Reflection journeys

Physics, neuroscience, self-help: everything seems to have replaced philosophy; it remains to find out what you ask of it, what it alone can deliver, and whether 'being useful' is even the right measure to judge it by.

What we do with our desires may decide what a successful life is: to affirm them as a force, to sort them with lucidity, or to detach from them to find peace. Between drive and serenity, where do you place happiness?

Faced with what eludes us, does serenity come from accepting our limits, from pushing them back without respite, or from knowing, at each ordeal, how to tell the two apart?

The feed never stops. Is it the lever that widens our lives, the neutral tool whose worth lies in the use, or a power built to capture what it craves, our attention?

Rushed, overwhelmed, always behind ourselves: what if we were short not so much of time as of a way to inhabit it, turned toward the instant, toward the future, or toward what is received and passed on?

How are we to live, knowing that we will die? The way we look at death may shape the very way we live.

Running, the gym, the stadium: never has sport counted for so much in our lives. What are we really after in effort and competition, joy, fulfillment, or surpassing ourselves?

The truth owed to all, the equal dignity of each: two demands clear in principle, that the presence of a loved one, all at once, comes to trouble.

Our choices have causes, from our history down to our very neurons; does any part of them truly depend on us — the part on which merit, fault and responsibility rest?

Of all that we believe we know, what truly withstands scrutiny, and how far can a certainty reach?