The vile excuse of age

Metropolitan areas are tailored for young people, especially after a certain hour. And it's only right that it should be so. Tendentially, however, not inexorably.
I see a problem in all this: those who are of a certain age interpret this trend as if it were a ban, a prohibition to participate in the city's social life, especially nightlife. This is also true for those who, while no longer young, are not even too old and still have the psycho-emotional need—and the human right—to enjoy social activities of any kind. Not just those among the usual four couples of friends in the living room or tavern. I'm talking precisely about throwing oneself into the mix, among strangers, music, colors.
To justify themselves they make up excuses, deceiving themselves more than the person they're talking to: I'm old, I'm tired, I'm not interested in music, I can't handle alcohol anymore. Then, however, they risk a heart attack running or cycling on the hills on Sunday morning, polish off bottles of wine and whisky all by themselves and abandon themselves, drunk, to melancholic thoughts in front of the fireplace, listening to Albano, Ricchi e Poveri, and Pooh, sniffling out of despair rather than emotion.
I don't give a damn. I know the city is made for young people. But the ID card, by law, is checked for minors to keep them from drinking, not for fifty-year-olds to send them home. If it's not forbidden, I exercise my right to participate. Not always, but not too rarely. For heaven's sake, I don't crash university parties like I did thirty years ago. I select places, venues, and circumstances, and if they pass the test I dive right in.
Sometimes it seems like everything and everyone is inviting you to go back home, you pathetic piece-of-shit old man. It's a feeling: it's our damned, dysfunctional, and misplaced sense of inadequacy speaking. You just have to silence it. If someone really looks at you that way: move on, the asshole is them.
Hold on, don't give up. Sometimes, at a certain point, something happens, maybe a small thing, but one that hasn't happened in a long time. Then you realize that the boy you once were, you still are to this day. When you get back home you find yourself ecstatic: "So it can still happen!". In front of the fireplace you pop open a cold beer, the last one, the umpteenth. You blast Moby or Daft Punk at full volume. And the ones that lightly salt your beer are tears of joy.
As I already said, I don't give a damn and I keep at it. If no place inspires me, worst-case scenario I take a nice walk: Italian cities, at night, without dazed tourists or busy residents, are even more beautiful. I'll stay home when my brain or body is mush. When to stay stuck in bed or in an armchair I won't need any vile excuses anymore.

P.S. In Bangkok, it must be said, it's easier than in Padua.

The solution to an idiosyncrasy

My optimal working condition is characterized mainly by three attributes: autonomy, asynchrony, and atopy. The "three a's". That is to say: independence from the apparatus, from simultaneity, and from localization.
This does not mean that the possibility of working with other people, sharing the same place, or communicating live is strictly excluded. It means that this is only done when it is constructive, natural, logical. Not out of habit, convention, or regulation.
There will certainly be exceptions, especially in smaller entities, but normally corporate organizations of a certain size and complexity involve social dynamics that I find extremely toxic.
What weighs on me the most in those environments is the feeling of being forced to repress certain impulses — natural and normal elsewhere — to conform to an environment that, for reasons of coexistence, convenience, and connivance, becomes artificial, synthetic, and fake. A stage upon which individuals must avoid letting traits of their personality that make them unique show through, slipping into a character uniform that constrains and homogenizes the spirit even more than the tailored one they wear does to the body.
I am not able to lightly handle this split personality demanded almost by contract. There is a primordial and irrepressible force inside me that screams to warn me that all this is not right, that I AM normal in my uniqueness, that there is nothing wrong with expressing it, and that indeed suffocating it is wrong and can even cause pathological drifts.
While not being asocial or misanthropic, I am certainly well-equipped to (r)esist for a long time in a solitary and self-sufficient manner. And to draw advantage from it as well. This is why the "three a's" working mode is the optimal solution to my idiosyncrasy toward structured professional organizations.

