Look at us, prisoners of a theater of shadows where « what will people say » acts as both supreme law and silent executioner. We are a society of exacerbated appearances, where people plunge into absurd debt for weddings with a thousand guests, half of whom will hasten to criticize the salt in the soup. We suffocate in a facade of conservatism that barely hides a daily schizophrenia: preaching virtue in public while cultivating vice in private. The public space has become a battlefield for egos, a parade of shiny cars on broken sidewalks, where politeness vanishes before the aggression of a fierce individualism. We have become experts in hasty judgments, scrutinizing a neighbor’s outfit or a cousin’s success with a bitterness that erodes our own ambitions, preferring collective stagnation to the success of others. This reign of social judgment creates a stifling atmosphere where the fear of being different outweighs the desire to innovate.

Yet, this same society that self-destructs through contempt is capable of bursts of solidarity that border on the sublime, making our malaise even more incomprehensible. We love each other with a violence that excludes nuance; we hate each other with a passion bordering on obsession. Talent is often perceived as insolence, and originality as a betrayal of our ancestors. We live with our gaze constantly turned elsewhere, magnifying a distant West while despising the genius sleeping beneath our feet. It is the reign of « dégoutage » (weariness) erected as a national philosophy, where the youth prefer dreaming their lives on a screen rather than challenging the codes of a suffocating social gerontocracy. We are a people with hearts on our sleeves but acid on our tongues, capable of building cathedrals of generosity on shifting sands of resentment, condemned to wander between the nostalgia of a fantasized past and the inability to define a present that finally looks like us.