Hapless is the mind that is anxious about the future (Seneca)

I have a picture of many prey to obscure neurosis, living in a state of anxious insecurity. How can we not understand them?

My thoughts are of too many people, including those I know the best, who on any day, while leafing through a newspaper, reading the news, find their intelligence and sensitivity shocked by what they find there, describing situations that get worse everyday, made up of violence, subjugation and suffering.
It is my presumption that primarily, for many, even if they are not capable of admitting it, it is fear that dictates how they perceive reality and represent the same, it is fear that guides the choices made and actions taken to save their very person from impending threat.

A battle, a fight that occurs day-in-day-out, into which many throw in their survival instincts, egoism, but also happy intuitions, lofty sentiments and the capacity to look beyond, if for no other reason than to tackle things in their own way.
If not gods, they are improvised, diligent creators of their own opportunities, while also being conscious or semi-conscious debunkers of the falsehoods of a now globalised and digitalised world that, despite what one would wish, falls far short of being the best one possible.

Indeed the occasional cases of human and entrepreneurial ‘diversity’ which I chance to come across,  the instinctive refusal of some people having themselves homogenised under the stark term of “business” devoid of all adjectives, makes one think and leaves space for a certain optimism.
I speak, for example, of Giancarlo Cavanna (Laminati Cavanna) and Giorgio Tomassini (Tecnocarta), who I met at the beginning of the year and who, in their diversity, appeared to me as people who standout for their and ability and aptitude, having in common the fact that they created companies with the emphasis on testing new services and products, using new (as well as old) materials and technologies.

People, probably not only capable of looking ahead with optimism, but aboveall capable of looking backwards to see how they might configure their past in order to help them tackle the oncoming challenges.
Certainly curiosity is one of their prime traits, along with having “eyes in the back of  ones head”, and the ability “warm oneself whilst the fire burns” (Nietsche).

This rugged, sturdy “normality” as a reaction to life is indeed a comfort and encouragement.

By contrast this may give rise to the suspicion that one of the causes of the suffering of humankind - as Remo Faccani writes in the introduction to Oblomov by Ivan A. Goncarov - is that human curiosity inevitably ends up by upsetting the fragile order of things, the precarious equilibrium of the individual’s ties with the environment, because one is forced to intervene and interfere or, one might say straight out, one is forced to live!
But to be sincere there may be more to it, something that is evermore evident in our days: an unease, a vein of malaise provoked, as Montale said in his last works, by “an incredible and never believed reality”, or be it an irregular, disjointed, vacillating reality for which one has lost the code that allows one to interpret it.

But why torture oneself? The capacity to ‘live easily’ is only of the Gods, of those who know how to live forever, as Roberto Calasso writes in his book The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.
The luckier ones still have the critical force of utopia and the pride of not being “afraid of ones own feelings”… The future is a space open to all possibility.

Stefano Lavorini