Avevi sempre

Le mani fredde

Come la città

Che t’ha accolto,

Come il gelo

Che ci ha travolto.

Avevi sempre

Un gran sorriso

Come a sfidare

La vita e il tempo,

Come la Luna

Quando sta crescendo.

Avevi sempre

L’energia

D’un fuoco d’artificio,

Come la galassia

Che mille stelle

Accende,

Come il boato

Di quel lampo

Cadente,

Che di noi,

Non ha lasciato niente.

Avevi il mio cuore

E lo hai

Ancora adesso.

Non lo rivoglio

Tienilo tu,

Che delle tue mani

Mi fido di più.

Ho il tuo sapore

Ancora addosso.

Posso tenerlo?

Lo custodirò

Come posso.

Avevamo l’amore

Appresso,

E almeno un milione di carezze

Che ora abbiam perso.

Maledetto

Destino avverso,

Io spero potremo

Ricominciare,

Ricamminare

Assieme verso

Un futuro più lieto.

Ricostruire,

Dov’ora c’è

Questo campo deserto.

Jan 7th 2025

Lorenzo

Le s’arriccia

Sul naso

Una dolce risata,

Che mi prende

Per mano

In un ballo.

E l’allegria diffusa

Mi seduce a seguire

La musica sua

Come canto

D’una sirena.

D’un nome puro

Veste il suo viso,

D’una profonda

Genuinità

Il suo animo gentile.

Immerso

Nel suo mondo

D’idee ed avventure,

Nella sua carezza

E giovani occhi,

Mi lascio

Cullare

Da un’energia

Naturale,

Che tutti i bambini

Sanno,

Che tutti gli adulti

Scordano.

Donna Russa

De la Venezia

Settentrionale,

Che a la mia porta

Bussa

Con quel suo fare

Originale,

È fuori dal centro

Che t’aspetto Io,

È fuori dal centro,

Che sei libera Tu,

Dove Noi solamente

Ci possiamo capire.

Sunday August 17th 2025

Lorenzo

Where are the aliens? How do we outcompete them?

What do all forms of life do?

Assume we are not alone in this galaxy, and assume the laws of physics are universal (they work the same everywhere). Now ask the question (known as Fermi’s paradox), where are the aliens?

If we think by first principles, we can reason about humans as complex aggregates of atoms organized in a very sophisticated and ordered way (compared to the average group of atoms in the Universe). Our main goal, as forms of life, is to propagate our genes deep into the future, or, in other words, to survive as who we are individually and as a species.

If we paraphrase Darwin’s idea of evolution in physics terms, we can think about life forms as orderly complex aggregates of atoms coupled together in the pursuit of decreasing local entropy of their overall structure/system at the expense of the entropy of their surroundings (the Universe). The goal of life, then, can be explained as atoms coming together to use more efficiently low entropy energy to maintain local low entropy at the expense of the overall entropy of the Universe. Seems convoluted? It is, but to really understand where I am going with this argument, we need to start from areas where we are very confident about and be precise.

As entropy minimizer, we want to live longer, we want to maintain the order of things and transform energy around us efficiently for our goal.

We now think as energy as abundant enough for our current needs, to the point to not even think that we will run out of it. We assume that if we get into troubles for a low supply, we will find out how to better extract it and transform the one available to us (from the Sun, atoms, etc).

But if we think about what is the long game here, and we imagine ourselves playing more and more to it with a longer time horizon, we have to consider that the energy of the galaxy (and the Universe) is the ultimate scarse resource. This is the first principle of thermodynamics: energy (which is also matter, E = mc2) never gets created or destroyed, only transformed. Hence if you think about energy as a budget to spend in a zero sum game we can only transfer energy from A to B or viceversa but not create it new. You might think, well then we have all this energy we just have to trade it to get it.

The problem with this scarce resource is, not only the fact that it is limited, but also that when it gets used, a part of it becomes unusable. If you think of energy as money in the form of capital, this means that when you pay someone to do some work and transform some energy from potential to kinetic (usually with the ultimate goal of reducing our entropy locally as discussed above), some energy just gets ‘lost’. Not lost in the sense that it is destroyed, but gets less usable. This is the second principle of thermodynamics, stating that entropy of the overall Universe is always increasing, often known as the arrow of time. Systems tend to go from order to chaos spontaneously, the other way around requires energy.

So we will have a problem, eventually.

Where are the aliens?

If we are not alone in the galaxy (and for the example we consider only the galaxy and not the Universe), then we have to assume that other forms of life will eventually come to the same conclusion. That their structure of atoms will want more and more low entrhopy energy at the expense of us as a species. This is a very long game, but a zero sum one. Remember the energy is fixed, so you can only trade it by convincing aliens to give it to you, or steal it given that we have no knowledge of them and their ability to collaborate or not. But on top of this, there is the problem of entropy and degrading energy, which accelerates the game to a more difficult and faster stage. Because of the irreversible nature of time, at some point the energy of the galaxy will become not usable anymore, trading will be foolish and irrational as this transitions from a zero sum game with possibility to trade, to a zero sum game where no trade of energy is possible nor rational.

When everyone has extracted all the low entropy usable energy to its own advantage, the worst thing that can be done is to trade it away. Given the principle of evolution, we can think that every form of life will eventually reduce maximally its own entropy (at least the forms that will survive, which are the ones playing the game properly), but we do know that it is impossible not to give up, even if slowly, some energy in the form of heat. So the ultimate creature in the universe is a form of life that maximally reduced its inefficiency in losing heat and loves eating all energy for the sole purpose of maintaining a very orderly internal state.

To state it more simply, because a portion of the budget (energy) becomes more unusable at every transaction, the rational thing becomes eventually to keep optimized energy for oneself to just die at a slowest possible rate. This means the game will become purely competitive and non collaborative in the limit.

