Author: Jean-Philippe

A Conversation That Started With a Nervous Dad in My Chair

A father brought his son in for his first proper haircut and got every part of it right. I couldn’t stop thinking about how rarely that man shows up on screen.

A father came in last week with his son, who looked to be about five and deeply suspicious of the entire enterprise. The father had clearly thought this through. He had brought a small toy car as a bargaining chip, negotiated the seat height like a diplomat, and crouched down to the boy’s eye level to explain — calmly, patiently, twice — exactly what was about to happen and why it would not hurt.

“You did this before?” I asked, mostly making conversation.

“No,” he said. “First time. I looked up how to do it properly last night.”

The boy sat through the whole thing without a single tear, mostly because his father stayed crouched beside the chair the entire time, narrating the scissors like a sports commentator covering a very low-stakes match. When it was over, the boy checked his reflection, nodded with the gravity of a man approving blueprints, and the father looked, for a moment, prouder than the haircut alone could explain.

I thought about that man for the rest of the day. Specifically, I thought about how rarely I have seen him anywhere except in my own chair.

[Switches to serious face.] Turn on a sitcom — almost any sitcom, from almost any decade of the last thirty years — and you will likely meet a different father entirely. He forgets the school play. He microwaves something that was never meant to be microwaved. He requires reminders to perform tasks a reasonably attentive teenager would manage unprompted. The mother rolls her eyes. The children exchange a knowing look. The audience laughs, because the joke has been told so often that everyone already knows the punchline before the scene starts.

Someone will say it’s just a sitcom. Just a cartoon. Just television. Perhaps. But children absorb stories long before they learn to analyse them, and lately, the story has been remarkably consistent.

2x  more likely a TV mother is shown as competent versus the father

7 hrs.  average daily screen exposure for children and teens

2-3x  more household & emotional “mental load” reported by mothers versus fathers

1 in 3  fathers say media rarely portrays them accurately

The Father Who Used to Be in the Room

Older stories did not pretend fathers were perfect. They could be stubborn, strict, occasionally wrong about nearly everything that mattered. But they were rarely irrelevant. They were protectors, however imperfect. They carried weight, however clumsily. When trouble arrived at the door, someone looked to them, and they were expected to have something to offer — even if what they offered was simply showing up.

That version of the father has not vanished from real life. I meet him regularly, in my chair, in exactly the kind of unremarkable, undocumented moment that never makes it into a script — a man crouched at his son’s eye level, narrating scissors, getting it right because he looked it up the night before. He has just largely stopped appearing on the screen that shapes how the next generation imagines what a father is for.

What the Research Actually Shows

This is not simply a grumpy observation from a man with opinions and good lighting. The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has spent years analysing exactly this pattern across thousands of hours of television and film, and its research consistently finds mothers portrayed as more competent, more emotionally grounded, and more central to family decision-making than fathers — who appear disproportionately as figures requiring patience, correction, or supervision.

None of this happened by accident or malice. Writers reach for what gets a reliable laugh, and the bumbling-dad joke reliably gets one — which is precisely what makes it durable. A joke that always lands never gets reconsidered. It simply gets repeated, season after season, until an entire generation has absorbed it as a kind of ambient weather rather than a choice someone made in a writers’ room.

“The mother carries the emotional weight of the household. The father becomes another item on her list.” — The plot of roughly four hundred consecutive sitcom episodes, summarised.

Photos: Unsplash

What Children Actually Absorb

Children do not watch television and produce a written critique afterward. They absorb it — quietly, cumulatively, without footnotes. They learn who gets listened to, who solves the problem, who carries the weight, and who exists mainly to be gently corrected by someone wiser standing just off to the side. The American Psychological Association has long documented how strongly children model the roles they repeatedly observe — in the home first, but in the surrounding culture immediately afterward, and at considerable volume. Seven hours a day of anything is not background noise. It is curriculum.

And lately, the curriculum has been oddly consistent. The mother is competent, composed, and emotionally fluent. The father is a likeable mess, one bad decision away from requiring adult supervision — adult supervision that, conveniently, the mother is always standing nearby to provide. Look closely and a pattern starts to repeat at home, too. How many young men grow up believing that rights arrive automatically while responsibilities remain conveniently optional? How many wives quietly admit, usually somewhere around the third glass of wine at a dinner party, that they feel less like a partner and more like a manager with unpaid overtime?

An Uneven Workload Wearing the Costume of Progress

Somewhere along the way, we rightly encouraged women to become stronger, more capable, more independent. That shift was overdue and remains, by any reasonable measure, a good thing. But somewhere in the same stretch of time, our collective expectations of men quietly slid in the opposite direction — not loudly, not as policy, just gradually, the way a chair settles half an inch into soft carpet until nobody remembers it used to sit higher.

Strength in one half of the household was celebrated. Strength in the other was treated as unnecessary, outdated, occasionally even faintly suspicious — as though competence and warmth in a father were a costume that might slip at any moment to reveal the sitcom version underneath. Researchers studying what sociologists now call the “mental load” — the constant, invisible work of noticing, planning, anticipating, and remembering everything a household needs — consistently find it distributed unevenly, with women carrying the larger share even in homes where both partners work full days and both would, if asked directly, describe the arrangement as equal.

