I am fully aware that my claims in this section are rather banal, but that does not mean they are necessarily useless or, worse, false. Moreover, I write this text mainly for myself and to give a mental order to my ideas.
Tomorrow, 6 April 2026, I will turn 20 years old, which means that very likely 25%1 of my life has already passed. At this exact moment, 4:02 AM, I started writing while listening to the song "The Autumn Leaves"2.
Getting back to it, this means I have roughly 3 more slots of time as long as the one that just passed left to live, and then it will all be over.
I could comfortably say (and maybe get away with it among my less argumentative friends) that in recent months I have accomplished nothing, that in my life I have never achieved anything significant and that therefore I must change, or that maybe social media has fried my brain and that is why I cannot get anything done — and many other fine things — but I am not 16 anymore. My David Goggins3 phase has unfortunately ended, or rather this mindset has lost its credibility and all the aura that surrounded it. So it would be too simplistic to say that not having studied or trained is worse than having rested or scrolled for 18 hours a day, given that potentially every action is devoid of meaning4.
At this point, perhaps, I could cite the most ancient example of nihilism: "Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas"5.
Now I have made my impression so let us go my girlfriend, anyway for an atheist like me this statement should be terrifying, but thinking it over the fact of having no purpose makes us free6 (something that actually frightens us humans — as much as we like to glorify freedom, we would find it rather convenient to have at least a boss; the search for religion is the ancestral proof of this) to choose our own, even if I know it is not the most convincing argument in the world — nice to say but not very practical. Unfortunately I am not clever enough to find a practical meaning.
I have chosen a path7 at random, the one that seemed most aligned with my inclinations and with the social conditioning that has paradoxically stuck with me in part (not a small part) and that would take too long to fight off relative to the benefit I would gain, summarised well by the concepts in "So good they can't ignore you"8. My path is to live by challenges — right now it is studying computer science at university while maintaining good health and a good appearance; in 10 years I do not know what the challenge will be. Anyway, all these words are a nice reassuring way to keep avoiding my duty and to feel at peace with myself — by showing off my erudition I can feel fine — but that is not the point. The point is to write what I did today and say how I could improve to reach my goal.
Today I did nothing to pursue my path. I think the key to understanding my string of failures is my well-established irresponsibility, which I need to address.
| Time | What happened | Solution |
|---|---|---|
| 10:00 | Woke up, picked up my phone and finished my research on the city of Sodom9 | The obvious solution is to have the discipline in the evening not to read anything unrelated to computer science. |
| 13:00 | Stopped reading because I was falling asleep | Open the shutters, and apply the solution above. It might also help to think about the day just passed before sleeping and plan the next one. |
| Time | What happened | Solution |
|---|---|---|
| 14:00 | Finished eating | // |
| 15:00 | Continued my escape from responsibility until 18:00 by reading about the lives of various saints, and a nice quote from Rousseau that went something like: "Whoever says the Gospels are lies has no idea how lies are told.", and waiting for my girlfriend to reply to my messages — it is always nice to escape together | Stop running from my duty — in the end that is all this is. Also, I must not allow myself to read in a more distracted way than I study; that is not healthy. |
| Time | What happened | Solution |
|---|---|---|
| 20:00 | Ran errands for my mother until 21:30 since she hurt herself | // |
| 22:00 | Ate, played music and talked with my girlfriend | I do not have great solutions |
The conclusion is that I need to take responsibility — as a student, as a person and as a boyfriend. I can isolate myself as much as I want, remove app stores, browsers; these are contingent solutions, but they will not work in the long run if I do not actively fix my irresponsibility using whatever willpower I have, even if it is little. If I believed in an anthropomorphic God I would hope for help, but that would conflict with living a life with a material goal — so I can essentially rely only on my own willpower, and improbably make it.
The odds that I will succeed at 20 are not high — quite the contrary — but I will try so that "Let it never be said that I gave up on a losing battle"10.
Based on an average life expectancy of around 80 years.↩︎
I had never heard it before; I knew a magnificent arrangement by Lucas Brar, which had inspired my own arrangement of "Fly Me To The Moon". It is ironic to hear a song like this, by chance, in a moment of nostalgia for time gone by — especially because I never listen to music while studying or thinking. What a coincidence.↩︎
Former Navy SEAL and American ultramarathon runner known for his extraordinary physical feats, particularly for the discipline and suffering (suffering in which Goggins finds meaning; without it he is lost) he endures to achieve them — a kind of "Marcus Aurelius" stoicism with an all-American flavour.↩︎
Look up nihilism in any dictionary; that is more than enough.↩︎
"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." The phrase with which Qoheleth concludes the 12th and final chapter of the Biblical book of Qoheleth (during a dialectical discussion typical of the Jews, millennia before that show-off Hegel decided to appropriate it). In this discussion Qoheleth concludes that everything is ultimately nothing but vanity — both good and evil — and that the only answer is paradoxically found in death. The message Qoheleth wants to convey is to trust in the eternal father, because everything material is vain.↩︎
I seem to recall reading somewhere — maybe on Reddit — that Nietzsche holds a similar view; it is consistent with what I remember of him, but I do not feel like doing thorough research so I leave that to the reader as an exercise lol.↩︎
A Kierkegaardian reference to his three stages, even though I know Kierkegaard will be turning in his grave at what I am claiming.↩︎
A good book by Cal Newport on choosing a career path.↩︎
A truly interesting story — the character of Lot in particular. If you are curious, read Wikipedia and the linked pages.↩︎
A phrase by M. Boldrin, spoken at political rallies for Ora, referring to Italy's economic situation. Grammatically a grey area — I would have written "mi perda" rather than "mi perdo" — but it works.↩︎