This opens some interesting questions. If we are in this zero sum, and eventually non tradable, game, the aliens out there, if more advanced, should have probably figured out by now that they need to quickly gather all the energy before us and other aliens. This means that in this game the rational thing to do is to get all the energy before others do and transform it to lower the internal state and live longer.

We should then see signs of such civilization sucking energy with Dyson spheres all over the galaxy. We should also understand that we do have necessarily to play this game, if we don’t want to go extinct, and we better do it ‘quickly’.

But where are these examples in the galaxy? If aliens have figured this out a long time ago, then they should have continued to gather all the energy, and we should see some signs by now, given the age of the galaxy.

The “Selfish Aliens” Game Theory

One hypothesis often proposed is that if aliens exist, they don’t want to be seen. This to me has little sense, given the assumption of the evolution game we all play. The only way this makes sense, is if they want to ‘slowly’ get energy, so they are not seen as using it to avoid attracting attention elsewhere. But given that we are all in a ‘hurry’ in this game, it is impossible to slowly bleed energy from systems without getting a hit in terms of survival time. The stacking as fast as possible seems a better strategy. The slow capture of energy to avoid getting noticed must happen slow relative to others’ clocks (see Einstein’s relativity) which they can achieve as deception, but it seems quite a costly plot, in their absence of knowledge of competitors. We of course cannot exclude it, and cannot exclude that they know about competitors, but I find more plausible that they do not care about being seen (sometimes called the Zoo hypothesis where they ignore us and coexist), the cost is just lower than the benefits once you understand and accept the rules of this game.

Given we assume they exist, this leaves us with either the idea that they can’t be seen (not advanced societies yet hence we all are just starting, invisible footprint, behind black holes, etc), they all tend to die and go extinct ‘quickly’ (burnout hypothesis), we have bad monitoring tools, or that we just need more time to search.

The “can’t be seen” idea is the most interesting and compelling hypothesis to me, and, among the many reasons why they could not be seen, my theory and idea is that it is because they are in the main galaxy’s black hole. I find this hypothesis to be the most rational and plausible. The idea behind it, is about using our lack of alien evidence as an insight to conclude that the rational thing to do, given the game of life, was to go into a black hole for efficient energy capture. Since they did not conquer the galaxy, I believe this suggests that it was not practical to their survival and an unnecessary cost given what their goal is (evolutionary and same as ours). This means that they figured out that it was more efficient to eat the energy of the galaxy from the black hole, instead of going one star by one to harvest it.

I lay out the following theory as an answer to the Fermi’s paradox called the “selfish aliens” game theory:

The first hypothesis posed here, is that the ultimate state of any form of life is the same. And that is because we will eventually figure out that with the same rules of physics, we want to do and get to the same end goal, if we play the entropy minimization game and compete for it. This might mean that the ‘how’ we evolve is very different, but the beginning and the end will converge in form.

This means that all aliens will tend to look similar over time. One possible speculation is that the body will lose its purpose and we will just concentrate energy more efficiently in the mind as we master safety from nature itself and outsource body functions to the more efficient robots. A result of this could be the ‘homo dormiens’ or ‘homo roboticus’, a merged version of the sapiens with machines that became full mind and outsourced the body function to machines so it can focus on using the power of sleep and restoration cycles to think and solve the most important problem of all: decreasing its entropy.

The second hypothesis is that if we reason about this game, the closest object we know to the ultimate desired state that we are describing is something similar to a black hole, an object trying to eat most of the energy of the galaxy that maintains a collapsed orderly state internally, with little thermal radiation (Hawking radiation) and offering great concentrated energy flux to be captured more easily for usable energy-hungry life forms.

The third and final hypothesis is that aliens probably figured out that the ultimate and most efficient way to win the game is to go close or to merge with the black hole and directly go there somehow. Especially if it is a rotating black hole (and most are), there is the possibility to stay inside without collapsing into the singularity, which may offer great energy flux, ability to use that flux to maintain low entropy and a time ticking slower than alien competitors in the outer galaxy.

Conclusion

The idea of this thought experiment is to propose that, if aliens exist, they most probably go directly to the best source of energy and place themselves there, rather than trying to compete with the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy by creating one themselves. In a sense, we are doing the same on Earth: we could create energy from fusion, but we already have and use the Sun, it is already there for us and we want to be rational and take advantage of what exists. The theory proposed here, claims that sophisticated aliens somehow figured out that it was easier to go into the black hole rather than building or extract energy in a black hole fashion from scratch (sort of buy instead of build trade off). This gives us great cost/benefit analysis insights, because it means that the cost of getting to the black hole and of living there is lower than the one of building such an energy source. It is for us a benchmark for understanding what aliens discovered that we might not yet know. This is in fact an insight that moving to the black hole is cheaper and safer than we think, and that we will eventually find out a very cheap way to move, so that this conclusion will become evident to us. This already tells us that there might be a way for traveling easily in the galaxy and we just need to discover it!

At the same time though, it could signal that they were in a ‘hurry’; as soon as they figured out how to, they went there, and this could mean many things, but a speculation is that they either found an easier way to the black hole than to inter galaxy travel or that they had either no time or curiosity for other forms of life, where the former sounds more plausible.

Lorenzo Coacci

Feb 15th 2025

Why?

We need to remember to ourselves who we are. The Western world has been under attack for the last 20 years. Our values, abandoned. Our compass, broken.

My journey and purpose with the writing of this manifesto starts with a simple question: Why to create?

If life is going to end, what is the purpose of creating something great? Why should we reject cynicism, or the rampant nihilism that is present in my generation and our youth?

I began tackling this question by asking myself, on a casual day, another, apparently silly question: Why and how did we make the decision not to replace the Colosseum with a more modern building? Why do we sometimes avoid replacing the old with the new?