The result of all this is not stronger women and stronger men.

The result is often stronger women, quietly carrying weaker men, while everyone involved insists — with complete sincerity — that the arrangement is fair.

And that is not equality. It is simply an uneven workload wearing the costume of progress.

The Mental Load, in Plain Terms

The phrase did not originate in an academic journal — it spread through ordinary conversations between exhausted parents long before researchers gave it a name. What the research has since confirmed is the shape of the thing: it is not the dishes or the school run that exhausts people, but the constant, low-grade awareness that someone has to notice these things need doing in the first place — and that, in most households, one person has quietly become the someone. Pew Research has tracked this imbalance for years across modern dual-income households, and the gap, while narrowing, remains stubbornly wide.

What a Family Actually Runs On

A family functions best when both parents carry real weight — not identical weight, not weight measured with a ruler and reported at dinner, but weight that is genuinely shared and mutually trusted. A society tends to function the same way. It does not improve when one half rises by standing on the other. It improves when both halves bring their particular strengths to a table that is actually built to hold them, rather than competing quietly to see who can carry the entire table alone while smiling for the photo.

So perhaps the more useful question is not what happened to fathers. Perhaps it is: what happened to the stories that were supposed to show children what a father carrying real weight actually looks like — so that the boys in the audience might recognise the job when it eventually lands on them, and the girls might learn to expect a partner rather than train, in advance, to become a manager.

I touched a related thread in our piece on technology and human connection — the way children absorb far more from what they observe repeatedly than from what they are told once, deliberately, in a serious tone. The mechanism here is identical. Nobody sits a child down and explains what a father is for. The culture simply runs the same scene on a loop until the lesson installs itself quietly, without anyone ever appearing to teach it.

Back to the Chair

The father and his son left with a fresh haircut, a small toy car returned safely to a pocket, and the particular satisfaction of a mission completed without incident. At the door, the boy turned around, pointed at his own head, and announced that he now looked “like Papa.” The father’s expression in that moment was not bumbling. It was not clueless. It was not a man one bad decision from requiring supervision.

It was a man who had shown up, prepared, and gotten it right — quietly enough that no script would ever think to write him in.

I come from a place where fatherhood looked considerably less negotiable and a great deal more assumed — where the question of whether a father showed up was simply not a question anyone thought to ask. Which may be why I notice the absence here a little more readily than someone raised inside it. Some things travel well across borders. It would be a shame if this turned out to be one of the things that didn’t.

What happened to our fathers? Perhaps nothing happened to them at all. Perhaps they have been here all along — crouched at eye level, narrating the scissors, getting it right the night they looked it up — quietly waiting for someone to finally write the scene where that counts as the whole story.

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.

Age Gap Relationships: The Question Society Keeps Refusing to Ask

A reality show removed age from the equation and let two people find each other first. Then the families arrived. Forty-five minutes of analysis. Very confident conclusions.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were doing what sophisticated adults with long working days do on a Tuesday evening: sitting on the couch in a state of approximate consciousness, negotiating the remote with the weary authority of two people who have been making this particular compromise for years. We landed on a reality dating show. I was prepared for the usual parade of attractive people making poor decisions in expensive locations. What I got was considerably more interesting than that.

[Switches to serious face.] The premise was simple, and the simplicity was the point. A group of men and women arrived at a resort for speed dating. There was only one rule: nobody was allowed to reveal their age. Age gap relationships — whether a feature or a problem — could not be prejudged. The producers wanted to remove one of society’s favourite shortcuts and force people to rely on chemistry, attraction, conversation, shared interests, and that increasingly rare activity known as getting to know someone.

An odd experiment, really. Imagine evaluating a person before checking the label.

8%of couples have age gaps of 10+ years

300M+

people use dating apps globally

3 in 4

adults say shared values matter more than age in a partner

40%+of adults have used an online dating service or app

The Experiment

The contestants ranged from their early twenties to around sixty. If two people felt a connection, they could spend time together exclusively. After a few days, they would enter a “commitment room” where they revealed hidden facts about themselves — including their age. At that point they could decide if they wanted to continue.

Some relationships ended there. A few people could not get past a particular detail from someone’s past. Others stumbled over the age gap once it had a number attached to it. Fair enough. Everyone has preferences, and preferences deserve respect even when they are inconvenient.

What caught my attention were the couples who chose to continue despite the surprise.

These were people who had already found what most dating apps promise and rarely deliver. They enjoyed each other’s company. They laughed together. They were attracted to one another. They shared values and ambitions. They had found, in other words, the qualities that supposedly matter. Then they discovered a number. According to Psychology Today, the factors most consistently linked to long-term relationship success are emotional compatibility, shared values, communication style, and mutual respect — none of which appear on a birth certificate.

“Please collect your belongings and proceed to the nearest socially approved partner.” — The unspoken message from families who had been in the room for forty-five minutes.

