The Inner Margins is a series of brief reflections on random subjects. I am sometimes more in the mood of sharing compressed thoughts rather than long essays.

The title comes from the inner margins of a book: the white space near the spine, where readers leave their notes. Those spaces seem secondary, but they often hold your learnings.

The salt of life does not hide in the grand narrative, but at its edges, in the empty spaces where understanding is incomplete. What I share here belongs to that space: passing thoughts that may turn out to matter more than they first appear.

As one grows older, some new emotions kick in. We become more mature and some of our flaws sharpen. Some fears reappear, some others disappear.

Maturity is not always a blessing, even though it can be beneficial to be relatively immature about certain things, especially concerning creation. There is some beautiful naïveté and ingenuity about the way we approach life when we are younger. Unfortunately, for some people, that feeling of innocence ends abruptly. For others, it never disappears. I believe we must never let that feeling fade away completely.

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As we grow older, an ineffable feeling appears. One of them is the awareness of last times. The last time you see someone, the last time you feel something, the last time you visit some place, the last time a given opportunity presents itself.

I do not think we grow more conscious about last times because they happen more. I mean, consider the last time we were at school, the last time we were at University, or the last time we saw some long-lost friends. Those are all things that happened when we were quite young, even a kid. But at that time, one is not really aware. I believe that, when older, one is more conscious (or maybe not1) about the last times, and there are more last times every time.

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Thinking about this, I realized that English language, and many others such as French, Spanish, or Arabic, do not really offer a word for the last occurrence of something.

Not even Greek, whose vocabulary of time is richer than most, gives us exactly what we need. It has kairos, the right or critical moment (and, with entropy, one of my favorite concepts2), and telos, the end, purpose, or completion, but neither names the unnoticed final instance of a thing. Arabic perhaps comes closer with zawal, which evokes decline, the moment the sun begins to descend, and by extension something slowly, irreversibly fading away.

The closest word I found may be in Tamazight, the family of Berber languages of Northern Africa: aneggaru, the last in a sequence, the final thing, the last time something happens3.

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Some last times are voluntary, like when you quit a job or cut someone out of your life. For others, we have less control, such as when a place we love closes, or, of course, when a loved one dies. Sometimes, even when we act with agency, it’s difficult to grasp the significance of the last moment.

I often find myself thinking about the last time I saw someone and wondering if I will ever see them again. In some cases, I feel sad. Most of the time, I feel slightly uncomfortable—perhaps because, as we grow older, time gains more weight with every second, and each final occurrence carries greater significance. In some other cases, I feel more — even though not completely — at peace, because this person brought nothing to my short existence. Or because destiny was made this way, that our paths will never cross each other again.

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In all cases, last times expose the transient nature of human life. We appear briefly, share fragments of time with others, and then vanish. It is not enough to live with the knowledge of our own imminent death. One must understand that each moment is both the first and the last time life will ever occur in this form.

This awareness should influence our behaviours, and lead us to practice various things. The obvious one is kindness, because a single act of meanness may become the final version of how someone experienced you4. Genuineness, because no moment repeats, and to live it under terms that are not yours is to waste it entirely. Courage, because the last chance to act often passes unnoticed, and regret fixes itself precisely where action did not. Gratitude, because every moment is complete in itself, and only our failure to recognize it turns it into regrets once it is gone.

The awareness of last times, and the need for gratitude, should guide ungrateful people: those who destroy what they already have in pursuit of hypothetical things they do not, only to destroy those too once they finally get them. That being said, ungratefulness toward life can take various forms.

For example, it also applies to people who place negative emotion above reality in every experience. If anxiety appears in the middle of a good opportunity, they surrender the whole experience to anxiety. If insecurity rises in the face of love or intimacy, they crush and annihilate the opportunity to live it5. If growth requires stress, they choose stagnation instead. Then, in all those cases, they commit one final and perhaps most unpardonable form of ingratitude: they refuse to learn the lesson life offered them through the very chance to fail and instead choose to blame someone else, the world, or any culprit they can find. Ungratefulness first, ungratefulness then.