The answer seems so obvious that we don’t even take a second to address such a question.

But what if, we start investigating the deepest reason of why we sometime decide not to destroy?

Most might argue that we don’t want to delete the past so we retain history and remember who we are, and where we come from. Although this is certainly true, and a valid reason, it does not address the complete picture.

We do often destroy to rebuild, we often recreate or deprecate what is old, in the spirit of progress, and to allow the process of evolution to continue.

But why do some things stay? Why do we keep what we keep? How would you know that something you create is here to stay?

The more I thought about such a simple and apparently silly question, the more I started to understand the deepest reason of why we don’t bring down some of the history embedded in our physical reality. It is not just about being remembered where we come from, or our common ideals, or the aesthetic beauty of some piece of art, but it is, most importantly, because it reminds us what mankind is capable of. This is such a universal and culturally agnostic principle, that it’s the unifying layer of why we retain greatness and make sure it is seen and remembered.

Masterpieces are not there so we have something nice to look at, they are there to remind us where to find the deepest sense of meaning in life. Their meaning, is the meaning of the humans who decided to create despite the odds, despite the insurmountable effort.

We do not replace the Colosseum with something new, because it reminds us of the greatness of who built it, it tells us an incredible story of excellence, discipline and mastery, it screams to the world what men are capable of.

We preserve greatness because it is there to inspire us, it is there to convince us that we are built for more.

When I look at the greatest achievements of mankind, especially the ones that stand there every day in front of our eyes: the Colosseum, New York City, the cathedrals in Europe, the Pyramids, the art of Michelangelo or Da Vinci, I cannot believe what we have done.

And yet in awe I can’t do anything but feel extreme gratefulness and admiration for the lives, deaths, sweat and blood of billions of people of our past who brought us here. We truly stand on the shoulders of giants.

But if great achievements are there to be the examples of our ability, whether embodied in art or not, why to create in the first place? Why are we so attracted by this romance of greatness and creation?

This is a crucial question for our future. If AI will, (although I bet it won’t) at some point in the future, be able to replace almost everything we create, is there still a case for creating?

Why Not?

In my search for an answer, I found and decided to believe this: that a good life is all about creation and connection, what I refer to in short as a legacy. An obligation to become a hero for someone, an obligation to do great things that matter to many people across time. Creation and connection is all what the Universe does in its deepest essence.

Creating appears irrational if not done for a specific reason. But the act of creation in itself carries the beauty of life, and that is because it reminds us that to create means to oppose the truth of death, to leave something of you to the world that will outlive you. The act of creation is the deepest act of life a man could do, the act of creation, of any form, is the antithesis of death, a tentative to escape mortality in its sublimation. Through the beauty of creation we live beyond our limits, we live beyond the ancestral truth of being temporary. Creation is the ultimate challenge to the prison of time, to the unknown, the ultimate challenge to God’s boundaries.

Connection is instead designed to make your creation last, to make your creation matter. You want to leave something that is an extension of yourself, and you want that extension of yourself to connect to others in space and in time. That is your fundamental mission and instinct, to survive: because you can’t do it forever with your body, you will try relentlessly to do it through others via your legacy.

Meaning is both found in the process of creating a legacy while connecting with others so that they’ll carry it forward for you, and in the choice of believing that it will live beyond yourself for as long as possible.

Legacy can be a child, a company, a theory, an idea, the way you treat people, or the memories someone has of you. All of it matters, and it matters in ways we cannot comprehend, in the same way a butterfly flapping wings could generate storms somewhere else in space and time. Legacy can be achieved through creation or/and connection: I create therefore I live, I connect therefore I matter.

How can you be certain that what you create is going to last? The answer is that you don’t know, you don’t know if something you created is there to stay, but it is no good reason not to do it. That is why, “Why not?” is the best answer we have to “Why to create?”. It is as simple as that: to create for the sake of creating is an active choice, and it is in this chase of the ‘unnecessary’ beauty of creation, that lies the growth of the spirit, of the soul. It is in this question that lies the difference between nihilism and life, between hate and love.

Doers, builders, creators, artists, entrepreneurs are the true heroes of our era, exactly because they have the magical gift of asking this question over and over with the same powerful ingenuity of a child. Why not?

How?

Meaning is in the path not in the destination. If you expect to be happy once you hit a certain amount of dollars in the bank you are wrong. Money will only make you happy until a certain threshold. It does not mean that you should give up making money, nor to abandon your financial goals at all. You can and should be motivated by money early during your career and youth, it is surely useful and you should feel shameless about being competitive and wanting to win.

But for the long game, for the adventure of your life, it only makes sense to be true to yourself and find meaning and excitement in the things you do every day, to love what you do on a random Thursday in the path to your destination, and not the destination itself. It is the only way you are going to sustain meaning long term.

To get what you want, you need to align all your life to 1 direction and 1 destination. Every single small action of every day which is not aligned or does not help or contribute with that goal, must be realigned or removed. Sacrifice is the difference between wishing and wanting.

Now that you understand why to create is important, the question that you need to ask yourself is, “what can I specifically create than nobody else can or will?”, “what is my mission?”. The way to adopt this legacy manifesto and rebel against this society is to go build, to go create your own concept of the “Colosseum”.

Addendum for Men

Males have increasingly been sedated to comply and society needs men now more than ever. Society needs you. It is incredible what breaking rules can do, and you would realize that in an era in which we are suppressed by rules, it is a necessary act of courage to just stop following them and start breaking things like a male would do. The world is starving right now for rebels, a unique thing every male is uniquely positioned to do, to disagree, to tell the truth and to have the stubbornness of following his own path in his own way.

Males need to rediscover their natural sense of war, the seeking of strength, and channel it to productive endeavors in a common sense of battle that unites us in building the future. We need to rediscover our natural sense of competing to win, to protect, and to be great for the sake of greatness. To become dangerous, to be able to defend. We need to rediscover our ability to be the front line of society’s hunger for winning.