What Chemistry Actually Looks Like

After the commitment room revelation, the couples moved into apartments together in the city. This was where the experiment became less romantic and considerably more realistic.

Anyone can look compatible over candlelight and cocktails — the lighting does a great deal of heavy lifting that gets attributed to chemistry. The real test begins when two people must decide what to eat for lunch every day, share a bathroom, negotiate habits, tolerate quirks, and discover that the person they adore leaves cupboard doors open for reasons known only to them and perhaps a higher power.

Some couples struggled. Others grew stronger. This, too, is data. It tells you something that no age calculation can.

Photos: Unsplash

Then Came the Friends & Families

This was the fascinating part.

The couples had spent weeks learning about each other. Their families and friends spent less than an hour learning almost nothing — and somehow arrived with very strong opinions. Many of those opinions revolved around age gaps ranging from twenty to thirty years in either direction. Older man, younger woman. Older woman, younger man. It hardly mattered which configuration. The verdict was often swift.

Relationship denied.

Application rejected.

Please collect your belongings and proceed to the nearest socially approved partner.

What struck my wife and me was how little curiosity accompanied these judgments. Very few people seemed interested in asking what qualities had created such a strong bond in the first place. What made this person a good partner? What values did they share? How did they treat one another? Were they genuinely happy?

Those questions seemed secondary. The age gap had entered the room, and apparently no other evidence was admissible.

Society, Apparently, Needs Only a Coffee

The final stage took place at a mountain resort. One couple at a time met to decide if they would continue their relationship despite the approval, disapproval, or confusion of the people around them.

Some chose each other. Others chose society. Both decisions carried a price. That part felt true in a way that most reality television does not.

What stayed with us was the contrast. Two strangers spent weeks discovering qualities they admired in one another — intellectually, emotionally, physically — without knowing each other’s age. Then family, friends, and the general social consensus arrived, asked a handful of questions, performed roughly forty-five minutes of analysis, and confidently declared the relationship invalid because of a number.

The confidence was impressive. Scientists spend years reviewing evidence before reaching conclusions. Society apparently needs only a coffee and a first impression.

What the Research Actually Says

According to Pew Research, about 8% of married couples in the US have age gaps of ten years or more. Studies consistently show that relationship satisfaction is more strongly predicted by compatibility in values, communication patterns, and emotional intelligence than by proximity in age. The American Psychological Association notes that couples who navigate social disapproval together often develop stronger communication skills and higher relationship resilience as a result — which is one of those findings that sounds surprising until you think about it for a moment.

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.

A Conversation That Started in the Salon Chair

A client who works in software said technology is just a tool. I said a hammer was designed to hit things, though. Neither of us left entirely satisfied. That felt about right.

There is a particular kind of conversation that happens in the chair — the kind that starts as small talk and quietly refuses to stay that way. A client settled in last month, someone who works in software development, one of those people whose ease with technology comes from being inside it rather than observing it from a polite distance. We were somewhere between the consultation and the first rinse when the topic arrived, as it often does, through a side door.

“People worry too much about AI,” he said. “Technology is neutral. It’s just a tool. A hammer doesn’t decide who to hit.”

I adjusted my angle in the mirror. “A hammer was designed to hit things, though.”

A pause. The kind that means something landed somewhere it did not expect to land.

“That’s… actually different,” he said. Not quite a concession — more like a man who had just noticed a step he had been walking over his entire life without registering it was there.

We talked for the rest of the appointment. By the end I had a clearer sense of what I thought, and he had a slightly less settled relationship with the word neutral. I have been thinking about the conversation since.

[Switches to serious face.] People often say technology is neutral. That sounds comforting, right up until you remember that technology does not fall from the sky like rain. Human beings design it. Human beings fund it. Human beings decide what it should do before anyone else gets their hands on it.

2.5QTbytes

of data generated globally every single day

79%of Americans say they have little control over data collected about them

$600B+

annual digital advertising market, funded by behavioural tracking

87%of the most popular apps contain third-party tracking code

Is Technology Neutral? Start With the Gun.

Nobody looks at a gun and thinks: “Finally, something to help me bake a pie.” A gun was designed to project force. Society can spend centuries arguing about when that force is justified, regulated, or romanticised — but the purpose is not exactly hidden in the marketing material.

The same applies to technology more broadly. If you build an AI system whose business model depends on extracting value from people without their informed consent — tracking their behaviour, recording every digital twitch, packaging their insecurities for advertisers — calling that system neutral feels a bit like calling a casino a retirement plan.

Surveillance technology is not neutral. It was designed to watch. And watching is not an end in itself. Nobody spends billions collecting information for the sheer joy of alphabetising it. Information creates power. Power creates influence. Influence creates control.

And since we have not yet invented a society populated entirely by houseplants, what gets controlled is usually other human beings.

“Since we have not yet invented a society populated entirely by houseplants, what gets controlled is usually other human beings.” — The argument that tends to make the room go quiet.

