Two years ago I realised for the first time that I end up making the “right” moves in life, but often I make those changes later than the average of my peers.

Owning a house, investing money, getting married, having kids… It's not that I fail at those projects, or shun those life decisions: it's just that sometimes I get to those places a few years later than would be desirable — judging with the benefit (and the bias) of hindsight.

That was stating the obvious, I guess. Of course you want to start earning money earlier rather than later. Of course you want to travel soon, so that you'll have more time to visit more places in your life. You'll probably end up marrying and having kids (like most people do), so why postpone it unnecessarily? And yet, for me, strangely, that was a novel realisation.

Armed with that silly “insight”, in 2023 I noted that

“now that I've spotted a trend in my life trajectory, it should be ‘easy’ for me to course-correct. […] That means making an effort to identify the next life goals, and acting quicker to get there. And so I have been wondering:
What are people my age starting to do now?
What will they be doing in a few years' time?”

Thinkers​

I asked Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Grok:

“What are the ten most influential thinkers in human history? What ten individuals made the most important contributions to philosophy? They should all be real people who actually existed, about whom we have enough information, who were original in their ideas, and who continue to be discussed and appreciated. Consider philosophers, theologians, social scientists, authors, and any other kind of intellectual.”

Results:

• Five mentions: Aristotle, Confucius, Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx.
• Four mentions: Plato.
• Three mentions: René Descartes and Jesus.
• Two mentions: Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo, Avicenna, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche and Socrates.
• One mention (discarded): Buddha, Laozi, John Locke, Muhammad, John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft.

(← See the third week)

⭐⭐ for the entire work; ie, the seven volumes.

I've written about In Search of Lost Time before (book #1, book #2, book #3, book #5), so I won't elaborate here. Some of those volumes I liked (#5 and #6) while others I found quite boring (#3 and this last one, #7).

It has been quite a journey of five and a half years for me, and one that I'm glad I made. I don't think I'll ever read another ~4,000 page-long novel with so many highs and lows, so many characters, and sentences so long and convoluted. OK, Proust: you're a genius. I'll give you that. Not sure if you could have made a better investment of your talent and the last years of your comfy life, though. And I'm uneasy about your moral compass and your values, to be honest (yes, I know it's fiction and that was not your life — wink, wink).

(← See the second week)

(← Start on the first week)

Like every month of April since 2008, I'm taking one photo a day to document my routines and the state of my world for my future self (and for some friends and family).

There's no particular theme or prompt in 2025 — in the last years I consider it a success if it doesn't get to midnight and I have forgotten to take at least one picture.

So, here goes my first week:

This:

“Toxic masculinity is a contradiction in terms, it's a non sequitur. In order for a thing called ‘toxic masculinity’ to exist you'd have to have a thing called ‘positive masculinity’, and you'd also have to have toxic femininity, and positive femininity.
There is no reality in which positive masculinity isn't synonymous with femininity, because a trait cannot be gendered equally masculine and feminine at the same time, or it ceases to be gendered at all. That's the entire point of a dichotomy: it's one or the other.
If a trait signifies masculinity, it cannot simultaneously and to an equal extent signify femininity. Aggression is not good or bad — it's good or bad depending on the circumstances. Nor should it be good or bad depending on the genitalia of the person exhibiting it.”

It's strange that someone who loves books as much as I do reads only 7–15 books a year. There are two reasons for that.

The first reason won't surprise you: like virtually everybody else in the world, my attention span and my ability to focus on reading have diminished in the last two decades or so, as a side-effect of constant screen exposure. I'm not too concerned about this, though, because at least I keep on reading. Not only that: about half of my reads are difficult, stuffy, old books — and often on paper, where there are few distractions available. (In contrast, many people nowadays seem to read non-fiction only, or contemporary literature only. Some of my fellow nerds read mostly — or only — technical books, articles, or blog posts. And there are even people who seem unable to read text for more than two minutes unless it's displayed on a bright, colourful piece of glass.) But even I don't seem to be able to read for hours on end like I used to in my youth. On my ~2h30′ flights to and from Frankfurt, I usually read most of the time, but not all the time. I manage to read for around one and a half hours or so, and then get distracted by my phone — like everybody around me.

Inspired by my friend Fidel, I'm publicly sharing some of my resolutions for the new year.

This (turn of the) year I have not thought much about this nor made an actual list, unlike some other years. But certainly there are a few concrete goals in my head, some of which I already mentioned on my recap of 2024.

Here go some of the goals I can divulge, hoping to put some social pressure on myself.