At bottom, this is ingratitude: toward fate, toward life, toward destiny, and toward the finite nature of what is given to us here, now, and perhaps for the last time.

We all run out of time sooner than we expect. Act accordingly.

The Inner Margins is a series of brief reflections on random subjects. I am sometimes more in the mood of sharing compressed thoughts rather than long essays.

The title comes from the inner margins of a book: the white space near the spine, where readers leave their notes. Those spaces seem secondary, but they often hold what lingers longest : your learnings.

Life itself is shaped there. Not only in the grand narrative, but at its edges, in the empty spaces where understanding is still incomplete. What I share here belongs to that space: passing thoughts that may turn out to matter more than they first appear.

You should pray for the selfish. They will never experience the true pleasure of giving, the fulfilment in loving and the beauty of caring.

I increasingly feel the world is divided, for any given situation at any given moment, between takers and givers. All takers and drainers are selfish, not all selfish are takers. Some selfish are not shameless, hence not ruthless takers. Not all selfish people are bad people.

Pray for selfish takers as they don’t even realize the power of giving what you want to receive, of inspiring what you want others to be. They sit and whine, judge and despise. Being grateful and forgiving is not part of their software. Givers take heavier blows but live with lighter hearts over the long term. Time is their friend.

Stubbornness makes a good lawyer, but a terrible judge.

Shame is a social protector. I come from a rather inhibited society where people easily feel shame. I used to despise that and consider it a barrier to empowerment. It is negative in many cases. But shame—feeling ashamed, having a sense of what makes you feel proud or ashamed—is a social protector and the best tool you have to achieve self-awareness. Shameless people keep hitting the same walls because life did not give them this radar.

Shame is only crucial in emotional matters, where one can hurt people. In professional contexts, ethics replace it. In creative endeavours, it is destructive and inhibits the process.

Shamelessness and entitlement stem from selfishness and a lack of empathy. Some people view their actions solely through the lens of immediate and unconditional fulfilment of their selfish desires, without considering others, the rules that apply to everyone, or basic decency.

I said it in another articles, but I read it again in Kevin Kelly’s tips for life : “Be strict with yourself, forgiving of others. The reverse is hell for everyone.” I think I underestimated this until now.

Shameless people happily impose onto others constraints they would never consider for themselves. Worst, they often don’t even realize it and see no issues in this structural asymmetry. The best friend of those people are narratives, their worst enemy is time. As time passes, they don’t even remember the thousands of occurrences when they failed to apply even a tenth of the rigid constraints they impose on others. This applies well to politicians, but not only them.

Time is their worst enemy because it exposes their actions. Shameless people never consider their past offences. Typically, they complain about something when they have done ten times. They impose their ruthless will on those they once promised to treat with kindness and generosity. Again, politicians and shamelessness go hand in hand, but it is also present at the individual level.

Treat yourself as an option, and you will end up like one.

The human mind is not a car engine that can be repaired in isolation. We are social animals, and much of our health depends on how we relate to others. The older I get, the more I believe that one secret of a good life is to give, to love, to care, and to act as selflessly as possible, with the faith that life returns something to those who live this way. Obviously, no one can do that flawlessly.

The mind resembles a plant more than a machine. A plant does not flourish alone: it depends on bees, on exchange, on a world outside itself. It must give something in order to keep living. A plant that destroys the bees that sustain it cannot survive for long. Human beings are not so different. We need to give, and I don’t think we should regret giving to the wrong people. It is their loss, even though they often see themselves as the only prize.

The best relationships are built on reciprocity of concern. Each side places the other’s well-being above themselves. A good state should care more for the good of its citizens than for its own prestige, and good citizens should care for the common good more than for selfish desires. One lover should think first of the other’s happiness, and the other should do the same. A son should care for his parents’ happiness, and loving parents should care for his. Not everyone understands this, because not everyone is capable of seeing that a life organized entirely around the self slowly poisons the conditions that make life worth living.