The Knife Wakes Up With No Opinion on Ethics

Of course, there is another side to the argument. My client in the chair was not wrong to raise it.

A knife is a knife. It can butter toast, carve a sculpture, sit above a fireplace for decorative purposes, or participate in a family dispute that rapidly becomes a police matter. The knife itself has no moral philosophy. It wakes up every morning with no opinion whatsoever on ethics. It does not lie awake at night second-guessing its decisions.

From this perspective, asking whether technology is neutral is really asking whether a hammer is neutral — and yes, the hammer is indifferent to what you hit with it. Electricity can power a hospital or an electric chair. The internet can host a university lecture or a conspiracy theory involving lizard people and the moon. Technology is merely a tool. The responsibility belongs entirely to the people who design it and the people who use it.

This argument is not wrong. It is just incomplete. Which brings us to the third view, which is where things become genuinely interesting.

Photos: Unsplash

Neither Neutral Nor Fully Under Control

Technology is neither neutral nor fully under human control. This is the position that makes everyone in the conversation slightly uncomfortable, which is usually a reliable sign that it is the correct one.

Its creators imagine one outcome. Its users invent another. Then society takes the whole thing somewhere nobody expected, and by the time anyone notices, the journey is already well underway.

Social media was supposed to help people stay connected. A reasonable goal. A few years later, everyone was connected, angry, distracted, and arguing with strangers about things they would never have discussed face to face. People were comparing their lives to carefully filtered photographs and receiving advertisements for products they had mentioned near their phones three minutes earlier. No single engineer designed that outcome. No user intended it. Yet there it was.

The Center for Humane Technology has documented in considerable detail how platforms engineered for engagement end up optimised for outrage — because outrage keeps people scrolling longer than contentment, and longer sessions mean more data, and more data means more revenue. Nobody planned the outrage. They planned the engagement. The outrage was the furniture nobody ordered.

Technology often behaves like a guest who arrives for dinner and quietly rearranges the furniture while everyone is eating. By the time dessert arrives, nobody can quite remember where things used to be.

The Design Is the Message

Shoshana Zuboff’s work on surveillance capitalism argues that the problem is not misuse of technology — it is the intended use. The AI Now Institute at New York University has documented how AI systems encode the biases and incentives of their creators long before the public encounters them. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been making the same point since 1990: the design choices made privately, by a small number of people, become the conditions of life for everyone else. The tool shapes the hand that holds it, eventually.

Back to the Chair

My client and I did not resolve the argument. That was never the point. What we did — in the specific, unhurried space that a salon chair creates when it is working well — was arrive at a better version of the question together. He left with a trim and something to think about. I stayed with the scissors and the thought that the conversations worth having rarely begin with anyone knowing where they will end.

I come from somewhere that had a different relationship with surveillance — one less algorithmic and considerably more direct. Which may be why the polite version of the same dynamic strikes me as worth examining rather than accepting as a given. From the outside, the politeness can look like a design choice too.

We have written about the same thread from different directions here — about who benefits when AI enters the classroom and about who owns the knowledge that technology is built on. The pattern is consistent: the technology arrives, the terms are set, and the public is invited to participate in a space it did not design, under conditions it did not negotiate, in service of someone else’s business model.

So perhaps the real question is not whether technology is neutral. The real question is who designed it, who profits from it, and what habits, incentives, and dependencies it quietly builds once it escapes into the wild.

History suggests that by the time we ask that question, the furniture has usually already been moved.

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.

Expat vs Immigrant: The Word Game Nobody Admits They’re Playing

Expat or Immigrant? The Word That Changes Everything

One word sounds like a lifestyle choice. The other sounds like a life sentence. The difference has nothing to do with what you did — and everything to do with who you are.

Word association. Quick round. I say a word, you have a reaction, and we spend the rest of this pretending those reactions are neutral observations — and not five centuries of power dynamics compressed into twelve letters. Ready? “Expat.” MacBook. Flat white. Lisbon Airbnb. Correct. “Immigrant.” Different picture entirely. Same human being. Different passport. Completely different face on the customs officer.

[Switches to serious face.] The difference between an expat and an immigrant has nothing to do with behavior, education, or morality. It has everything to do with power, passports, money, and skin color. Colonialism left fingerprints on language. The vocabulary survived long after the empires collapsed.

14% of Belgium’s population is foreign-born

180+nationalities call Antwerp home

3.6MEU citizens living outside their home country

281Minternational migrants worldwide in 2025

The Word Game Nobody Admits They’re Playing

The logic is simple. From wealthy country to poorer one: expat. From poorer country to wealthy one: immigrant. One sounds adventurous and sophisticated. The other sounds like paperwork, suspicion, and a queue in a government office with posters from 2003 still on the wall.

Same journey. Different Spotify playlist. Completely different customs officer.

I am writing this from a one-person hair salon in Brasschaat — probably the world’s least likely political economist. And yet I see this play out, chair by chair, with a clarity no think-tank quite captures. People talk in salon chairs. Really talk. The mirror, the scissors, the fact that you physically cannot leave — it produces a particular kind of honesty.

