Jean-Philippe

About Jean-Philippe

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July 21 2026

Democracy

Democracy: Code Has a Deeply Authoritarian Streak. Shocking, I Know.

A client’s new car wouldn’t let her go five over the limit, even at 2am on an empty road. It just beeped. There was no arguing with it. Neither, it turns out, is there much arguing with most of the software running our lives.

A client was in the chair last week, irritated about her new car. “It won’t let me go five over the limit, even on an empty freeway at two in the morning,” she said. “It just… refuses. Beeps at me like I’m a child.”

“What happens if you ignore the beeping?” I asked.

“Nothing, really. The limiter just kicks back in. There’s no arguing with it.”

I thought about my engineering days for a moment. “That’s not a bug,” I said. “That’s the whole point. Someone designed it to behave exactly that way.”

She frowned. “Designed it to be annoying?”

“Designed it to be authoritarian,” I said. “There’s a difference. Well — sometimes.”

[Switches to serious face.] One problem here is that code has a deeply authoritarian streak. Shocking, I know.

If your car says, “This is the speed limit,” and that rule is hard coded, that is the end of the discussion. No leeway. No context. No emergency. No negotiation. No “fine, I’ll pay the ticket.” The machine has spoken. Apparently silicon now does what kings used to do, only with cleaner branding.

2 reasons code and democracy seem to be moving in opposite directions

0 votes most citizens cast on the rules a piece of software enforces on them

130+ countries with no comprehensive law governing algorithmic decision-making

1 word that should make you suspicious every time a tech company uses it: “inevitable”

Not Accidental

I do not think it is accidental that democracy is struggling at the same time digital technology is rising. There are two reasons.

First, code tends to be authoritarian. Software loves rigid rules. It hates ambiguity, nuance, and human mess, unless someone goes out of their way to build those things in. So the real question is not simply what the code does, but who writes it.

“The machine has spoken. Apparently silicon now does what kings used to do, only with cleaner branding.” — The observation that made my client stop being annoyed and start being unsettled.

Who Is Making These Rules?

And who is making these rules? Usually not your elected representatives. More often, it is a handful of well-paid engineers in Silicon Valley deciding what billions of people can do, see, or access. Democracy used to mean voting for the people who made the rules. Now the rules arrive as software updates.

AlgorithmWatch, a research organisation that tracks exactly this shift, has spent years documenting how automated decision-making systems — in credit scoring, hiring, policing, content moderation — quietly assume governmental functions without ever passing through anything resembling a legislature. Nobody campaigned for the job. Nobody can be voted out of it.

The Second Reason: Surveillance

Second, AI threatens democracy through surveillance.

The AI systems we are building need vast amounts of data, endless streams of it, and much of that data is personal. Personal data becomes dangerous when citizens have little power over it, while corporations and governments hold plenty. That imbalance matters. Give institutions detailed knowledge about everyone, while keeping citizens in the dark, and you do not get freedom. You get control, wrapped in convenience.

The Imbalance, Documented

Access Now, a digital rights organisation operating across more than 25 countries, has tracked a consistent pattern: surveillance infrastructure built for one stated purpose — fraud prevention, public health, counterterrorism — routinely expands into general-purpose population monitoring once it exists. The capability rarely gets removed once installed. Researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center describe this as a one-way ratchet: surveillance powers granted during a crisis are almost never returned once the crisis passes.

Control, wrapped in convenience, stored on racks like these. Photo: Unsplash

Technology Is Not Destiny

Most importantly, technology is not destiny. It is design.

We are building these systems. That means we choose what they become. So when someone in tech says, “Relax, this is inevitable,” I would challenge that. “Inevitable” often means, “We already built it and would prefer fewer ethical questions.”

“’Inevitable’ often means, ‘We already built it and would prefer fewer ethical questions.’” — A useful translation for the next time someone uses the word in a pitch meeting.

The Truly Strange Part

Yes, we should ask if AI could become conscious one day. That is a serious question.

But the more urgent question is simpler. Should we design these systems this way at all? Should we keep building machines that deliberately blur the line between simulation and consciousness — systems that speak, emote, and perform sentience so well that people forget it may all be mimicry?

And then comes the truly strange part. We are no longer talking only about imitation. Some people want to go further — from mimicking consciousness to creating the real thing.

Because apparently humanity looked at all its existing relationship problems and decided, “You know what would help? Conscious machines.”

One of these is performing an expression. Increasingly, that’s the part we’re being asked to stop noticing. Photo: Unsplash

Back to the Chair

My client left with a haircut and, she said, a newfound urge to read the manual for her car — not because she expected to find anything reassuring in it, but because she wanted to know exactly which decisions had already been made on her behalf before she ever sat in the driver’s seat.

I could see both sides of this divide — the engineering side that writes the rules, and the chair where people sit and live inside them — to notice how rarely anyone in the first group is required to explain themselves to anyone in the second. That used to be called accountability. It used to require a vote.

I followed a related thread in our piece on what AI clears space for and what it quietly forecloses, and another in the house nobody is fixing — institutions left running on autopilot long after the people meant to maintain them stopped paying attention. Code is just the fastest-moving version of that pattern. Nobody voted for the speed limiter. Nobody voted for the algorithm either. Both arrived the same way: quietly, as an update, with the explanation that this was simply how things had to be now.

It wasn’t. It never is. Someone just decided it would be easier if we stopped asking.

The Salon California Journal is a space for ideas, culture, and conversation from my chair in Brasschaat, Belgium. I write about beauty, technology, society, and the intersections between them.

July 17 2026

No Tax under 30

No Tax Under 30: Math, That Rude Little Tyrant, and the $46 Trillion Question

A client watched a third of his first paycheck disappear and went pale, like he’d just read a death certificate. So here is a radical thought. What if we stopped taxing people in their twenties?

A client in his early twenties checked his banking app in the chair last week, went pale, and read the number out loud like it was a death certificate.

“They took a third,” he said. “A third.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “You’ve just discovered taxation.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“If I ran things,” I said, “you’d keep every cent of that until you turned thirty.”

He looked at me like I’d just told him the moon was made of cheese, in a good way. “Go on,” he said.

[Switches to serious face.] So here is a radical thought. What if we stopped taxing people in their twenties? Simpler still: under 30, no tax.

Immediately someone clutches their pearls and says, “But wouldn’t that incentivise young people not to go to university and instead get jobs?”

Yes. That is called an incentive. Glad we are keeping up.

$514T approximate global wealth in 2025 (UBS Global Wealth Report)

$46.26 Trillion what a flat 9% tax on that wealth would raise per year

30 – 60 the proposed taxable window — peak earning years

0% the proposed rate under 30, and again after 60

The Sacred Cow

And before people faint, let’s address the sacred cow: university.

We treat university as if it is a universal human right, somewhere between clean water and oxygen. Everyone must go. Everyone must get a degree. Apparently the dream is for half the population to graduate and then compete for jobs that did not require degrees twenty years ago.

Brilliant system.

