemed very appropriate to me.

At the gym we train the muscles, by doing several repetitions lifting weights. In meditation we train the mind, returning several times here and now after we get lost in thoughts. Today I see meditation this way, and this is how I practice it, with the same spirit I adopt when I go to the gym.


Again about the mind, some time ago I was discussing “spiritual” topics with a friend, and I asked him the following question: what do you think is the difference between consciousness and mind?

Even if in that period I was starting to be rather familiar with the two concepts, I had the tendency to confuse them, that’s why I asked his opinion. His answer was simple: he said that in his view the mind is a creation of consciousness. I reflected on these words several times later, and yes, now it seems obvious to me that this is exactly the difference.

So according to this view, consciousness is a “greater” concept and the mind a “smaller” concept. Consciousness created the mind as a tool and gave it us to use it, similarly to the physical body, but with the difference that the mind is impalpable.

Even if for many this revelation may be a banality, I think that for me it’s been very useful to see this triangular structure: cosciousness above, body and mind below as tools to be used.

It’s very useful especially in relation with the mind, since I’ve often forgot its presence in the past (and I still forget): for the fact that it’s impalpable, for the type of education I received, and for the type of society I live in.

Remembering that the mind is there made me want to study it and search for information about it, and this helped me reach interesting concepts, for example the idea that not only an individual mind exists, but also a collective mind. On a more practical level instead it made me want to train it, from here the interest in meditation.

Needless to say, after a certain amount of training, today my mind is still a mess (I suspect that it’s a mess for many people however), but I am confident that it will also get some abs sooner or later.


Notes: The book to read to understand the concept of here and now is The power of now by Eckhart Tolle. This article was originally published on July 7, 2016 in italian, this is its translation in english.