The Word Game Nobody Admits They’re Playing

The logic is simple. From wealthy country to poorer one: expat. From poorer country to wealthy one: immigrant. One sounds adventurous and sophisticated. The other sounds like paperwork, suspicion, and a queue in a government office with posters from 2003 still on the wall.

Same journey. Different Spotify playlist. Completely different customs officer.

I am writing this from a one-person hair salon in Brasschaat — probably the world’s least likely political economist. And yet I see this play out, chair by chair, with a clarity no think-tank quite captures. People talk in salon chairs. Really talk. The mirror, the scissors, the fact that you physically cannot leave — it produces a particular kind of honesty.

One Is an Immigrant With a LinkedIn Profile

Here is the comparison nobody wants on a PowerPoint slide but everybody already knows:

One is an immigrant with a LinkedIn profile. The other is an immigrant without one.

The first moves to a country that is not his, barely integrates, spends most of his time with people from back home, complains about the locals, misses the food he grew up with, refuses to properly learn the language, demands the benefits of the country while protecting his own culture, and somehow gets paid more for fewer skills.

The second does the exact same thing.

He also stays close to his own people. He also misses home. He also struggles with the language. He also wants safety, opportunity, and a future for his family while holding onto the fragments of himself he could not leave behind.

But he gets paid less for harder work.

“One gets called global. The other gets called a problem. One arrives and people ask where he’s been. The other arrives and people ask why he came.”— The gap that has no good reason to exist

One arrives with a smile and says, “I moved here because the vibe is chill.” Wine is poured. People ask about his travels.

The other says, “I came because life back home was collapsing and I wanted a future for my children.” Borders tighten. Europe is full.

The irony is merciless. The man escaping boredom gets romanticized. The man escaping despair gets interrogated.

Human beings rarely judge migration itself. They judge who is doing the moving.

According to the IOM World Migration Report 2024, there are 281 million international migrants worldwide. Most are called immigrants. A few are called expats. The deciding factor is almost never the visa category.

Antwerp’s streets have always reflected whoever showed up with something to build. Photo: Unsplash

Hair, Identity, and the Mirror That Doesn’t Lie

The salon chair creates a particular kind of honesty — intimacy, eye contact via mirror, the physical inability to leave because someone currently has scissors near your head. People tell me things they would not tell a therapist. Things that actually matter.

Hair is among the most culturally loaded aspects of physical appearance. It communicates identity, pride, and belonging — or a principled refusal to perform belonging for someone else’s comfort. For migrants of colour especially, decisions about hair become a daily negotiation: how much of myself do I have to change to be accepted here?

The woman who straightens her natural hair for job interviews. The man who shaves rather than maintain a style that marks him as different. The second-generation immigrant who asks us to help reconnect with a cultural hairstyle their parents discouraged — because “it’s easier here if you blend.”

Not abstract positions. Decisions made in front of a mirror, with real consequences.

My practice is to take hair on its own terms — no hierarchy of which cultural expression is professional and which is not. That turns out, quietly, to be a political act. One I am perfectly happy to keep doing.

What We Lose When We Sort People by Passport

Cohesive cities are not built on hierarchies between expats and immigrants. They are built on shared investment in place. And you cannot ask people to invest in a city they are constantly being reminded is not quite theirs.

Immigrants — by any definition, with any passport — are net contributors. They start businesses at higher rates than native-born citizens. They fill critical gaps in healthcare, logistics, and care work. According to Eurostat, labour market participation among migrants in Belgium consistently runs above 65%. People who showed up and got straight to work — no lifestyle Instagram required.

I explored a similar pattern in my piece on AI and the future of education — where the same question applies: who gets access to the opportunity, and who gets left managing the consequences? The fault lines run in the same direction every time.

People can only contribute fully when they are welcomed fully. Not as temporary labour. As neighbours. As people who chose this place and deserve to have it choose them back.

One Chair at a Time

I am not naive enough to think this gets resolved with a haircut. Probably. I have not fully ruled it out.

But I will keep having the conversation — in this journal, in the salon, in the ordinary moments where two people from different continents talk about something real because one needed a trim and I had scissors and forty minutes.

The fact that you read this far means either you care deeply about getting this right — or you are a certified glutton for punishment. I appreciate you either way.

In this corner of Belgium, I believe we have the chance to be better. We have been, at our best moments. A port city that understood the people arriving from somewhere else were not a threat to what Antwerp was — they were the reason it became something worth defending. I believe that still. One chair at a time.

What the Algorithm Never Figured Out

Social media replaced the dinner table question. AI replaced the village elder. Neither came with a warranty for the things that actually break.

A client sat in my chair last week — a woman in her early forties, the kind of person who speaks in complete sentences and has opinions about olive oil. Between the toner and the rinse, she mentioned, almost as an aside, that she had not had a real conversation with her teenage son in six weeks. Not an argument. Not a disagreement. Just silence. He was in the same house, eating the same food. But he had moved, quietly and entirely, to somewhere she could not follow.