Here is the uncomfortable truth. University is, in many cases, a luxury item. And luxury items stop being luxurious when everyone has one. If 50 percent of people go to university, that does not scream equality to me. It screams credential inflation. Congratulations — you spent three years and a small fortune to qualify for an entry-level job answering emails.

“Congratulations, you spent three years and a small fortune to qualify for an entry level job answering emails.” — The line my client read twice before laughing, a little uncomfortably.

University is the third stage of education. It should be selective, purposeful, and ideally useful. Researchers at Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce have tracked exactly this drift for years — degree requirements creeping into roles that never structurally needed one, while the wage premium attached to many of those same degrees quietly erodes. The credential keeps costing more. It does not keep delivering more.

A credential that costs more every year and signals less every year it does. Photo: Unsplash

Free, But Only If It Keeps Civilisation Running

And yes, I would make it free — but only for subjects that actually keep civilisation from collapsing.

Study something that grows corn, builds bridges, keeps the lights on, or cures disease. Agriculture, engineering, medicine, physics, technology — call it STEM. Free.

That seems like a fair deal. Society pays for what society needs.

If you are in the younger generation and academics is your path, excellent. Go study. Become useful. We need smart people.

But if university is not for you, also fine. Go work. Build something. Learn a trade. Start a business. Earn money and keep it.

Keep all of it.

Grows corn, builds bridges, keeps the lights on, cures disease. Free. Photo: Unsplash

No Tax Under 30

No tax under 30. Imagine that. Young people accumulating capital instead of debt. Revolutionary.

Then perhaps taxation happens mainly between 30 and 60, when people tend to be at peak earning power.

And maybe after 60, no tax again.

Fantasy Politics

Why?

Because at some point we need to stop doing fantasy politics.

Every election sounds like a children’s birthday party. Yes, yes, yes, we will pay everyone’s pension forever. Free this, subsidised that, endless benefits for all.

Wonderful.

Tiny issue: we do not have enough young people paying into the system to fund pensions forever.

Math, that rude little tyrant, keeps ruining political speeches.

The Tyrant, Quantified

The IMF has repeatedly flagged ageing populations and shrinking worker-to-retiree ratios as one of the most structurally underpriced risks in advanced economies — not a future hypothetical, but a current trajectory. Every pay-as-you-go pension system was built on the assumption of a population pyramid, more young workers than retirees, indefinitely. That pyramid is inverting almost everywhere it was once assumed permanent. No campaign promise changes the denominator.

The Real Tragedy

Just as food for thought: global wealth in 2025 was approximately $514 trillion. Flat tax that at only 9 percent and you get $46.26 trillion.

Forty six trillion dollars.

Just imagine what that could solve. Poverty. Hunger. Healthcare. Infrastructure. Education.

Many of humanity’s grand crises could be dramatically reduced.

The tragedy is not lack of wealth.

It is that we live in a civilisation astonishingly good at producing wealth and almost artistically talented at concentrating it into fewer hands, then acting baffled when the rest get angry.

Back to the Chair

My client left with a haircut and the same third of his paycheck gone, because I run a salon in Brasschaat, not a finance ministry. He asked, on his way out, whether any of this had a real chance of happening.

“Probably not,” I said. “Doesn’t mean the maths is wrong.”

I followed a related thread in our piece on growth, limits, and the invoice nobody wants to read — the same arithmetic, really, wearing a different line item. Pensions, tuition, payslips. Different receipts, same civilisation, remarkably consistent at the one talent nobody campaigns on: turning collective wealth into a small number of very comfortable private bank accounts, then expressing genuine surprise at the resulting mood in the room.

Math, that rude little tyrant, is still waiting for someone to argue with it directly instead of around it.

The Salon California Journal is a space for ideas, culture, and conversation from my chair in Brasschaat, Belgium. I write about beauty, technology, society, and the intersections between them.

July 17 2026

What would I do ?

What Would I Do? Fixing Education Starts With Paying Teachers Properly

A teacher in my chair was doing dentist-appointment math on a twelve-year career. If I were put in charge of education, the first thing I would do is simple. I would pay teachers properly.

A teacher was in the chair last week, marking papers on her phone between sections because that’s apparently what evenings look like now. She mentioned, almost in passing, that she’s been teaching for twelve years and still calculates whether she can afford the dentist before booking an appointment.

“Twelve years,” I said. “And you’re doing maths about a dentist appointment.”

“Welcome to teaching,” she said, not looking up from the screen.

“If I were in charge of education,” I said, “I know exactly where I’d start.”

She looked up. “Go on. Surprise me.”

[Switches to serious face.] If I were put in charge of education, the first thing I would do is simple. I would pay teachers properly.

My mission would be to make teaching one of the most respected and sought-after professions in society. I would want the brightest, most ambitious young people to dream of becoming teachers, not only lawyers, doctors, or investment bankers. Strange, isn’t it, that we trust teachers to shape every future profession, yet often pay them as if their work were an afterthought.

44 countries where teacher pay sits below the average graduate salary (UNESCO)

5 yrs of rigorous training proposed, in exchange for a genuinely stable career

#1 factor most consistently linked to student outcomes: teacher quality and wellbeing

2,400+ years since Ancient Greece treated teaching as one of the highest callings

What Teaching Once Was

I would want to restore teaching to what it once was. In Ancient Greece, education was seen as one of the highest callings — a noble pursuit tied to the formation of character, wisdom, and citizenship. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that.

A profession once tied to wisdom and citizenship, not an afterthought in a budget line. Photo: Unsplash

Make It Difficult to Enter

I would work hard to rebrand the profession, and I would also make it difficult to enter. Becoming a teacher should require rigorous training, perhaps five years of serious preparation. But in return, I would guarantee something rare in modern life: a stable, respected career that people would want to stay in for decades, perhaps for life.

According to data tracked by UNESCO, dozens of countries pay teachers below the average graduate salary in their own economies — a structural signal, repeated in every recruitment cycle, that the profession is not where ambition is supposed to go. The Varkey Foundation’s Global Teacher Status Index has spent years measuring exactly this gap between how much societies say they value teachers and how they actually treat them — and the gap, in most countries surveyed, is not small.

“Strange, isn’t it, that we trust teachers to shape every future profession, yet often pay them as if their work were an afterthought.” — The sentence that made the teacher in the chair finally put her phone down.

It Starts With the Humanity of the Teacher

I would invest heavily in teacher wellbeing. Better salaries, continuous training, personal development, free gym access, free therapy — whatever helps them maintain strong mental and emotional health. Because the research is clear. The more you invest in teachers, the better children perform, not only academically but as human beings. They develop sharper critical thinking, stronger empathy, and a genuine love of learning.

It starts with the humanity of the teacher.

Research from the Learning Policy Institute consistently finds that teacher attrition — the steady loss of experienced teachers to burnout and better-paying work — costs school systems far more than the raises that would have prevented it, once you account for recruitment, training, and the lost continuity of an experienced teacher walking out the door. The expensive choice and the cheap-looking choice are, infuriatingly, often the same decision pointed in opposite directions.

