Avec du recul les réseaux sociaux c’est quand même un monde de fou hein, des humains qui ne veulent jamais la fermer et donnent leurs avis sur tout et n’importe quoi
L’#ÉvangileDuJour (Mt 14, 22-33) nous enseigne une chose importante : tout d’abord, à ne pas nous enorgueillir face au succès et à ne jamais nous surestimer ; et en même temps, à ne pas désespérer, même dans les moments sombres, lorsque nous nous sentons impuissants face aux problèmes.
This is why so many rich kids become obsessed with unusually hard hobbies (HYROX, Ironmans, ultramarathons, survival expeditions, extreme sports, Everest, etc.)
They’re not necessarily masochists. They need a result where observers, and more importantly themselves, can’t immediately say “yh but your dad…”
Money contaminates most conventional achievement because it can buy you the introductions, runway, education, safety net, first customers and endless second chances. Physical suffering is different. Your dad can hire the trainer, buy the bike and fly you business class to the race, but he still can’t run the last 30km of an ultra for you.
And then you get this funny achievement inflation. Once normal difficulty becomes accessible, you need increasingly absurd difficulty to produce the same clean proof of competence:
A 10k stops feeling exceptional → marathon → Ironman → 100km ultra → Marathon des Sables / UTMB → whatever is sufficiently painful and scarce to still mean something.
Same for mountains: Everest with oxygen → without oxygen → harder mountain → unsupported → faster, etc.
It’s especially funny because their normal life has usually been optimised to remove exactly the things they then seek recreationally: cold, danger, physical exhaustion, uncertainty, getting lost, carrying your own stuff, sleeping badly, not knowing whether you’ll make it. Generations of family wealth go into eliminating friction, then the descendants spend their weekends putting it back in.
And of course an entire luxury industry now exists to package the hardship nicely. Black Tomato sells a “Get Lost” experience starting around £20k per person where they privately transfer you somewhere remote, give you equipment and training, then make you navigate back to civilisation while an expedition team invisibly tracks you as a safety net.
Basically the final stage of wealth is paying a lot of money to recreate problems your grandparents spent their lives making sure you’d never have.
« La faute de l’Abbé Mouret » est l’œuvre d’Émile Zola. Un roman où ferveur mystique et désir charnel s’affrontent dans une Provence luxuriante. L’auteur y peint une tragédie humaine d’une beauté cruelle, entre foi dévorante et nature souveraine. Lu par Eric Herson-Macarel
Pour moi la vraie preuve que quelqu’un est con c’est quand on lui parle d’un fait sociologique ou scientifique et qu’il veut réfuter en balançant une expérience purement personnelle.
Hamburg (metro area 3.5 million) is probably the culturally least significant West European big city. Hamburg is bigger than Warsaw, Lisbon, Brussels, Budapest... Yet you never even hear anyone visiting there.