The most powerful and dangerous force the world has, is a male with purpose and nothing to lose. It is the engine of every society.

You are not wrong. Own your masculine instincts, stop listening to the noise, focus on the signal. Do not worry about peers, the world will realign to us, to nature.

It’s ok to follow this path, in the long term, others will follow along. It’s a cycle, and we are at the beginning of a cultural transition to rediscover tradition.

Go Build

We are not going to be the generation stopping this natural process of greatness. We are going to honor ancestors and create great things, achieve the impossible, as it was showed to us through the ages, with the incredible legacy that was left to us. We are going to continue it, so that one day far into the future, someone will look at our creation in awe, will be inspired by our effort and sweat, and be immensely grateful. So that one day a child will be able to dream, so that one day we will discover the secrets of the Universe, so that one day we will explore the stars.

We will not end this story. We will not end this ancient chain of honor and belief in the values that made possible the great history of mankind.

We are humans. We build, we create, we love, we connect, and we survive forever through the legacy of our glory.

Wake up. Lead the legacy revolution, It’s time to build.

“Per aspera ad astra”

Lorenzo Coacci

Nov 9th 2024

A speech and reflection for my 30th birthday

Tuesday, July 2nd, 2024, Kornati Islands, Croatia

I want to start with the why. Why are we here tonight?

The easy answer is to celebrate my 30th birthday, but there is much more to it than that. The reason why we are all here is much deeper.

Tonight, we are not just celebrating a birthday, but we are also celebrating life in its purest form. Life does not get better than a moment like this, where we celebrate friendship, experiences, love, nature, time, and the magic beauty of parties. We are here because I wanted to remind us all what really matters, while we all reflect on the next chapter.

We often get caught up in being busy, working, having worries or problems to solve, and we forget to be grateful for what has been achieved so far, for the present, and for the little details of our existence. I wanted to create a rare moment that we all can share to be in the present.

It’s no coincidence that we are on a boat tonight, as the idea and metaphor of the journey and exploration have been present with me for my whole life.

One of my favorite pieces of literature is in fact from Dante’s Inferno and it is about Ulysses and his deep motivation for jumping into the unknown. In the words of Dante this is what he told us:

“ […] né dolcezza di figlio, né la pieta del vecchio padre, né ’l debito amore lo qual dovea Penelopè far lieta, vincer potero dentro a me l’ardore ch’i’ ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto e de li vizi umani e del valore; “

I have always found it so profound, in so few sentences. How a man can be called upon to do great things and go beyond the most fundamental bonds of life. And it helped me so much all the times I was really afraid to jump into something new, or unknown. It is, I think, a reminder to us all, that we have a responsibility to be brave even when we are full of fear. And it is so much easier to be brave when younger, not because we are, but because of our stupidity and ignorance; we do things that seem brave out of immaturity. But doing it as an adult is so much harder, as we have responsibilities and understand all the details and consequences of our actions better, as we start to acknowledge our fragility. Unlearning and relearning to be brave like a child, I believe, is such an important part of our adult struggle.

We have to constantly remember to ourselves that we are temporary, that because we have no second life, we have nothing to lose. When you are looking at the horizon of life, you stop being afraid and worried. But we always forget to do it.

When I left Italy almost 6 years ago, I was certainly afraid, barely speaking decent English, my grades were average, and my capacity to dream was put under pressure by a difficult year in terms of love and family. A difficult year that started in these islands, to some degree.

I only learned after years, that ‘difficult’ was really a relative concept, and seeing it today, that ‘difficulty’ sounds quite silly to me. But it is exactly because it was difficult back then, that it looks easy today.

If things are not hard, you should question your path, because if things are not hard, you are not growing.

There is an anecdote that I want to tell you tonight, happened during my early career, about a colleague of mine called Pierre. One day Pierre and I were talking during a meeting about our lives, and he started talking about his very young daughter, and how he decided to read her a story the night before. He started telling me this story about a curious sheep wanting to escape from a farm. This sheep tried many times unsuccessfully. But in the end, after many attempts, she was finally able to cross the fence and get to see what was outside of it. She explored the forest and the hill, the trees and the wild animals. Eventually, while free in the forest, she got attacked by some wolves and died. I remember to this day what I was thinking inside of my head, while he was telling the story. I had an immediate feeling about how positive and inspiring that could have been for a kid, how this could have been a story of courage and exploration. But when Pierre finished telling it, he told his daughter how negative and terrible the story was, and that, because of the death of the sheep, the final message was to never escape the farm in the first place if one is not prepared to face the risky unknown.

I remember being shocked by hearing how the same story was instinctively positive for me as it was negative for him, and how the same narrative could have such a different interpretation. How perspective makes all the difference, how every person picks a special point of view of it. How our parents and others might nudge us in directions we really don’t comprehend.

But I also asked myself, why the hell did I see the story as positive despite the death of the sheep? After all, his interpretation sounds reasonable for a child, to only go out in the world when you are ready.

And the more I was thinking about it, the more I was starting to realize that the answer was in values. You don’t have to read too much through the lines of a story to immediately project yourself, the feeling, and the instinctual perception of even a simple story like this one. They all tell us about ourselves, how we view the world, and what we believe in.

I understood that I chose to believe, and still believe today, that no one will ever be ready to go out in the world, there will never be such a thing, and that it’s better to risk losing the body rather than the soul, dying in the pursuit of adventure rather than staying in the farm. In other words, that freedom is more important than safety.

Even such a simple and ambiguous story like this one can spark a deep reflection on values.

This belief of mine is not because I was, or am, necessarily that brave sheep, but because I wanted and want desperately to become like it. In a sense to unlearn what adulthood teaches us about risk, to rediscover the spirit of exploration that made our inner child brave.