Truth Over Convenience

Of course, I would also overhaul the curriculum. Every textbook and teaching material would be reviewed and grounded in truth, evidence, and science, not shaped by political convenience, government agendas, or the old habit of teaching whatever helps those in power sleep better at night.

Facts should be accurate. Data should be current. Knowledge should serve understanding, not indoctrination.

I would also push for more systems-based learning — teaching students how things connect rather than forcing them to memorise isolated facts for exams they will forget by summer.

Different talents, equally legitimate — neither one a detour from the “real” subject. Photo: Unsplash

Redesign Assessment

And yes, I would completely redesign assessment.

Our current model treats students like factory products moving down the same conveyor belt at the same speed, then acts surprised when many feel broken. Education should not be one size fits all. Students should move forward according to their strengths, talents, and aptitude in the areas where they excel.

Some shine in mathematics. Some in language. Some in design, music, engineering, or human relations. A good education system recognises this instead of punishing difference.

Photo: Unsplash

But Before All of That

Teachers first. Because if you want better students, you start by valuing the people standing at the front of the classroom. Every curriculum reform, every assessment redesign, every push toward systems-based learning depends entirely on having teachers with the time, training, and stability to deliver it well. Pay and respect are not a reward for the rest of the plan working. They are the precondition for it.

Back to the Chair

The teacher left with a fresh cut and, she said, “something to think about that isn’t a lesson plan, for once.” I told her I wasn’t in charge of education, and likely never would be, so none of this was about to become policy on her behalf.

“Doesn’t mean you’re wrong, though,” she said, on her way out.

I touched a related thread in our piece on why school often feels like a drive-thru — the standardised menu, the factory-model assessment, the conveyor belt nobody asked to be placed on. That piece was about the system children are served. This one is about the person serving it, and the fact that we built an entire structure assuming her humanity was optional overhead rather than the actual mechanism by which any of the rest of it works.

If you want better students, you start by valuing the people standing at the front of the classroom.

Everything else is just curriculum.

The Salon California Journal is a space for ideas, culture, and conversation from my chair in Brasschaat, Belgium. I write about beauty, technology, society, and the intersections between them.

July 15 2026

Mies van der Rohe Was Not a Minimalist

He Was a Perfectionist Who Made It Look That Way.

A client called my salon “so clean, so minimal.” Which got me thinking. We have been told that Mies van der Rohe was a minimalist. He was not. He was a perfectionist who made complexity disappear so thoroughly that simplicity became the illusion.

A client sat in the chair last week and looked around the salon with the calm expression of someone who had just walked into a room they immediately understood. “It’s so clean,” she said. “So minimal. How do you keep it this way?”

“With great effort,” I said.

She laughed. “That sounds like a very philosophical answer.”

“It’s a very practical one. Clean costs more than messy. Every surface you see is a decision. Empty space is the most expensive thing in a room.”

She looked at me differently. “Are you an interior designer on the side?”

“No,” I said. “But I spent two years studying architecture in San Diego — before a move to Belgium made it impossible to continue.”

“That’s a very specific answer for a hairdresser,” she said.

[Switches to serious face.] We have been told that Mies van der Rohe was a minimalist. He was not. He was a perfectionist who made complexity disappear so completely that the result looked effortless. That distinction matters. Minimalism, in the popular sense, is about subtraction — removing things until what remains is simple. What Mies did was different. He concealed complexity with such control that simplicity became the illusion.

1929 the year the Barcelona Pavilion was built — demolished the following year, reconstructed half a century later

1958 the year the Seagram Building was completed on Park Avenue, New York

90 ft the distance the Seagram Building is set back from Park Avenue — premium street frontage deliberately given back to the city

3 primary materials in the Barcelona Pavilion — marble, glass, and steel — placed with obsessive, relentless precision

The Barcelona Pavilion

In 1929, Mies van der Rohe built the German Pavilion for the International Exposition in Barcelona. The building was not designed to display objects. It was designed to be the object. There was almost nothing in it. A reflecting pool. Walls of green Tinian marble and Roman-tinted glass. A low, flat roof hovering over the space with no apparent effort. A pair of chairs — now so famous they have become a design cliché, which is not their fault.

The building used three materials. That sounds simple. What sounds simple is never simple.

The marble was sourced for specific reasons — colour, grain, reflective quality. The glass was tinted precisely. The steel columns, those elegant cross-shaped sections holding up the roof, were not left as raw structure. They were wrapped in chrome-plated steel panels — sheathed in mirror-polished skin. Every joint, every transition between materials, every threshold between inside and outside was resolved to a point where the resolution itself became invisible.

“We have been told that Mies van der Rohe was a minimalist. He was not. He was a perfectionist who made complexity disappear.” — The distinction that explains why his buildings feel inevitable and everything trying to imitate them feels thin.

The Fundació Mies van der Rohe in Barcelona maintains the reconstructed Pavilion — rebuilt in 1986 from the original drawings after it was demolished in 1930, just one year after it opened. That it needed to be reconstructed from drawings tells you something. The building was so far ahead of its moment that the world did not yet know how to keep it.

The Seagram Building

In 1958, Mies completed what many consider the finest office tower ever built: the Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York, designed with Philip Johnson. Bronze-toned glass and steel, set back ninety feet from the street on a granite plaza. That setback was not a regulatory requirement. It was a choice — an expensive choice, at a moment when real estate in midtown Manhattan was among the most valuable land on earth. Mies gave that space back to the city. He paid for restraint with money that the client chose to spend on absence.

The building’s facades are curtain walls of amber-tinted glass held in a bronze-finished steel frame. The I-beams running up the exterior are not structural — they are decorative mullions added to give the facade rhythm and depth. Mies used what looked like exposed structure to communicate honest construction, while the actual steel frame is fireproofed and hidden behind it. It is a very sophisticated kind of honesty: the fiction tells you the truth about how the building would like to be understood.

Simplicity Is Expensive

Here is what the word “minimalist” gets wrong when applied to Mies. Minimalism implies that things were left out because leaving things out was the goal. With Mies, things were included — every decision, every joint, every material — and then resolved to such a degree that they became invisible. That is not subtraction. That is control raised to the point where it no longer shows.

His famous phrase was “less is more.” It is almost always quoted as a design philosophy about removing things. It is almost never understood as what it actually is: a description of effort. Less visible means more work. Less apparent means more thought. Less showing means more done.

The Archive

The Art Institute of Chicago holds the largest collection of Mies van der Rohe’s architectural drawings and documents in the world — tens of thousands of items spanning his entire career. What is striking about the working drawings for the Seagram Building is not their elegance, though they are elegant. It is how many there are. The building that looks like pure simplicity required, on paper, the documentation of ten thousand decisions. That is the part no one mentions when they call it minimalism. MoMA holds further drawings, models, and documentation of his work as part of its permanent collection — a record of someone working through each problem with the patience of someone who does not believe in shortcuts.

What This Has to Do With Hair

More than you would think.

A good haircut is one where people cannot tell exactly what was done. They know something changed — they feel it, the weight is right, the shape sits correctly — but they cannot locate the specific decisions that produced the effect. That is not an accident. That is the goal. The visible technique is the failed technique. What you are trying to achieve is the result without the signature of effort left behind in it.

