Two worlds compared: the silence of books and the noise of screens
For years I have worked side by side with technology. I have designed systems, I have understood their logic, I have spoken the cold language of code. But every time I go back to read a passage from Seneca or reread a fragment from Heraclitus, I feel something inside me reset. It is as if time slows down, as if I can finally breathe. The thoughts of the ancients do not need to be updated, nor corrected, nor redefined. They remain there, solid, like marble columns on which to rest your gaze in the chaos of everyday life.
Instead, every time I open a scientific article, especially on technological topics, I feel a strange agitation. It is not just curiosity, nor simple interest. It is a sort of submerged nervousness, almost a fear. Because I know - or rather, I feel - that what I am reading in a few months could already be obsolete. Technology evolves so quickly that even the most solid certainties become precarious. And this instability creeps into me, into the unconscious, making the little balance that I manage to build day after day tremble.
The classics never get updated
Peace of the Past: From Plato to Pascoli
I remember one evening, while I was reading a Platonic dialogue. We were talking about the soul, about truth, about good. I felt calm, as if those words were roots that sank into the soil of existence itself. The next day, instead, I read an article about a new model of artificial intelligence capable of emulating human thought. The topic was fascinating, of course. But at the end I had a strange feeling, like emptiness. As if I had touched something too quickly to be truly mine. Something that tomorrow would be different, perhaps even surpassed.
Maybe that’s the point: humanists talk about eternal things, or at least things that resist time. Greek philosophers still talk to us today, and will talk to us tomorrow. Their ideas don’t change because a software is updated. While modern science, by its very nature, must change. It must evolve, improve, destroy itself to rebuild itself. And I, while deeply respecting it, can never feel it is truly mine.
But it is not only the Greeks and Latins who give me peace. Even the greats of the recent past, the modern classics, offer me refuge. When I read Montaigne, for example, and listen to his “Considerations on Things,” I hear a sincere man, full of doubts, but firm in his will to understand himself and the world. Or when I immerse myself in Leopardi’s essays, where a lucid, almost mathematical melancholy flows, which however does not depress me, on the contrary: it frees me. Every now and then I return to Pascoli, to D’Annunzio, to Ungaretti – poets who have sought the light among the folds of the shadow, without ever losing the word.
And then there is Primo Levi. Oh, he really knew how to talk about science and humanity at the same time. In The periodic system, chemistry and soul coexist, complement each other, question each other. Reading it is an act of hope, because it tells you that technical knowledge is not the enemy of humanity, as long as it is accompanied by conscience, memory, pain.
A Compass in the Present: Trusting Slow Thinking
I have nothing against science. On the contrary: I believe it is one of the greatest products of the human spirit. But I am afraid of its uncritical use, of its transformation into myth, into dogma. We live in a time in which technology is celebrated as a religion, where the future is a god to whom we sacrifice the present. I prefer to stop. I prefer to look back. Not out of nostalgia, not out of conservatism. But to find a measure.
I grew up with a Socratic approach to knowledge: doubting, questioning, searching without ever stopping. But Socratic doubt is calm, internal. What I feel when I read about technological innovations is different. It is anxious, urgent. It is the doubt of someone who asks: "But is it really worth it?" And not so much for the content, but for the speed with which everything changes. A constant movement that pushes forward, without allowing you to look back.
I live in a world that celebrates the new as an absolute value. But I prefer the old. Or rather, I prefer what resists. And it is not nostalgia, it is not conservatism. It is rather an act of faith towards those who thought before us, towards those who asked questions that no algorithm will ever be able to answer. Questions like: what is justice? What is love? What does it mean to live well?
Technology has given me very powerful tools, I do not deny it. But it was the classics – ancient and modern – that gave me a compass. And in a time like ours, where everything flows quickly and nothing seems to last, having a compass is a form of peace. A fragile peace, certainly, but real.
So yes, I prefer to sit with Cicero rather than a white paper on machine learning. I prefer to walk with Leopardi along the hills of Recanati, rather than follow yet another report on the future of work. Not to ignore the present, but to not get lost in it.
Because humanism is not a step back. It is a deep breath. And that is where I find peace.