Not everyone needs to look at the story like I did, as not everyone needs to look at the story like my colleague did.

The reason why I am telling you this anecdote is because you ultimately decide how to view the world, through which eyes you see the story, and what is the balance for you between comfort and growth. But remember that the way you think will determine who you are in ways you often don’t understand. And who you will become is eventually decided by the habits of your mind. The way you see a story tells you about your own story.

I understood, as a consequence, that parents and loved ones most likely will hold you back. It’s just human nature, it’s an instinct we all have. People who love you, often want the best for your safety, they want to keep things stable. Change is scary, and in most cases, they care more about safety than freedom, and project their feelings and values on you. But those who understand meaning instead of happiness, want you to risk, want you to become stronger than who you are today, to go out in the world and discover yourself. So always be skeptical of advice, even mine, because nobody knows what is good for you, if not yourself. Don’t accept what you have been taught blindly. Rebel against living a life that is not yours, or you’ll pay the price of wasting it.

I struggled so many times in the past years, trying to find meaning to all of this. As meaning will become even more of a problem in the next decade, I asked myself this: is there a meaning in doing for the sake of doing?

In my quest for an answer, I found and decided to believe this: that a good life is all about creation and connection, what I refer to in short as a legacy. An obligation to become a hero for someone, an obligation to do great things that matter to many people across time. Creation and connection is all what the Universe does in its deepest essence.

Creating appears irrational if not done for a specific material reason. But the act of creation in itself carries the beauty of life, and that is because it reminds us that to create means to oppose the truth of death, to leave something of you to the world that will outlive you.

You want to leave something that is an extension of yourself, and you want that extension of yourself to connect to others in space and in time. That is your fundamental mission and instinct, to survive: because you can’t do it forever with your body, you will try relentlessly to do it through others via your legacy.

Meaning is both found in the process of creating a legacy while connecting with others so that they’ll carry it forward for you, and in the choice of believing that it will live beyond yourself for as long as possible.

Legacy can be a child, a company, a theory, an idea, the way you treat people, or the memories someone has of you. All of it matters, and it matters in ways we cannot comprehend, in the same way a butterfly flapping wings could generate storms somewhere else in space and time. Legacy can be achieved through creation or connection: I create therefore I live, I connect therefore I matter.

The act of creation is the deepest act of life a man could do, the act of creation, of any form, is the antithesis of death, a tentative to escape mortality in its sublimation. Through the beauty of creation we live beyond our limits, we live beyond the ancestral truth of being temporary. Creation is the ultimate challenge to the prison of time, the ultimate challenge to God’s boundaries.

Different people express this beauty of creation in different ways. One of the most obvious is aesthetics.

Why build a beautiful cathedral when we can just build a block of concrete with windows? Well, why not? Because the difference is choice, and it is in that choice that everything happens.

Why choose a boat? Why the tuxedo? Why the little details that make a dinner special, a moment, a party. The answer is as simple as “Why not?”, and it is in this chase of this ‘unnecessary’ beauty of creation, that lies the growth of the spirit, of the soul. It is in this question that lies the difference between nihilism and life, between hate and love.

Builders, creators, artists, entrepreneurs are the true heros of our era, exactly because they have the magical gift of asking this question over and over with the same powerful ingenuity of a child. Why not?

I want to conclude with a reflection on time. There is something unique about each age that has no monetary value, no price tag attached, some experience that you can only live at that age. So let’s remember this: for some things, there is just no trade with time that makes any sense, and we should find those and chase them with the same hunger of a child for playing, as tonight is one of those ones, when we celebrate young, beautiful and alive in such a unique place in this world, we should feel grateful of time, we should feel like this night is priceless.

I am sure one day I will look back at my life and see that the most memorable moments can be counted on just one hand. This magic night as well as moving to the US will be two of them. A move for which I have to thank you all, for support, encouragement, and for being and remaining friends and family beyond time and space.

As I wrote in my letter 10 years ago after high school, while approaching my early 20s, even though I have to say goodbye to the past I still think the best part is yet to come. And that is how you want to keep thinking to stay young, that no matter the years, the best part is beyond the next fence.

And beyond the fence of the farm, or beyond the pillars of Hercules, where Ulysses dared to go, there are lions, there are wolves, yes. But what my colleague forgot to mention to his daughter, is that after lions, there is often a better world, there is often a better you.

Enjoy your night, and enjoy your journey in life.

Thanks to everyone for being here.

Cin cin.

Lorenzo

“Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time.” — Seneca

Croata

Culla

In cui torno

Spoglio

De l’amore antico,

Dopo sette

Giri del globo

Attorno a la stella

Che anche tu avevi

Bella

Fra le mani.

In quest’acque,

Tiepide e calme,

Come adesso il cuor mio,

E in questo

Battito

Di ciglia infinito,

Oggi io

Mi ritrovo a guardare

Il mare,

Dove prima

Guardavo te.

Ma così come

La dolce termica del giorno

Evapora l’acque

A formar la brezza,

Dell’evaporata passione

Rimane a me la purezza

D’un setoso ricordo

Ed un soffio

Spazzato dal tempo,

Che mi fa sorridere

Com’ogni primo morso

Di cioccolato,

Come la prima volta

In cui ci hanno baciato,

Eco infinito

D’un’emozione forte

Che m’accarezza piano,

Della quale sempre

Son grato,

Qui ed ora,

Così come

Là e allora.

Lorenzo

Dear Brother,

Welcome to the free world!

I am very happy that you have made the decision to embark on this incredible adventure, a pivotal step in your life that, one day, you will regard as one of the most meaningful choices of your story.

It won’t be easy. There is no better way to say it. But, why should it be?