The Inner Margins is a series of brief reflections on scattered subjects. I am sometimes in the mood of sharing compressed thoughts rather than long essays.

The title comes from the inner margins of a book: the white space near the spine, where readers leave their notes. Those spaces seem secondary, but they often hold what lingers longest : your learnings.

Life itself is shaped there. Not only in the grand narrative, but at its edges, in the empty spaces where understanding is still incomplete. What I share here belongs to that space: passing thoughts that may turn out to matter more than they first appear.

For specific reasons, I am in the mood of publishing small thoughts.

There are moments in life where reflections don’t fill a particular blind spot, but rather multiple little small scattered empty holes. Those are moments where one’s experience offer small learnings, about various topics.

Learning from experience is non linear, you learn nothing, and operate in a vacuum, then something happens and exposes your ignorance. When that happens, you have the choice to ignore, and keep being stubborn, or to learn, and actually change your behavior.

Learning has nothing to do with raw information. One can know all the best food recipes without being able to cook a fried egg. The real life is about execution rather than lectures. About practice, rather than academic knowledge. About actions, rather than promises. About real life, rather than fantasy land.

We live in an era where, unfortunately, society values lecturing and pretending more than execution. The effect is even more perverse, many people construct their entire lives around the illusion of various type of knowledge. The illusion of what they think they know. The illusion of what they think they are. The illusion of what they think other people are. Generally speaking, the illusion of what they think it’s true. Entire society collapse because of those illusions.

Anyway, here are some thoughts, in the forms of wanna-be aphorisms. They are not sufficiently refined nor astute to be considered pure aphorisms, but you got the idea.

Human character is not an inventory of traits. Some attributes are foundational, others expressive. What matters most in a person is not the long list of qualities they claim, but the few governing principles from which the rest of their conduct flows. A few lines define the whole shape.

I am not totally sure of what are the foundational attributes but love, courage, sincerity, selflessness, humility and ethical seriousness seem closer to the root. From them arise loyalty, fairness, generosity, and steadiness. The reverse is also true: when vanity, cowardice, or selfishness sit at the center, the visible eventually reflects them. Entitlement is not foundational, for example. It comes from utter selfishness and lack of humility. Ruthlessness is not foundational either.

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Everyone is manipulative to some extent. A good leader, a skilled therapist, or a caring parent all try to direct how another person sees, feels, or acts. The difference is not the existence of manipulation, but its purpose and its moral limits. We usually reserve the word manipulation for cases where psychological knowledge is used exploitatively. The problem is not understanding people’s weaknesses and fears. The problem arise when using that understanding to dominate, diminish, or serve oneself at their expense.

We tend to distinguish between influential, inspiring people and manipulative ones. But both dynamics mirror each other. In both cases, the person acting upon the other knows enough about that person’s weaknesses or strengths, fears or inspirations, and about the environment around them. Yet in one case, this knowledge is used to give, and in the other it is used to take.

Just as in war you judge an army’s ethics by how it treats the weak — civilians, women, children — in human relationships you judge people by how they handle the other person’s taboo, fragility, or vulnerability. That is where character shows itself.

Do they use your strengths and virtues to cast enough light on you that your weak spots lose their power? Or do they use your weak spots to cast so much shadow that you become unable to see your own virtues?

Kind people build on even the smallest solid brick, meaning they will light what is beautiful and build around that. Shameless ones can erode even the strongest foundation until all focus is directed toward the most shameful brick.

Selflessness matters because goodness is corrupted the moment action is a mean to an external end or as an inward gratification. A truly good act cannot have the self as its terminal goal. This is the beautiful difference between telic, and autotelic.

Typically, when trying to help someone, some people will use a private set of information to give encouragement and empower. Others will use it to drain your energy and ruin your self-esteem. The first is selfless. The other is deeply selfish. One requires giving energy and confidence to the other. The other steals energy and destroys self-worth.