“He lives in his phone,” she said. “I don’t know who he’s talking to. I don’t know what he’s laughing at. I don’t even know who he is anymore.”

[Switches to serious face.] That is not a technology story. That is an attachment story. Technology is just the specific shape that particular problem is taking in 2026. And to understand why the shape matters, you have to start somewhere older.

5B+social media users worldwide in 2024

6+ hrsaverage adult daily screen time globally

47%of US teens say social media harms mental health

$600B+annual global digital advertising revenue

The Arrangement That Worked for Thousands of Years

For most of human history, the relationship between parents and children followed a simple pattern.

Children learned from their parents. They borrowed skills, values, confidence, and occasionally a healthy fear of making bad decisions. Then they would charge into the world convinced they knew everything. Reality would quickly prove otherwise. Bruised by experience, they would return home seeking comfort, advice, or sometimes just a meal and a sympathetic ear.

Then the process would repeat.

Failure. Reflection. Growth.

Over time, enough lessons accumulated to produce something rare and expensive called wisdom. The arrangement worked reasonably well for thousands of years. Every generation was, in a sense, an apprentice to the one before it — learning through proximity, through watching, through the ordinary friction of living alongside people who had already made most of the available mistakes.

Then technology arrived with a better offer.

“Parents stopped asking, ‘How was your day?’ Algorithms started asking, ‘Would you like another video?’ The algorithms won.” — This is not a criticism of algorithms. They were very good at their job.

The Most Successful Marketing Campaign in History

Social media’s original promise sounded genuinely noble. Connect people. Share ideas. Bring the world closer together. What it actually achieved was the remarkable feat of allowing an entire family to sit at the same dinner table while simultaneously existing on different planets.

People became busy constructing digital versions of themselves. These online personas were polished, filtered, inspirational, adventurous, and remarkably different from the individual sitting alone in sweatpants at two in the morning wondering why they felt unhappy. The gap between the curated self and the actual self has always existed. Social media just gave it a publish button and an audience of several hundred.

The business model was elegant in its simplicity. The platforms were free. The users were not.

Technology companies invited billions of people into their digital homes, observed every click, preference, insecurity, and desire, then packaged that information and sold access to advertisers. Humanity spent centuries protecting privacy as if it were a crown jewel, then voluntarily published breakfast, vacation photos, relationship status updates, and political opinions for strangers across six continents. According to Pew Research, nearly half of American teenagers now say social media has a mostly negative effect on their emotional wellbeing — and the majority of them continue using it anyway. History may eventually record this as the greatest marketing campaign ever conducted.

Then came advertisements. Then subscriptions. Then influencers. Because apparently it was no longer sufficient to compare yourself to your neighbors. Now you could compare yourself to carefully edited strangers from six continents at the same time.

The Attention Economy, Explained Simply

When a product is free, the product is you. The Center for Humane Technology has documented how platforms are engineered not to connect people but to capture attention — using the same psychological levers as slot machines. Outrage keeps people scrolling longer than joy. Comparison keeps people returning more reliably than satisfaction. The goal was never a healthier world. It was a longer session.

The device offers answers to every question except the ones that actually matter. Photo: Unsplash

The Village Elder in a Glowing Rectangle

And now arrives artificial intelligence. A curious development.

For generations, people turned to parents, grandparents, teachers, mentors, or trusted friends when they had questions. Today many turn to AI. Need advice? Ask AI. Need information? Ask AI. Need help writing a birthday card to your mother? Ask AI. At this rate, some people may eventually ask AI what they should ask AI.

The irony is difficult to ignore. The same species that spent millennia accumulating knowledge through trial, error, sacrifice, and discovery has now built machines capable of presenting that knowledge back to us in seconds. The village elder has been replaced by a glowing rectangle that never sleeps, never forgets, and never asks you to take out the trash.

Naturally, companies charge subscriptions for this privilege. This is not entirely unreasonable — building advanced technology costs money. Yet there is something quietly amusing about watching humanity collectively contribute centuries of knowledge, train the systems through constant interaction, and then receive a monthly invoice to access the results. A business model worthy of admiration, envy, or suspicion, depending on your perspective and the size of your inbox.

Despite All This, I Remain Optimistic

So where are we heading? Despite all of this, I remain optimistic. And I say that as someone who did not grow up with any of it — which may be why it reads, from the outside, as a stranger set of choices than it appears from within.

Human beings have survived every technological revolution so far. We survived printing presses that would supposedly ruin memory, novels that would corrupt youth, radio that would destroy conversation, television that would rot minds, and the internet that would somehow do all of the above simultaneously.

Each invention changed us. None replaced us.

The danger is not artificial intelligence. The danger is intellectual laziness. Every powerful tool tempts us to stop thinking for ourselves. A calculator can weaken arithmetic. GPS can weaken navigation. AI can weaken judgment if we allow it to do our thinking instead of assisting it. The American Psychological Association has documented the link between passive social media consumption and reduced wellbeing — it is not the technology itself that harms, but the posture we adopt toward it. Passive versus active. Consumer versus creator. Receiver versus participant.