No great story worth telling is ever easy; choosing a life of service and adventure over one of comfort and ease can make you wonder “Why should I endure more unnecessary hardships compared to others?”, or “Why should I risk failure despite investing so much effort?”. The answer is simpler to tell than to be truly understood on your skin, but something you want to keep always in mind as you will ponder: the easier path might leave you intact on the outside, but with the biggest scar of all on your soul. You can choose to suffer now and have an adventure, or to suffer when old, accumulating regrets.

You will have time to decide how to use New York: to learn and go back, to stay here for the long term, or to become extraordinary. New York can offer all those possibilities. Only few people in the world have such a tremendous opportunity, and among those who do, only a fraction possesses the courage to fully embrace it, always remember that. Feeling a duty toward those people who will never have this option is a healthy reminder to use the city wisely and humbly.

You don’t have to change the world necessarily; bringing the most joy you can to the greatest number of people, in the unique way you can do so, is often already the best victory you can hope for. But you can change the world here if you really decide so.

Being extraordinary is, ultimately, a choice, a difficult choice, that comes with immense sacrifices. It does not mean having extraordinary gifts (IQ, money, talent), it means having an extraordinary hunger, the only thing that matters for playing the long game of life.

It means giving up time for something that matters to you greatly, and giving up time is the most difficult sacrifice of all, it means saying no to a call of a dear friend, no to a drink on a Saturday night, no to a movie or a tv show, no to a holiday, no to many things. It’s easier to be said than to be done; when you will be in those situations, you will be tempted to just go with the flow and enjoy youth; but being great, as all investments that compound, is only about time and its allocation. There is no free lunch.

The competition is fierce, so be strategic in all aspects of your life, except for one domain: when making major life decisions, listen to your heart. Strategy and data-driven decisions are useless when it comes to choosing the crucial direction that resonates with your being. This direction won’t be clear for a long time, and it is your goal in the next 5 years to discover it.

Consider your parents’ job done. Life is yours now. Explore it, ask yourself: what do I want from life? What story do I want to tell? There are no rules, write yours. Remember, you owe nothing to anyone when it comes to deciding what kind of life you desire.

One of my benchmarks for a good life is keeping track of the number of people who admire you, whom you inspire, and to whom you bring joy. When I find myself deviating from this benchmark, I try to correct myself. This does not mean pleasing others, but instead being true to yourself and respected for who you are, while bringing joy and engagement to those around you; shining so that your light serves as a beacon and can enable others to shine.

Figure out who are the people who cannot and won’t accept this light and run away from them. In fact, be very careful about where you position yourself in life. One of the most powerful ways to change, is to be immersed in a new environment. Environments are stronger than you, they are like river rapids, there is no way you can win them, no matter how hard you try. So be cautious on how you pick people around you, on how you pick your tribe. There isn’t a more effective strategy to become the person you would like to become, than placing yourself in an environment with the kind of people you admire.

Mindset is everything, it makes a difference from a life of misery to a life of joy, and to shape how you think and react to problems with strength, you must interact and be influenced by people who already cracked the code for that behavior.

It is early for you, but you will need to understand the special way in which you are going to become a hero to someone, and, once you are sure, to commit to that. This is the path to adulthood: legacy. It is stronger than wealth, it is the way you survive forever in the minds of the people who loved you. Don’t just build net worth. Build legacy.

Life can be difficult, but becoming an adult is mainly about slowly getting better at removing obstacles, not because they disappear or can really be removed, but because you will be able to make them smaller in your mind as you grow up. You will often be shocked by how large some challenges look like that you did not expect, but remain calm, it is normal, you will solve them step by step, day by day. If I was able to do so, so will you. The key is perseverance, and only a great hunger, a great vision, a great belief in yourself and the future, can hold that perseverance alive forever, no matter what.

It is very difficult to be honest with oneself, but at some point, we get exhausted by the excuses we tell ourselves, and fueled by enough fear of regret, we find the courage to jump into the life we have always dreamed of, we go get those desires we have always had inside our minds. This is the most complicated of the changes, but eventually the only real one: when you decide that you are not the person of the past anymore, but instead commit to a new you, a statement of belief, a new dogma that you will never doubt again. That’s how internal change occurs.

Pain alone without reflection does not lead to growth; mere aging, getting older, won’t guarantee strength of character, but only the combination of pain and reflection will.

Look at the horizon of life often. Look at the end of it. Keep death in mind, to appreciate life. Where are you going to be at 80? Examine those who are older than you and ask yourself, “What do I want to avoid?” Start by identifying the things that you dislike in those who have already lived, and work backward. What do you want to fix about the world? What do you think the future should be? Imagine it, invent it, build it, do not wait for others to do it for you. We have been given the extraordinary gift of being builders, of being able to shape the world that our children will inhabit. So, focus on building and not talking, on signal and not noise.

Understand yourself, understand your temperament, measure it, be humble about your strengths and your weaknesses and align your uniqueness with a career that makes sense with who you are and who you want to become. Write down the 5 people who you esteem the most; those are who you are secretly wishing to transform into.

Those 5 people will immediately tell you your values. Find people with those same values, find your tribe. As time will become less, focus on quality over quantity, it is going to be far more important. It takes courage to close some doors forever, but part of maturity is to be able to do it firmly and consciously, so you can allocate effort on what truly matters. If you have the courage to close them, new windows will always open to you.

You will change, and it will be irreversible. There is, again, no better way to say it. It will be hard. You won’t be able to talk anymore with who is not aligned with the world you will experience. Old friends will look boring, unable to discuss about the things you will be able to discuss about.

Whatever you decide to do with New York, it will forever leave an indelible mark on you. After all, it is the queen of all cities. In this way, it is going to be an invaluable, but difficult city to be forgotten, and experiencing it, is like winning the world cup, there won’t be anything better than that to those who can truly understand and embrace the timeless, youthful, and ambitious spirit of New York City.

