The sociology that emerges from the Christmas table has agreed, through an implacable scientific spirit, that 2025 will be worse than the current year. The brother-in-law, who digests carn d'olla and geopolitics equally, has warned us that the very limited human brain and our defenseless hands will practically be useless, as artificial intelligence (I still write it in lowercase, who knows if out of anthropocentrism) will be able to vomit novels in half an hour.
The relative in question seems very worried about the matter, even though he has never written a single novel and, in fact, has not read anything at all (for this reason, at home it has become a tradition to guarantee him socks as a gift, something he always welcomes with resigned joy). The great substitution, he proceeds as I cut nougat, will not be that of natives for foreigners, but that of "that great machine that will slowly kill us."
The younger cousins seem unimpressed by the technological catastrophe. Their life is so boring that they are happy to have an omnipresent algorithm that can entertain them a bit (and mess up their brains even more) with an endless string of videos about fitness and Japanese nymphs sharing makeup courses. They are more scared by the omnipresence of war. Although they have not yet been able to study history or politics, they are certain that Vladimir Putin is close to Europe and that any day, so to speak, he will burst onto Tamariu beach commanding his private aircraft carrier. The topic is damn scary. The kids inform me that the Russian dictator has already spoken with Trump and, in exchange for ending the war, the monarch in question has demanded to keep a couple of pieces of unfortunate Ukraine. They say nobody wants Gaza, because there is nothing of value there.
When I look at the Eixample, all my troubles disappear, and I am infinitely grateful to my idol Cerdà for building us that modern and utopian grid where most of the world's problems seem like trifles.The prospects are so fatalistic that, in the second round of nougat, I slip out to the balcony overlooking Rambla de Catalunya to smoke a good cigar. Now that I live in the underworld of Barcelona, I thoroughly enjoy looking out onto my street, majestic as ever, and which, tinted by the winter light of dusk, looks like the thigh of a Moorish queen perpetrating a siesta.When I look at the Eixample, all my troubles disappear, and I am infinitely grateful to my idol Cerdà for building us that modern and utopian grid where most of the world's problems seem like trifles. In the distance, I still hear echoes of the Christmas dinner table, where the conclave of football experts has determined that this season "we might not win anything, but Flick has given us an unprecedented hope in years." We are in Catalonia, it is true, a country where hope weighs much more than the silver of a trophy.
Will 2025 be worse? Honestly, not a damn bit. My brother-in-law is now resting, and my parents refute his dystopian fever by stating that most eras ---on a planetary level--- are more or less a complete shitshow... but that in this small corner of the world, in the end, we always manage to get by and live like kings. The younger ones respond that "you would say that," because they ---despite the immense number of degrees they collect--- will have to live sharing a flat until they are forty and with third-world job insecurity.
I would like to live another predictable year with some minimal existential shake-up, something like family after-dinner conversations.It is then, as happens annually, wheneach generation wants to monopolize misery; you don't have an apartment, but we didn't have hospitals; you had an apartment, but we went hungry. While everyone honors Christ's suffering on his birthday, I finish my cigar, thinking that I don't know if I have lived well or badly, but sure of being happy smoking up to the sky.
As the years go by, one becomes predictable. I would like to live another predictable year with some minimal existential jolt, something like family after-dinner conversations. I hope to be able to keep breathing, with a more subdued anguish if possible, and for the words to keep flowing from my hands with a certain music. As long as you read them, there will be life. And it will be better.
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