Mies understood this better than almost anyone in the history of architecture. He spent decades learning how to remove his own fingerprints from his buildings — how to make the work look like it had always been there, inevitable, as if the space could not have been otherwise.

“The visible technique is the failed technique. What you are trying to achieve is the result without the signature of effort left behind in it.” — True of Mies van der Rohe. Also, with some adjustments, true of a good haircut.

“Less is more” is not a design principle. It is a discipline. It costs more to do less well than to do more badly. The empty wall is harder than the full one. The quiet room is harder than the cluttered room. The single chair placed exactly right is harder than twenty chairs placed approximately.

This is also why imitations of Mies fail consistently. You can copy the vocabulary — the flat roof, the exposed steel, the open plan — and produce something that looks, from a photograph, vaguely like his work. You cannot copy the resolution. The joints give you away. The thresholds give you away. The details that Mies spent months deciding and you spent an afternoon approximating give you away every time.

Back to the Chair

My client left looking, she said, “at everything differently.” She meant the salon, I think. Maybe also the street outside. The way things are arranged when you realise someone arranged them on purpose — and then worked until the arrangement stopped looking like a decision.

That is what Mies gave to the people who walk through his buildings. Not the feeling that you are inside something designed. The feeling that you have arrived somewhere that simply is. The architecture disappears into its own intention so completely that what remains is the space — and in the space, the person standing in it.

It took forty years of work to learn how to do that. Probably more.

I touched the same thread in our piece on what it means to originate something rather than imitate it — the gap between the appearance of a thing and the labour that produced that appearance. Mies is the clearest example I know of someone who spent a career making that gap invisible. Which is why people call him a minimalist. He would have considered that a partial reading.

Architecture starts, he said, when you carefully put two bricks together. Most people who quote that line admire the modesty of the statement. What they miss is the word “carefully.”

The Salon California Journal is a space for ideas, culture, and conversation from my chair in Brasschaat, Belgium. I write about beauty, technology, society, and the intersections between them.

July 14 2026

Cash

Germany Has Quietly Said Enough: Cash, Control, and the Digital Euro

A client came back from Munich baffled that half the restaurants wouldn’t take her card. By the end of the haircut, she understood exactly why — and so, mostly, did I.

A client came in last week fresh off a trip to Munich, still mildly outraged. “I went to four restaurants,” she said, “and three of them didn’t take cards. Cash only. In Germany. The most efficient country in Europe.”

I kept cutting. “Did you find that surprising?”

“I found it insane,” she said. “It’s 2026.”

“Did the restaurants seem to be struggling because of it?”

She paused. “No, actually. They seemed fine. Busier than the place that did take cards, if anything.”

[Switches to serious face.] Germany has quietly said, enough.

While much of the world sprints toward central bank digital currencies, sold as convenience wrapped in progress, Europe’s economic engine is tapping the brakes. And for good reason.

60% +of daily transactions in Germany still happen with physical banknotes

2026 year the ECB’s digital euro project faces its next major decision point

130+ countries worldwide currently exploring or piloting a CBDC

0 passwords, signals, or updates a banknote has ever required to function

Cash Is Still King

In Germany, cash is still king. Over 60 percent of daily transactions still happen with physical banknotes. In an age obsessed with frictionless payments and cheerful surveillance, that feels almost rebellious.

The Deutsche Bundesbank tracks this habit closely, and the pattern has held remarkably steady even as contactless payment became trivially easy almost everywhere else on the continent. Germans are not technologically behind — this is one of the most digitally capable economies in Europe. The persistence of cash here is a choice, repeated daily, by millions of people who could easily do otherwise.

A Quiet Resistance

Now, as the European Central Bank pushes the digital euro, a quiet resistance is growing. Businesses, small companies, and ordinary citizens are returning to cash, partly as habit, partly as protest. They do not love the idea of every euro spent becoming another data point in someone else’s database.

Why do Germans, among Europe’s most technologically capable societies, resist digital money?

Because history leaves scars, and some nations remember theirs better than others.

Convenient, certainly. The question that’s actually being asked is what convenience costs. Photo: Unsplash

History Leaves Scars

Germany has lived through systems where control reached deep into private life. They understand what many still dismiss: a system where authorities can monitor, restrict, or even disable your access to money with a keystroke is not pure progress. It can also become a leash with a sleek interface.

This is not paranoia dressed up as policy. It is a population that has, within living memory, watched ordinary financial and personal records become instruments of control rather than mere administration — and decided, collectively and without much need for explanation to one another, that the next version of that system deserves more scrutiny than enthusiasm.

“A system where authorities can monitor, restrict, or even disable your access to money with a keystroke is not pure progress. It can also become a leash with a sleek interface.” — The sentence that made my client stop scrolling through her Munich photos.

Cash Does Not Crash

They also grasp something unfashionably practical. Cash does not crash.

When the internet fails, when servers go down, when power grids wobble, paper money still works. No password. No signal. No update required.

The debate is no longer about convenience. It is about power.

Where This Is Actually Heading

The Atlantic Council’s CBDC Tracker currently counts well over a hundred countries researching, piloting, or launching central bank digital currencies — a near-universal experiment with very little public debate about the privacy architecture underneath it. The European Central Bank insists the digital euro would be designed with privacy safeguards comparable to cash for low-value transactions. Whether that promise survives contact with a future government under fiscal or political pressure is precisely the question Germany’s caution is built around.

The thing the product was never actually built to deliver. Photo: Unsplash

The World Is Splitting in Two

The world is splitting in two. On one side, digital efficiency and centralised control. On the other, physical autonomy and resistance.

This shift could shape the future of the euro, influence the adoption of Bitcoin, and change how you protect your wealth.

Over the next two years, one truth may become painfully clear.

The one holding the information often holds the power.

Back to the Chair

My client left with her haircut and, I think, a slightly different read on her own annoyance. “So they’re not behind,” she said at the door. “They’re just… not falling for it.”

“That’s one way to put it,” I said.

I’ve watched payment systems change shape more than once across four decades behind the chair — Boston, California, Belgium — and the pitch is always the same: faster, cheaper, easier, inevitable. Cash has been declared dead by enthusiastic forecasters roughly once a decade since I started cutting hair, and it has, every single time, declined to cooperate with the obituary.

I touched a related thread in our piece on how little of what we do is actually private anymore — the gap between what a system promises and what it eventually does once the incentives shift. A digital euro promising privacy today is making a promise about itself. A government holding the keystroke that can freeze it is making a promise about its own future restraint. History tends to be a more reliable narrator of the second promise than the first.

Cash, for what it’s worth, has never once asked anyone to trust it. It just sits in the drawer, working, regardless of who’s currently in charge of believing in it.

The Salon California Journal is a space for ideas, culture, and conversation from my chair in Brasschaat, Belgium. I write about beauty, technology, society, and the intersections between them.

July 10 2026

Social Media

Not One of My Friends Has Children: A Client’s Vent About Social Media, Dating Apps, and the Bill We’re Now Paying

“How hard do you have to stress a mammal before it stops reproducing?” He didn’t wait for the cape before he started venting. By the end, neither of us had a comfortable answer.