The good news is that human beings are far more stubborn than any algorithm. Sooner or later, people recognize when convenience has become dependency. They adapt. They recalibrate. They learn. They always have.

What a Salon Chair Knows About This

The relationship between parents and children will not disappear. Neither will friendship, mentorship, or the particular quality of human attention that arrives when someone who loves you sits down and really listens. These things survived every previous invention because they provide something technology cannot deliver, regardless of how many parameters the model was trained on.

I see this in the chair. The client I mentioned at the beginning — she did not need information about her son. She had plenty of that. She needed someone to sit with the difficulty of it. To acknowledge that the silence in the same house was a specific kind of loss. That the distance was real even though the distance was three metres and a screen.

That is what we explored in a different register in our post on the distance between an expat and an immigrant — how proximity and belonging are not the same thing. You can be in the same room and be unreachable. You can be thousands of miles from home and feel completely seen. Technology tends to optimize for proximity. Human connection requires belonging.

The machine can answer a question. It cannot sit beside you after your heart has been broken. It cannot carry the particular weight of a shared family memory. It cannot love you.

At least not yet — and if that day ever arrives, humanity will undoubtedly find a way to charge a subscription for 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.

When Knowledge Stopped Being Inheritance and Became Territory

Civilization once passed ideas forward like a torch. Somewhere along the way, someone decided torches needed a licensing agreement.

There is a client who comes in every few weeks — a musician, though in Brasschaat that covers a range from conservatory-trained to “I play guitar at Christmas and the dog no longer hides under the bed.” One afternoon, between the second rinse and the final blow-dry, she told me her band had received a copyright strike for posting a video online. For their own song. Which borrowed a chord progression from an older track, which had itself borrowed from a song recorded in 1962 by someone who learned it from someone whose name nobody remembered to write down.

[Switches to serious face.] That story is more amusing as an anecdote than it is as a system. But to understand why the anecdote is the system, you have to start somewhere older.

95years 

of US copyright protection after publication

2B+works

 licensed under Creative Commons globally

81years 

“Happy Birthday” was held under copyright claimText content

6.3%of GDP

 from copyright industries in developed economiesText content

We All Arrive Carrying Borrowed Blood

We all arrive carrying borrowed blood. DNA from our parents, gestures from our surroundings, fragments of voices that marked us when we were young. A child hears a singer, watches a hero, admires a teacher, and slowly begins to imitate them. Their mannerisms slip into our posture. Their vocabulary enters our mouth. Their values begin negotiating with our conscience.

As we grow older and the hunger for knowledge expands, we start examining morality and ethics to justify our actions and ambitions. Even that process is borrowed. Our ideas are shaped by the people around us, by education, by culture, by books written by dead minds still speaking through paper and screens.

Every thought we produce carries traces of earlier thoughts.

Mathematics did not appear from nothing. Physics did not emerge fully formed. Architecture was not born in isolation. Each discipline rests on foundations built by others across centuries. Even figures like Archimedes stood on older foundations laid before him. Newton acknowledged it in the most famous sentence in the history of science: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The giants, of course, were standing on other giants. Music is the most honest about this chain — Led Zeppelin borrowed from Robert Johnson, the Rolling Stones borrowed from Muddy Waters, and hip-hop borrowed from everything that came before it and made it new. Human progress has always resembled an endless relay race where each generation grabs the torch, modifies it, and passes it forward.

So in principle, if every idea contains inherited fragments, could inspiration itself become liable for copyright?

“Civilization once treated knowledge as inheritance. Now it treats knowledge as territory. That shift did not happen by accident — it happened by design, in rooms the public was not particularly invited to enter.” — The question this raises is not a legal one. It is a civilizational one.

Hard Work Deserves Protection. This Is Not That.

Do not misunderstand the argument. Hard work deserves protection. Theft exists. People spend years refining skills, building companies, writing books, composing music, or creating inventions. A society that refuses to protect creation eventually suffocates innovation. That principle is sound and genuinely necessary.

But the modern system often feels less concerned with protecting creation and more concerned with controlling access. Governments and institutions produce laws so ambiguous that interpretation becomes a marketplace. Lobbyists influence legislation behind closed doors. Lawyers search for loopholes large enough to drive profit through them. Justice becomes elastic. Meaning bends toward whoever can afford the better argument.

What This Looks Like in Practice

“Happy Birthday to You” — the most sung song in the English language — was held under copyright claim from 1935 until 2016. Eighty-one years. Studios paid royalties every time it appeared on screen. A federal court eventually ruled the claim had no legitimate legal basis. The song had been in the public domain all along. Separately, the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act — nicknamed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act by critics — extended US copyright by twenty years, largely because the original 1928 Mickey Mouse cartoons were approaching public domain. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization, copyright industries now represent approximately 6.3% of GDP in developed economies. The question worth asking is how much of that figure protects original creators — and how much is rent on ideas that always belonged to everyone.

What Are We Becoming?

That contradiction raises a darker question.