Hold onto that spirit within yourself, and you will never grow old.

You have all my support, whenever you might need it, for the rest of our lives.

Buona fortuna. Ti voglio bene

Lorenzo

Coperta

D’una coltre di segni

Sul corpo,

E d’una di fumo

Dalle labbra,

Racconti

Un’altra storia,

Un altro cammino.

E però

Ti vedo

Mi vedi

Fra persone e parole,

Mi scruti

Ti scruto

Come in una scommessa

A cui sempre si perde,

Ma gioca comunque.

Con quegli occhi da lince

Ghiaccio orientale

E capaci di cantare,

Seduci e taci

Sirena di mare,

Con quella falsa innocenza

Di chi ormai è senza

Paura o timore.

Ti macchi fuori

Per chiedere

Del dolore che hai dentro,

Per cercare una via

In mezzo a quel folto

Specchio di gocce.

Sirena corrotta

Dalla vita che porta

A noi tutti il conto,

Io per non cadere

Nella tua bella trappola,

Così come Ulisse

Nel suo lungo viaggio,

Dinanzi alla danza

Che i nostri sguardi

Si divertono a fare,

Sono costretto

A sorridere,

A sorriderti,

E stuzzicare

Immaginazione

Senza azione,

E nel tempo

Conservare

La sensazione

Viscerale e leggera,

Di questa

Sporadica

Silenziosa,

Lenta e giocosa,

Seduzione.

Lorenzo

DISCLAIMER: I am incredibly optimistic about AI, as I am a believer in abundance as the best possible way to alleviate suffering in the world. Read this article as brainstorming on the potential side effect of abundance, a pattern I think we have seen across history

Introduction

As the world watches the rapid advancements of AI systems, such as ChatGPT and its newest release GPT4, questions arise about the risks and opportunities of this AI revolution.

Elon Musk, and other AI experts, have already signed a document calling for a pause in the development of intelligent systems, until we establish our objectives and decide how to regulate this phenomenon. We have the opportunity to revolutionize society, but we also risk destroying it, as it will be quite difficult to slow down the ongoing development of AI and its wide application.

In this article, I want to speculate with you about the possible paths ahead through the lens of a recurrent pattern, that I firmly believe has pervaded throughout previous human revolutions. Thus, let’s scrutinize the broader perspective based on this principle, so to comprehend what could potentially mold our future, for better or worse.

The (hidden) long term misery of abundance, the power of scarcity

This principle of abundance is not a novel concept.

As human beings have solved the problem of food scarcity, we have found efficient workarounds to the biological need to hunt for survival. With the advent of innovative and scalable solutions, most of the modern world no longer needs to hunt for its own food. And this same pattern has been repeated throughout history, such as during the industrial revolution, when energy, products, and transportation became widely available, and later (1990s) in the era of the information revolution, where data became abundant. Finally, the latest AI revolution, that is undergoing as I write, is set to promise a democratization of intelligence in the years to come.

However, we often ignore that this remarkable progress comes at a hidden cost — the pace at which we have eliminated struggle has in fact outstripped our ability to biologically adapt as a species. Our brains still retain ancient software that drives us to play the game of hunting at different levels of complexity. Removing scarcity does not necessarily make us less miserable in the long run, as our dopamine system has developed over ages on a consistent and stable ‘game’, played repeatedly. Technology has changed this game at a dizzying pace, and we have yet to fully adapt to it at a fundamental level.

A consequence of this abundance is obesity, but not only physical obesity. Since each revolution brought abundance of some sort, we necessarily have an obesity problem with all human revolutions:

• Physical Obesity [Agricultural Revolution]: abundance of food
• Property Obesity [Industrial Revolution]: abundance of energy and products as a consequence
• Information Obesity [Information Revolution]: abundance of information/content
• Mental Obesity [AI Revolution]: abundance of high quality brains/intelligence (AI)

Let’s begin with ‘Physical Obesity’. As humans overcame the fundamental problem of food scarcity, we inadvertently created a new issue — an abundance of food. With no need to hunt, our physical activity decreased, leading to health problems. Thus, we had to engineer ways to incorporate exercise, such as running or going to the gym, into our daily routines to counteract this trend. However, our brains are not equipped to prevent overeating, as hunger stems from primordial regions of the brain that dictate an ancestral instinct to store energy in case of unpredictability and future scarcity.

But we are lucky that health is not the only incentive in this equation. Sexual reproduction is another one, a desire that will hardly vanish. Attractiveness is linked to symmetry, a proxy for physical health, and we are also quite motivated to stay fit by the process of female selection in mating; a fit body after all has higher chances of providing food, defending against predators, and hence surviving. Females hold the key for shaping the incentives of a generation, as with their choices can have a profound impact on the genetic makeup of future populations. This is a testament to the power of natural selection and the ability of males to adapt to meet the demands of the market as a consequence. In other words, a fit body not only increases our chances of survival but also serves as a powerful tool in the never-ending quest for reproduction. This might act as a powerful mitigation of risk of physical obesity in addition to the fear of long term health issues, and the help of a dopamine response released due to physical activity.

The same cycle of gratification repeated itself with the abundance of products during the industrial revolution, giving rise to what I call ‘Property Obesity’. It’s a never-ending loop of buying things that end up owning us instead, and can be seen as an abuse of consumerism (hyper inflation of lifestyle and maximalism). The fear of not having enough, coupled with the desire for status, perpetuates this game of accumulating possessions. But while status has its benefits, my generation places more value on experiences than material possessions. The looming threat of climate change has also shifted our perspective on consumerism, as we are better aware of the environmental impact of our actions. In many ways, this new awareness has changed the way we view abundance of products, and we are now more mindful of the consequences of our choices. Property obesity has some psychological consequences as well; it often leaves a sense of emptiness and a desire to continue a non sustainable and unsatisfying game of buying.