A client was in the chair last week, around thirty, and barely waited for the cape before he started venting.

“Not one of my friends has children,” he said. “Not one.”

I kept cutting. “How many friends?”

“Fifteen, maybe twenty if you count the ones I only see at weddings. Which have also mostly stopped happening, by the way.”

He went on for a while after that. By the time he left, I had heard more about dating apps, algorithms, and mammalian reproduction than I expected to hear before lunch — most of it, frankly, hard to argue with.

“Pause on that for a second,” he said at one point. “Do you realise how badly you have to stress a mammal before it stops reproducing? Give most mammals food, safety, and a halfway decent environment, and nature takes care of the rest. Humans, apparently, built Wi-Fi and talked ourselves out of it.”

“And it’s not local,” he added. “It’s everywhere. West, East, rich countries, poor countries. The pattern repeats.”

[Switches to serious face.] He is not wrong about the pattern, and he is not wrong about the timing of his own generation, either. He is old enough to remember the promise technology made about connection, and young enough to be living with the bill.

↓ fertility rates declining across nearly every region tracked by the UN, rich and poor alike

5B+ people now active on social media platforms worldwide

1 metric most dating apps are actually built to optimise: retention, not matches

∞ scroll — the design pattern with no natural stopping point

They Don’t Really Go Out Anymore

Something has broken, especially among younger people, he said. Kids don’t dance anymore. They go out, but they don’t really go out. They perform presence. They curate existence. Every moment feels like an audition for an invisible panel of judges.

Imagine being eighteen and wanting to approach someone you like. You walk over, say the wrong thing, stumble over a sentence, act awkward for ten seconds — and suddenly you’re content. Recorded. Uploaded. Shared. Mocked by strangers before breakfast.

Of course people hesitate.

Photos: Unsplash

That Would Be Terrible for Business

So when you ask why this is happening, his answer was simple. Technology. Social media. Artificial intelligence. Algorithms.

And no — dating algorithms are not trying to help you find the love of your life. That would be terrible for business.

Dating apps optimise for one thing: retention. They want you swiping tomorrow, next week, next month. The perfect match is not the product. Your attention is.

“Dating apps optimize for one thing, retention. The perfect match is not the product. Your attention is.” — The client, somewhere around the point I stopped trimming and started listening properly.

We quietly outsourced dating, intimacy, and large parts of human courtship to a small number of publicly traded companies, all without much public debate. We handed over our social norms to profit-driven systems and then acted surprised when the results felt transactional. Investigations by outlets like The Markup, which specialises in examining how algorithms actually behave rather than how companies describe them, have repeatedly found that engagement-optimised platforms are designed around exactly this incentive — the metric that gets reported to investors is time spent, not relationships formed.

What presence used to look like, before it needed an audience. Photo: Unsplash

Tools Shape Behaviour

As a society, we treated technology like a neutral tool. It isn’t.

Tools shape behaviour. Platforms shape culture. Algorithms shape desire.

For decades we were promised that if we simply let technology scale unchecked, it would deliver democracy, freedom, happiness, and economic growth.

Well — where is it?

The Numbers Behind the Vent

Fertility rates have fallen below replacement level across most high-income countries and a growing number of middle-income ones, according to data tracked by the UN’s World Population Prospects. The decline is not confined to wealthy nations or any single culture — it spans East and West, religious and secular societies, places with generous parental leave and places with none. Researchers debate the exact weight of any single cause, but the timeline lines up uncomfortably well with the rise of smartphone-mediated dating and socialising. Correlation is not proof. It is, at minimum, a question worth sitting with.

The thing the product was never actually built to deliver. Photo: Unsplash

Back to the Chair

He left lighter than he arrived, which is usually how it goes when someone gets to say the whole thing out loud to a person who isn’t about to post a reaction to it.

I’ve cut hair across four decades now — Boston, California, Belgium — long enough to have watched several versions of “technology will finally deliver the good life” arrive, get believed, and quietly fail to show up. Each version had its true believers. Each one left a slightly different kind of bill on the table for the generation that came next. His generation’s bill happens to be denominated in swipes, screen time, and an unusually empty wedding calendar.

I touched a related thread in our piece on what actually predicts whether a relationship works — the finding, consistently, that compatibility, communication, and shared values matter more than almost anything else. None of those three things are what a retention-optimised algorithm is built to surface. They take time, proximity, and a willingness to be mocked for ten awkward seconds without an audience. The apps were never going to deliver that. It was never the business they were in.

He’s right to be unsettled. The question isn’t really about phones, or apps, or even fertility rates, in the end.

It’s about how badly you have to stress a mammal before it stops wanting to reproduce — and what it says about the environment we built, that so many of us seem to be finding out.

The Salon California Journal is a space for ideas, culture, and conversation from my chair in Brasschaat, Belgium. I write about beauty, technology, society, and the intersections between them.

July 5 2026

Happy 250th, America

Happy 250th, America: Let’s Roll the Tape

America just turned 250. Big birthday. Big fireworks. Before we light the candles and congratulate ourselves — let’s roll the tape.

A client noticed the small California flag I keep behind the chair. She’s asked about it before, but this week was different. “You must be watching all the 250th celebrations,” she said. “What do you make of it? From here?”

“From here,” I said, “you get a better view.”

She looked at me in the mirror. “Of what?”

“Of the whole thing. The part they show on television, and the part they tend to leave out.”

[Switches to serious face.] America just turned 250. Big birthday. Big fireworks. Before we light the candles and congratulate ourselves, let’s roll the tape.

250 years since the Declaration of Independence and the arguments it started

600,000+ Americans who died in the Civil War, eighty years after the founding

120,000 Japanese Americans sent to internment camps not for what they did, but for who they were

1969 the year humanity walked on the Moon, while still struggling to live together on this planet

1776. July 4. The Declaration of Independence proclaims that all men are created equal. At the same time, slavery remains legal and profitable across the colonies. Equality, apparently, arrived with terms and conditions.

1838. The Trail of Tears forces thousands of Native Americans from their land in a deadly march west.

1861. The Civil War begins. The central issue: slavery. The nation goes to war over the question of who counts as free.

1865. The war ends after more than 600,000 deaths. Days later, President Abraham Lincoln, the man who preserved the Union and ended slavery, is assassinated.

1877. A political compromise ends Reconstruction and clears the way for nearly a century of Jim Crow segregation. Progress takes one step forward, then politely holds the door open for the past.

1920. Women win the right to vote. White women, that is. Many Black women in the South still face barriers that keep them from the ballot box for decades.

1921. A white mob destroys the thriving Black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as Black Wall Street. Hundreds are killed, and an entire neighbourhood is erased.

1929. The stock market crashes. Millions lose their jobs, their savings, and their homes. Wall Street sneezes, the country catches pneumonia.

1941. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. America enters the Second World War.

1942. Over 120,000 Japanese Americans are sent to internment camps — not for what they did, but for who they were.

1945. The United States drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than 200,000 people die, most of them civilians. Victory arrives carrying an unbearable price.