Hence, if we judge by foundational attributes rather than outward expression, a manipulative person is inherently selfish and indifferent to the other’s well-being, whereas an influential or inspiring one is kindhearted and selfless. The root process governs it all. Manipulative, non-empathetic people can only imitate the latter for so long, because their lack of care eventually reveals itself, no matter what narrative they hide behind. Things may no be so binary, obviously. I guess it depends on the context, and on the person. To some, one is careless and to others, caring.

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Time carries enormous weight in human affairs, because those who lack sincerity eventually end up bearing a gigantic burden on their shoulders. They can no longer remember their own promises, their own words, or the past comedy they staged for others. Falsehood blurs memory. Sincerity enhances it.

By saving your words for when they matter, telling the truth, and refusing to pretend or promise what you cannot truly assume, you free part of your mind. You no longer have to keep track of statements you never meant in the first place. In that sense, sincerity gives back a few precious points of cognition.

I think I said it in another article: genuineness never comes with a thousand shifting narratives, nor with endless promises. Genuine people cannot, at a fundamental level, do otherwise than keep things simple, because truth in your actions is always less complicated than fake performance.

Those for whom time is an enemy usually try, unsuccessfully, to shift its power by manipulating the narrative and starting it at the point where they still look good. But time carries the full weight of history. One cannot look only at a small window in which one’s values and principles seem untouched, while ignoring the rest of the record.

The Inner Margins is a series of brief reflections on random subjects. I am sometimes in the mood of sharing compressed thoughts rather than long essays.

The title comes from the inner margins of a book: the white space near the spine, where readers leave their notes. Those spaces seem secondary, but they often hold what lingers longest : your learnings.

Life itself is shaped there. Not only in the grand narrative, but at its edges, in the empty spaces where understanding is still incomplete. What I share here belongs to that space: passing thoughts that may turn out to matter more than they first appear.

There is time-honoured knowledge embedded in nature and in the volatility of human affairs. Except in cases that demand fairness or the defense of the vulnerable, it is usually wiser to respect the natural flow of events and their chaos. It is. counter-intuitively, compatible with high-agency.

The best opportunities are hidden in plain sight because they resemble retrospective evidence once discovered. They look obvious only after the fact. It works equally for scams and fallacious narrative, as they try and exploit retrospective evidence.

Self-obsession is destructive, especially when it comes without self-expectation or with high self-indulgence. In both cases it becomes self-distortion, and eventually reality distortion. It leads to destruction.

The focus of our attention determines the quality of our lives. Focus on self-obsession, and you construct a miserable existence.

The most important things in life require an infinite amount of gratitude to be enjoyed while they are happening, not when nostalgia turns them into melancholic memories. Otherwise, the only cherished moments belong to the past, never to the present.

Unexplained animosity or anger toward someone almost always contains an autobiographical element.

It is sad, but also relieving, to conclude that almost everything could be improved by being slightly kinder and slightly more generous toward the other.

Cheap people are cheap with everything. Not only money.

No one deserves anything. Entitlement is one of the defining diseases of humanity.

Expectations are an unhappy absorbing state. They almost inevitably lead to disappointment, because the probability that life—with its infinite texture and randomness—will align with your equally chaotic internal model is effectively zero. Freedom may lie in freedom from expectation, combined with gratitude and stoic acceptance of what the present moment brings.

Life is inherently unpredictable and dynamic. Living under the shadow of an imagined ideal scenario creates a sequence of unhappy static states, because the scenario never materializes at the precise moment you demand it, or the way you imagine it.

The best criteria are often found via negativa, in what one seeks to avoid. There are far more paths than one can ever explore, so filtration must precede exploration.

Knowing what you can control is different from attempting to control everything you know. The danger lies in the unknown unknowns.

Holding oneself accountable for everything dramatically changes the narrative of the past. It reframes events around what was actually within your control. That shift offers the best lessons that are actionable in the present and helpful for the future.