But even if we did learn and manage to tackle physical and property obesity to some extent during these last decades, the emergence of ‘Information Obesity’ as a result of the latest information revolution has left us some struggle to cope with. With the boom of the internet and the democratization of information through platforms like Google and social media, we are only just beginning to understand the consequences of this abundance. One of the biggest issues is the loss of focus, as we are inundated with a never-ending and overwhelming stream of content and media that destroys our capacity to prioritize and increases our sense of anxiety. The detrimental effects of this are now being widely recognized, and conversations are ongoing about how to regain our focus in a world of information overload.

And, finally, what about the AI revolution?

The AI revolution brings an unprecedented challenge: ‘Mental Obesity’. This risk adds up to the inability to focus mentioned above, as a potential abuse of the abundance of intelligence and a temptation to over-rely on AI systems.

Due to the way AI works (AI can only generate content based on trained data that we input), relying on these systems completely, will risk impacting severely creativity and critical thinking. In addition, bias is an important concern; replacing critical thinking with AI thinking, will be introducing biased narratives, capable of influencing the world in non trivial and uncontrollable ways, limiting diversity of opinions, and potentially increasing polarization. If we do not proactively preserve brain usage as we do for muscles, we risk impeding human progress and our ability to generate new and unique ideas.

The consequences of mental obesity could be severe, hampering our capacity to evolve as a society as well as the likelihood of leading to a cycle of war and destruction. This is because, unlike physical obesity, the rewards for thinking are not always immediately apparent, and only a few people are naturally inclined to think proactively. For most of us, thinking is rewarded, quite indirectly and for the most part, by money. But democratization of AI has the potential for making most jobs easier and cheaper as a consequence, and hence removing the profit incentive. Therefore, we must prioritize teaching critical thinking skills to incoming generations, to avoid repeating the same historical mistakes that led to the downfall of great civilizations, like the Greeks and the Romans. The future of humanity depends on our ability to recognize and address the risks posed by mental obesity, and to actively work towards preserving our own non — digital intellectual capabilities.

Conclusion

The potential problem is clear: if we don’t engineer mental gyms into our daily routines, as we do for our body, we are going to see a decline of civilization in some decades, as progress is not given, and cannot be taken for granted. We will require extra effort to promote rewards for keeping human brains exercised as we will outsource to AI systems, complex tasks.

Abundance has been steadily and consistently eliminating the effort around the achievement of human needs and desires in the Maslow’s hierarchy, leading to a sense of meaninglessness (nihilism) in contemporary society. This phenomenon is comparable to playing video games without any challenges, watching non engaging movies without a problem to solve or any drama, and lacking obstacles or opportunities is what is making the latest generation miserable. Consequently, my peers have turned to drug use as a way of numbing their perception of a bleak future and a surplus of options without enough challenging obstacles. The dopamine rush from accomplishing difficult tasks has been supplanted by artificially induced patterns via substances or digital mechanisms that offer a shortcut to pleasure and reward.

Building a constructive narrative for a vision of the future that is bright is crucial for keeping young minds motivated, and narratives and philosophies are indeed one of the most powerful tools we have to shape our destiny.

To conclude, while life is inherently painful, humans’ relentless pursuit and obsession of removing pain and obstacles comes with a significant hidden cost. We are now beginning to comprehend this cost, as we lose a sense of meaning and engagement with life’s rules. The solution lies in engineering scarcity into our lives, which requires us to abandon utopian thinking and humbly adapt technology to our brains. We must acknowledge that the struggle to adapt to ‘games’ that do not align with our core nature and the pace of human evolution, has been an ongoing and deeper issue throughout history and human revolutions, and not solely a problem posed by AI.

Potential solutions:

Physical Obesity [Agricultural Revolution]: abundance of food

Solution we are seeing:

• Physical motion is rewarded by dopamine
• Long term health
• Success in female mating

Property Obesity [Industrial Revolution]: abundance of energy and products as a consequence

Solution we are slightly seeing:

• A cultural shift in desiring experiences instead of things.
• Encouragement of efficient optimization, reduction of choice paralysis in buying with the help of data, information and AI (recommendation systems).
• Conscious buying and avoidance of waste of money and resources (re usability) due to climate change concerns.

Information Obesity [Information Revolution]: abundance of information/content

A potential Solution:

• Help with the summarization of information using AI systems as a middleware layer, to decouple digital platforms from us. This way we avoid going on Instagram, but we still get the value of it from an AI checking it for us. We might also avoid advertisers harvesting us, as we are a product.
• This decoupling helped by AI together with other incentives to live in the real world more, will help us deal with the tendency to be inundated by addictive loads of information that we cannot process.
• Use of AI as a external ‘coach’ that enforces rules to re gain focus.

Mental Obesity [AI Revolution]: abundance of high quality brains/intelligence (AI)

A potential Solution:

• Reward non-digital processing effort (human brain usage), still not clear how: female selection? creativity competition? mental games as we do for sports and Olympics?
• Merge with the machines

Thanks for reading! Let me know what are your ideas and solutions to these problems!

Lorenzo Coacci

Chiudi gli occhi

Nonna,

Ché non devi aver paura

Se lasciando il mondo

Sei attorno

Circondata d’amore,

Chiudi gli occhi

Nonna,

Non temere,

Ché nel prossimo cammino

Ci avrai comunque vicino.

Chiudi gli occhi

Con un sorriso,

Ché c’è di là chi t’aspetta.

Chiudi gli occhi

Nonna,

A testa alta,

Con la gioia,

La dignità,

E la forza,

Di chi sa che sarà con noi

Per sempre,

Di chi ha vissuto

Una vita densa,

Di chi ha regalato e ricevuto

L’impagabile dono

Dell’amore.

Lorenzo