1955. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till is brutally murdered in Mississippi. His death shocks the nation and fuels the Civil Rights Movement.

1963. Four African American girls are killed when white supremacists bomb the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama. Months later, President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas.

1964. The Civil Rights Act outlaws segregation, at least on paper. Changing laws proves easier than changing minds.

1965. Peaceful marchers demanding voting rights are beaten by police in Selma on what becomes known as Bloody Sunday. Months later, the Voting Rights Act becomes law.

1968. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated while fighting for equality. Two months later, Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated as well.

1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to walk on the Moon. Humanity reaches another world while still struggling to live together on this one.

Another world reached in 1969. This one still a work in progress. Photo: Unsplash / NASA

1974. President Richard Nixon resigns rather than face impeachment over the Watergate scandal. Even the cover-up needed a cover-up.

2001. September 11. Nearly 3,000 people are killed in terrorist attacks. Two decades of war follow.

2003. The United States invades Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that are never found.

2008. The housing market collapses, wiping out millions of jobs and homes. In the same year, America elects its first Black president, Barack Obama. One chapter closes in foreclosure, another opens in hope.

2020. George Floyd is murdered by police. Millions fill the streets demanding justice.

2021. A mob storms the Capitol in an attempt to overturn a presidential election they lost. The peaceful transfer of power suddenly requires a reminder.

The building at the end of the avenue. Still standing. Photo: Unsplash

Today. Mass deportations dominate the headlines. Rights continue to be contested and rolled back. The arguments have changed. The divisions remain remarkably familiar.

“Two hundred and fifty years. Genuine progress. Extraordinary achievements. Spectacular failures. A nation that has spent a quarter of a millennium arguing with itself, often at full volume.” — And somehow still going. Happy Birthday, America.

Two hundred and fifty years. Genuine progress. Extraordinary achievements. Spectacular failures. A nation that has spent a quarter of a millennium arguing with itself, often at full volume.

That is not an insult. For a country built on a document that promised everything and delivered it slowly, partially, painfully, and never quite completely — the arguing is the point. The Library of Congress holds the archive of every generation that tried to close the gap between what was promised and what was delivered. They did not always succeed. They did not stop trying.

Happy Birthday, America.

Back to the Chair

My client left quiet — which, in my experience, is not the same as leaving sad. I’ve cut hair in California long enough to know that Americans absorb hard things differently than they get credit for. They argue loudly, mourn publicly, and then, usually, get back up. It’s annoying and admirable in roughly equal measure.

Watching from Belgium, from a distance I chose freely, I think what surprises Europeans most about America is not the darkness in the tape — history is dark everywhere — but the insistence on narrating it out loud. The commission reports, the public trials, the documentaries, the memorials. Other countries bury theirs more quietly. America tends to put a plaque on it.

That is not nothing. That is, in fact, quite a lot.

Two hundred and fifty years. Still arguing. Still going.

The Salon California Journal is a space for ideas, culture, and conversation from my chair in Brasschaat, Belgium. I write about beauty, technology, society, and the intersections between them.

June 30 2026

Human Mind

By 2030, AI Files Patents: A Salon Conversation About the One Thing Machines Can’t Originate

A design student asked if AI was going to replace him. I told him about the calculator. He was not immediately reassured. Fair enough — neither was I, the first time.

A young man was in the chair last week, a design student about to graduate, asking the kind of question that already contains the answer the person is afraid of.

“Do you think AI is going to replace us?” he said. “Like, actually replace us?”

I thought about my engineering degree for a moment — a detail I don’t bring up often, mostly because nobody believes a man holding scissors studied electrical engineering at university, and explaining it usually takes longer than the haircut.

“I sat through lectures convinced the calculator had already ended my career before it started,” I said. “Spoiler: it hadn’t.”

He looked unconvinced, in the specific way the anxious look when offered reassurance instead of evidence. “Different scale, though,” he said.

“Maybe,” I admitted. “Let’s actually think it through.”

[Switches to serious face.] By 2030, AI files patents. By 2035, it directs films. By 2040, it runs companies.

Sit with that for a moment.

Most people, hearing this, reach for the exit. The ones who don’t — who get curious instead of careful — are the ones this era is being built for.

2030 projected year AI systems begin filing patents independently

40% of employers expect AI to change required skills within five years

3rd major automation wave in 200 years — mechanisation, computing, now AI

0 machines, so far, that have chosen a target worth optimising toward

The Calculator Didn’t Retire the Mathematician

History keeps offering the same lesson, and we keep forgetting it.

The calculator didn’t retire the mathematician; it handed him a rocket. The camera didn’t bury the painter; it handed her a century of cinema. Every time a machine absorbed a task, the human behind it didn’t shrink. They expanded.

I watched a smaller version of this panic in real time, in a lecture hall, decades ago. An entire room of engineering students convinced that computational tools would make the slower, more laborious parts of our training obsolete — and they were right, those parts did become obsolete. What nobody predicted accurately was what would fill the space left behind. Not less engineering. More of it, aimed at problems the previous generation didn’t have the bandwidth to attempt by hand.

The part of the process no model has figured out how to schedule. Photos: Unsplash

What AI Clears Space For

So what does AI clear space for now? The thing it cannot replicate: a mind at full stretch.

The idea that arrives at 2 a.m. uninvited. The instinct in a meeting that the data cannot locate. The leap nobody else saw coming. These aren’t soft skills. They’re the only skills a machine genuinely cannot mass-produce.

AI can write. It cannot wonder. It can calculate. It cannot dream. It can optimise endlessly toward a target — but it cannot choose the target that matters. That has always been a human job.

“AI can write. It cannot wonder. It can calculate. It cannot dream. It can optimize endlessly toward a target — but it cannot choose the target that matters.” — The part of the conversation where the student finally put his phone down.

Thinking Alongside It

The decision, then, isn’t whether to compete with AI. It’s whether to think alongside it or be replaced by the people who will.

This distinction matters more than it sounds. Competing with a system built to process more data faster than any human brain is a contest with a predetermined loser. Thinking alongside it — using it to clear the repetitive, mechanical, first-draft work out of the way so that attention can go toward the part only a human can do — is a different proposition entirely, and one with considerably better odds.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report consistently finds that the skills employers expect to matter most over the coming decade are not technical fluency with AI tools themselves, but the distinctly human layer around them — creative thinking, analytical judgment, and the ability to originate a direction worth pursuing in the first place. Researchers at Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute have made a related point repeatedly: the systems improving fastest are the ones that augment human judgment rather than attempt to replace the act of judging.

Photos: Unsplash

Use it. Build with it. But don’t hand it the one thing that’s actually yours — the willingness to originate. Every previous wave of automation removed the labour and left the authorship intact. There is no evidence yet that this one works differently, and considerable evidence — the calculator, the camera, the spreadsheet, the search engine — that authorship has always been the part worth protecting.

Use It. Build With It. Just Don’t Hand It This.