On the edge of the cliff

Sometimes I feel like I'm balancing precariously on the edge of a cliff. Beyond the edge lies the dark abyss of absolute despair.
For years I believed — and I realize only now the incredible, optimistic naivety that drove me — that people, despite making mistakes, were still capable, through personal analysis or guided by someone else, of correcting their course.
I must resign myself to this. A huge part of the population — certainly Italian, but probably not only — and perhaps even a preponderant part of it, despite being forced every day in private life to wade through the muddy swamp of a reality that is evidently, unmistakably, and indisputably complex, as soon as it steps up a level - on political, social, or even scientific issues - terrified by prospects that necessarily include the acceptance of chaos, uncertainty, and sometimes even chance, plug their ears, close their eyes, switch off the prefrontal cortex of their brain, and abandon themselves to the usual ridiculous, infantile, absurd Manichaean explanations artfully fed to them. They thus polarize into two opposing factions, playing right into the hands of those who manipulate them through the ancient technique of divide and conquer.
This dynamic had become clear to me some time ago. It was a bad blow, I admit, but it didn't make me lose faith in my fellow human beings. In fact, I thought that through outreach and evangelization, lost souls could be brought back to the right path. Excuse the apparent messianic delirium, but the stronger metaphors are, and the more closely they adhere to an individual's cultural roots, the more effective they turn out to be (and maybe I'm kidding myself again).
Unfortunately, this was a perspective characterized by an optimism comparable to that of the happy ending of a third-rate romantic flick.
Not only does public outreach make no impression on the minds of the polarized puppets. It even attracts their (obviously crude) irony, their indignation, and, if you persist, even their anger. When you raise doubts about someone's position on any side of any polarized issue — a fan of the Israelis as well as the Palestinians, of Russia or Ukraine, of Iran or the USA, a conspiracy theorist or an "establishment" supporter — it doesn't even cross their mind that you are referring to a factor of the dispute that only makes sense by taking a certain level of complexity for granted. No, the simple-minded, polarized fan takes it for granted that only the imbecilic binary interpretation is allowed, and therefore immediately thinks that you are AGAINST them and therefore WITH their enemies. When, after an exhausting and very long process of clarification, you have managed to make them understand that you are not a fanatical supporter (like them) but are simply dedicated to understanding the situation in its complexity, and are therefore disinterested in the simplifying idiocy of that very polarization, they react as if you were telling a joke, hence with humor.
If you persist, and they realize that you seriously accept neither their absurd partisan stance nor the equally absurd opposing stance, they start to get indignant, and accuse you of ethically unacceptable behavior. Their distorted vision of reality does not in fact contemplate chaotic and inevitably hybrid situations, and therefore does not admit disinterest in one of the two factions and interest in the simple issue at hand. Paradoxically, they would be more satisfied if you were on the other side of the barricade. The fact that you refuse the very erection of the barricade is incomprehensible to them. You are a coward, a deserter. They forget, however, that the war you are deserting from is one they invented.
If you still don't give up, indignation sometimes even turns into anger.
This type of attitude, which I believed was the prerogative of a minority of wild zealots, instead finds room even among the ranks of the calm and silent majority.
It is a tragic, discouraging, and shocking twist in the social reality in which we live today.
Just when science and technology are putting tools in our hands that could be used to achieve that better world we've dreamed of for years, these people decide to create perhaps irremediable rifts within the very social structure in which they live and upon which they depend. A senseless attempt at a slow (and perhaps not even all that slow) collective suicide. Pure madness.

Managing chaos: antisemitism and anti-islamism

We are currently at the peak of yet another wave rippling that historical sea of accusations of anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism that Europeans have been hurling at or deflecting from each other for centuries with extreme virulence and outrage. But so, who is right?
As usual, I suggest not relying on macro-categories, which are as arbitrary as they are disconnected from reality. Let's leave binary interpretations like good-bad, good guys-bad guys, right-wrong to cartoons. And if you use childish reasoning of that sort, go right back to watching cartoons: there's nothing wrong with that, as long as, like good children, you don't play with serious things because then it messes things up. Socio-political issues — especially delicate ones of the type in question — are made for those who know how to accept and manage chaos, complexity, and randomness. For the others, there are sporting events, traditional recipes, or reality and talent shows.
So, let's stick to a serious approach and judge case by case. Here is the guideline I suggest applying to every single instance.
Accusing Israel, Israeli civilians or military personnel, or in any case individuals of the Jewish faith, for having unequivocally committed specific criminal or even ethically despicable acts — such as hitting innocent children or occupying other people's property — is, in my opinion, NOT anti-Semitism. Just as accusing Muslims for heinous acts of terrorism or for not respecting and perhaps outraging the customs and values of the countries hosting them CANNOT be considered anti-Islamism.
This is for the "no" part. Now let's come to the more sensitive part: the "yes" one.
Attributing responsibility for any geopolitical event to alleged Jewish cabals, Jewish lobbies, international Zionist networks, or Mossad operations, on a hunch, without proof — because come on, they're surely always behind it — this, besides constituting slander, IS, as far as I'm concerned, anti-Semitism. Of the same kind used a few decades ago to spark pogroms or justify exterminations.
In the same way, leveling vague and generalized accusations of barbarism, bigotry, and backwardness at the Islamic world — because come on, it's obvious, just look at them — IS, in my opinion, anti-Islamism. Of the same kind used in the past to ban crusades or witch hunts.
Personally, I stick to the first scenarios. And there are plenty of unequivocally criminal or ethically despicable acts for which to condemn one side or the other.
The scenarios of the second type, on the other hand, seem to me not only squalid, but also quite irresponsible.