Back to the Chair

The student left with a haircut and, I think, slightly fewer reasons to lose sleep — though he was still not entirely convinced, which I respect more than instant agreement. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said at the door.

“That’s exactly the right amount of scepticism,” I said. “Just don’t let it stop you from making something this year that nothing currently existing could have made for you.”

I think about my own pivot more than I let on in the chair — engineering studies, decades behind scissors, a salon named after a place I no longer live in. None of that followed a script a calculator, or anything since, could have written for me. The tools changed considerably across that stretch of time. The willingness to point them somewhere new did not come from the tools.

I touched a related thread in our piece on what schools are actually built to produce — the idea that the most valuable output of any system, educational or technological, was never meant to be uniformity. It was meant to be someone walking out the other end with a question nobody had thought to ask yet.

The future runs on that. It always has.

The Salon California Journal is a space for ideas, culture, and conversation from my chair in Brasschaat, Belgium. I write about beauty, technology, society, and the intersections between them.

June 26 2026

20th. Century

The House Nobody Is Fixing: Three Theories About History and the Roof That Started Leaking

The twentieth century offered three grand scripts for where history was going. One of them looked like the winner. In 2026, the lights still work, the water still runs, and nobody seems particularly interested in fixing the roof.

A regular client came in last week cursing gently about the noise from his apartment building — a roof repair that, from the sound of it, had become somewhat more urgent than the building committee had anticipated when they declined to approve the budget for it three years ago.

“When did it start leaking?” I asked.

“Nobody’s sure,” he said. “Could have been last winter. Could have been the one before. You only notice when water is actually coming through the ceiling.”

I adjusted my angle. “When do you think they should have fixed it?”

“Before it started leaking,” he said, in the tone of someone who had achieved clarity the hard way.

I thought about that for the rest of the cut. About roofs. About maintenance. About all the things that continue functioning long after the moment someone should have noticed they needed attention.

[Switches to serious face.] In the twentieth century, humanity entertained three grand theories about where history was headed.

None of them were particularly optimistic about the roof.

18+ consecutive years of global democratic decline documented by Freedom House

1945 was the year the liberal international order was formally established

80 yrs of relative institutional stability the post-war framework produced

2026 the year nobody is quite sure who the caretaker is

The Three Grand Theories

The fascist story argued that history was a brutal contest between nations and races.

The strongest would crush the weak, plant its flag on the ruins, and call it destiny. Not a cheerful vision, but at least an honest one about its intentions.

The communist story agreed about the conflict but disagreed on the contestants. The real struggle, it said, was between classes. Workers and owners were locked in an unavoidable collision that would end with the triumph of the proletariat and the arrival of a worker’s paradise, administered, naturally, by a dictatorship.

The paradise part was always coming. The dictatorship arrived on schedule.

Then liberalism arrived like the sensible neighbour who suggested that perhaps not every disagreement required artillery.

Liberalism argued that history did not have to revolve around conflict at all. Human beings, regardless of race, nation, or class, shared enough interests that cooperation often made more sense than fighting. Trade could be more profitable than conquest. Agreements could be cheaper than wars. People could build things together instead of spending centuries finding new ways to destroy them.

For a while, this looked like the winning script.

The Winning Script

The post-war order that liberalism built was, by almost any historical measure, extraordinary. International institutions to manage disputes before they became armed conflicts. Trade agreements that made economic interdependence more attractive than territorial expansion. Human rights frameworks that gave individuals standing against the states that governed them. Democratic systems that provided a mechanism for changing leadership without requiring the previous leader to be carried out in a box.

It was imperfect. Spectacularly imperfect, in many places, for many people, for long stretches of time. The gap between liberalism’s principles and its practice was wide enough to drive a considerable amount of justified resentment through. But the underlying architecture held for eight decades, which is longer than either of its twentieth-century competitors managed before collapsing under the weight of their own internal contradictions.

Still standing. Still functioning. Built to last, by people who believed it needed to. Photos: Unsplash

The House That Runs Itself

Now, in 2026, the liberal story has not completely failed, but it no longer inspires the confidence it once did. By many measures, we are still living in the most prosperous, peaceful, and technologically capable period humanity has ever seen. The strange part is that it increasingly feels like nobody is in charge of maintaining it.

Our civilisation resembles a large old house. The lights still work. Water still comes out of the taps. The sewage system still carries away yesterday’s mistakes. Everything appears functional.

The problem is that nobody seems interested in fixing the roof.

The house was built with such skill and redundancy that it continues operating long after the caretakers stopped caring. We walk through the hallways assuming the structure is permanent because it survived another year. Institutions that took generations to build are treated as given — obvious features of the landscape rather than things someone constructed deliberately, maintained deliberately, and could allow to deteriorate through simple inattention.

“Houses do not collapse the day maintenance stops. They collapse years later, after enough leaks, cracks, and neglected repairs accumulate.” — The sentence the client recognised immediately. His building committee had proved the same point.

But houses do not collapse the day maintenance stops. They collapse years later, after enough leaks, cracks, and neglected repairs accumulate. And when the ceiling finally caves in, people rarely say, “The problem started today.” They usually say, “I thought someone else was taking care of that.”

The Data on Democratic Decline

Freedom House has published its Freedom in the World report annually since 1973. In their most recent assessments, the organisation has documented more than eighteen consecutive years in which the number of countries registering democratic decline exceeded those registering democratic gains — the longest continuous downturn since the index began. The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, which tracks democracy through a different methodology, reaches similar conclusions: the share of the world’s population living under democratic governance has returned to levels last seen in the 1980s. The house has been losing heat for some time. The thermometer simply wasn’t on display in the hallway.

What Maintenance Actually Looks Like

The question worth asking is not who broke the liberal order, because the answer to that is complicated, contested, and probably involves a longer list than anyone finds comfortable. The more useful question is what maintaining it actually requires.

Institutions are not self-sustaining. They require people who believe in them enough to staff them, defend them when they become inconvenient, and resist the temptation to hollow them out for short-term advantage.

Democratic norms are not enforced by the laws that describe them but by the willingness of participants to treat those norms as binding even when breaking them would be advantageous. International agreements held not because of abstract principle but because enough actors calculate that the system is more valuable intact than the gain available from defection.

None of this is dramatic. Nobody gets a monument for choosing not to exploit a loophole. Nobody’s approval rating rises because they maintained an institution rather than dismantling it for parts. The incentive structure of democratic politics often rewards exactly the kind of performance that the underlying structure can least afford — visible, short-term action over invisible, long-term maintenance.

Back to the Chair

The building committee, my client told me, had finally approved the repair budget — after the ceiling of a ground-floor flat had begun showing water damage, which was apparently the level of evidence required to convert a theoretical problem into an actual one.

“Will they fix it properly?” I asked.

He thought about it. “They’ll fix the part that’s leaking now,” he said. “Whether they check the rest of the roof while they’re up there—” He shrugged.

That seems about right.

I come from a place with a complicated relationship with the institutions that were supposed to protect people — where the gap between what structures promised and what they delivered was not theoretical but daily. Which may be why I find it easier than some to imagine those structures not being there, and harder than some to take for granted that they will simply continue to exist because they have so far.

I explored a related thread in our piece on growth, limits, and the things we treat as permanent until they aren’t — the same pattern, different domain. Systems built on assumptions that were once reasonable and have since quietly stopped being true. The difficulty of acting on a problem before the ceiling makes the argument for you.

The three grand theories of the twentieth century each had a vision of where history was going. The liberal one was the most liveable. It was also, perhaps, the most demanding — because it required not a revolutionary vanguard or a master race, but something considerably harder to sustain: a large number of ordinary people, generation after generation, choosing to maintain something they had not built and would not live to see completed.

The roof does not fix itself.

It never did. Someone just used to go up there.

The Salon California Journal is a space for ideas, culture, and conversation from my chair in Brasschaat, Belgium. I write about beauty, technology, society, and the intersections between them.

June 23 2026

Spotlight Effect

Nobody Is Watching You (And That Should Feel Better Than It Does)

A planet full of people auditioning for an audience that never showed up. A brief psychological update that might save you several hours of replaying conversations in your head.

A client came in last week carrying the distinct energy of someone who had survived an ordeal. She had gotten a haircut elsewhere the previous Friday — shorter than intended, apparently, and at an angle she had not approved — and had spent the entire weekend convinced that every person who looked in her direction was thinking about it.

“I could feel people staring at it in the supermarket,” she said.

“Did anyone say anything?” I asked.

She thought about it. “No.”

“Did anyone look up from their phones?”

“…Also no.”

“Did anyone in the supermarket appear to be thinking about anything other than their own shopping?”

She was quiet for a moment. “One man did stare at me for quite a long time,” she said. “But I think he was reading the label on the cereal behind my head.”

I kept cutting. “Psychologists have a name for what you experienced,” I said. “It’s called the spotlight effect.”

[Switches to serious face.] Let me tell you a strange psychological trick about people. Most of us spend an absurd amount of time worrying about what other people think of us. You post something online, then casually pretend not to care while checking who liked it every seven minutes. Very relaxed. Very secure.

2000 the year Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich first documented the spotlight effect in research

50% how much less people notice your appearance than you estimate, on average

7 min approximate interval at which a person checks social media after posting something they’re nervous about

0 people in the supermarket who were thinking about the haircut

The Detective in Your Head

You replay conversations in your head like a detective working a cold case.

Why did I say that?
Why did I laugh like that?
Why am I like this?

Sometimes you even change your behaviour to avoid judgment. You edit your words, soften your opinions, trim parts of yourself to fit the room. Social survival, with light self-erasure.

And somewhere in all of this, you develop a deep and sincere conviction that other people are watching you the way you are watching yourself — with the full intensity of a person who has access to all the footage, including the embarrassing bits.

The illusion is convincing because it feels so obvious. Of course you are the main character of your own experience. Of course you notice when something feels off about how you looked or sounded. The leap — the one that turns personal awareness into social terror — is assuming everyone else noticed too.

Here Is the Punchline

Psychologists call it the spotlight effect: the illusion that everyone is paying close attention to you. The name comes from research by Thomas Gilovich and colleagues at Cornell University, who asked participants to wear an embarrassing T-shirt into a room and estimate how many people noticed. Participants consistently overestimated by roughly double. The real number was dramatically lower. The spotlight they felt burning on them was, in the judgment of everyone else in the room, not particularly bright.

They are not watching. Most people are far too busy worrying about themselves. They are thinking about how they looked, what they said, whether they sounded unintelligent, or why they just waved at someone who was waving at the person standing directly behind them.

They have their own chaos. Their own awkward moments. Their own 2 a.m. humiliation archive, filed under things I said in 2019 that I am still not over.

“A planet full of people auditioning for an audience that never showed up.” — The sentence that made the client in the chair put her phone face-down on the armrest.

The audience you imagined was watching you. They were, in fact, thinking about themselves. Photos: Unsplash

The Insecure Narcissism Nobody Talks About

That is the real irony. While you think everyone is watching you and judging your every move, most people are trapped in exactly the same dynamic — except their version is aimed at themselves. We are all walking around convinced we are being observed, while hardly observing anyone.

There is a particular species of self-consciousness that presents as humility — I just don’t want to embarrass myself — but is actually a form of quiet narcissism in reverse. It places you at the centre of everyone else’s attention, in a universe where, as it turns out, everyone else has already put themselves there instead. Research published through The Conversation on social cognition has documented this pattern across cultures: the tendency to overestimate our own salience in other people’s awareness is not a personality flaw. It is simply a feature of how human attention works when turned inward.

We are, structurally, more aware of our own experience than of anyone else’s. This makes us chronically unreliable narrators of how visible we are.

What the Research Actually Found

The original spotlight effect study by Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky (2000) became one of the most replicated findings in social psychology. Follow-up research extended it in several directions: people overestimate how much others notice their nervousness, their mistakes, their clothing, their facial expressions, and even their good days. According to Verywell Mind, the spotlight effect tends to peak in social anxiety, where the perceived audience becomes not just present but critical — turning what is already an illusion into a particularly unkind one.

A Warehouse Full of Anxious People

Once you really understand the spotlight effect, something changes.

You stop performing. You stop negotiating with imaginary critics. You stop rehearsing the post-conversation analysis before the conversation has even ended. Because the spotlight was never on you.

It was just a warehouse full of anxious people, each clutching a flashlight, accidentally blinding themselves.

This does not mean other people never judge you. They do — occasionally, briefly, and then mostly forget about it because they have their own cereal label to read. What it means is that the gap between how much attention you think you are receiving and how much you are actually receiving is almost always wider than you believe. Considerably wider. And narrowing that gap is not a matter of becoming more confident. It is a matter of becoming more accurate.

What it looks like when the imaginary audience stops mattering. Photo: Unsplash

Back to the Chair

The client left with a haircut that fixed the angle from the previous week. She stood at the mirror for a long moment before saying, with some surprise, that it looked completely normal.

“Of course it does,” I said. “It always did. Nobody in the supermarket ever saw the problem because nobody in the supermarket was looking.”

She smiled the particular smile of someone who had just been handed back a weekend they had spent unnecessarily.

I come from a place where the stakes of being observed were somewhat more concrete — where standing out had consequences that went well beyond social discomfort. Which may be why the version of it that plays out here — the low-stakes, high-anxiety monitoring of imaginary audiences — reads, from the outside, as a particularly exhausting way to spend a perfectly good Saturday.

I touched a related thread in our piece on the skills quietly disappearing in a distracted age — specifically the difficulty of simply being present, without performing, without checking, without conducting a running internal audit of how you are being perceived. The spotlight effect is, in a way, the psychological tax on that difficulty. We have built lives of unprecedented self-documentation and social visibility, and then discovered, somewhat to our surprise, that it has made us more self-conscious, not less.

The good news remains what it always was. The audience is not there. It never was. The flashlights are all pointed inward.

You can put yours down whenever you like.

The Salon California Journal is a space for ideas, culture, and conversation from my chair in Brasschaat, Belgium. I write about beauty, technology, society, and the intersections between them.