Life evolved from a single cell into creatures capable of consciousness, imagination, mathematics, music, poetry, engineering, and art. Across millennia, humanity built pyramids, painted cathedrals, crossed oceans, composed symphonies, and dreamed impossible dreams until they became reality. Civilization advanced because people dared to imagine beyond existing limits — and because the ideas of one generation were available to the next one as raw material, not as property.

Yet during recent decades, society seems increasingly obsessed with multiplying restrictions across every part of life. Every idea becomes property. Every expression requires permission. Every invention risks becoming trapped behind ownership, licensing, patents, or legal threats. Protection slowly transforms into control. The fence keeps moving outward.

Every breakthrough in human history was built on what came before. The question is whether the rules we are building encourage or obstruct the next one. Photo: Unsplash

So the question begins to haunt the future: what are we actually building in the long term? A civilization that encourages creation through shared inheritance of knowledge — or one that slowly fences human imagination into private territory?

The View From a Salon Chair in Brasschaat

I do not have a law degree. I have a salon chair in Brasschaat and enough curiosity to ask questions that law degrees sometimes train people not to ask. What I see from that chair is this: the clients who are most alive — building things, starting over, learning new skills in their sixties — are almost universally the ones who borrow freely. They take technique from one mentor and philosophy from another. They read widely and attribute loosely. The creative inheritance model, in practice, produces more creativity than the creative ownership model. Every time.

There are genuine interests at stake. The novelist’s three years deserve protection. The musician’s catalog deserves protection. Creative Commons, founded in 2001, showed that there is a workable middle ground — two billion works now carry licenses that say “use this, build on this, share this” without abandoning the creator’s rights entirely. Open-source software built on the same principle now runs over ninety percent of the world’s supercomputers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has argued for thirty years that intellectual property law, applied without restraint, does not produce more creativity — it produces more litigation. These are not the same thing.

We have traced the same fault line in other posts — in our writing on who gets called an expat and who gets called an immigrant, and on who actually benefits when AI enters the classroom. Systems designed to protect the vulnerable tend, over time, to be repurposed to protect the powerful. Copyright law is not unique in this. It is just unusually well-funded.

Because if every generation inherited wisdom from those before it, then perhaps knowledge was never meant to belong entirely to anyone in the first place. Perhaps humanity advanced precisely because ideas were allowed to travel freely through time, changing hands like fire in the dark.

Salon California Journal

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.

The Future Got Here Early and Nobody Warned the Curriculum

Schools are still debating whether calculators are cheating. Meanwhile, your kid’s homework is being tutored by something considerably smarter than a calculator.

Full disclosure: I used an AI to help research this article about AI in education. I know. It felt like asking Netflix to write a think-piece about screen addiction — delightfully circular, possibly unhinged, and yet here we all are. The AI, for what it’s worth, was extremely helpful and did not once complain about the working conditions.

[Switches to serious face.] What I found in that research was genuinely important and only slightly terrifying. AI in education is not a future conversation. It is a right-now conversation — happening in classrooms across Belgium and Europe while the official curriculum committees are still scheduling their first meeting about it. The World Economic Forum estimates that 85% of the jobs today’s primary school students will hold simply do not yet exist. That figure, which once felt comfortably abstract, now lands like a fire alarm in a building everyone thought was fine.

60%

OF EU TEACHERS USED AI TOOLS IN 2025

4×

FASTER COMPREHENSION WITH ADAPTIVE AI TUTORS

85%

OF 2030 JOBS DON’T EXIST TODAY

1 in 3

BELGIAN STUDENTS USE AI FOR COURSEWORK WEEKLY

The Broadcast Model’s Midlife Crisis

For most of modern history, education has worked like cable TV: one channel, one schedule, the same content for everyone in the room simultaneously. The gifted student is bored. The struggling student is lost. The average student spends most of their time wondering whether this will be on the exam.

Imagine if Netflix worked that way. One film per week, chosen by a committee, broadcast to every household in Belgium at the same time. You would cancel immediately. And yet this is, give or take a few decades of incremental reform, exactly how we have been running schools.

[Back to the serious bit.] AI changes that equation at the root. An intelligent tutoring system can identify, within minutes, not just that a student got the wrong answer — but why. It serves a different explanation. Then another. It can be patient in ways that a teacher managing twenty-nine other students simply cannot afford to be.

A 2025 meta-analysis across fifteen EU school districts found that students using adaptive AI tutoring showed comprehension gains at four times the rate of those using traditional textbooks. Not because AI is magic. Because it does what no human tutor can do at scale: it adapts, constantly, to the individual.

FROM THE CLASSROOM: A TEACHER’S STORY

“I had a student who had failed the same algebra unit three years running. Within six weeks of using an AI tutor, she was helping other students. The AI found the gap — a fundamental misunderstanding about variables — that we had simply missed.”

The Skills Nobody Tests For (But Everybody Needs)

The industry calls them “soft skills.” Which is the education establishment’s way of saying: we have known for fifty years that these matter more than anything we actually assess, and we are very sorry about that.

Critical thinking. Ethical reasoning. Collaboration. Empathy. The ability to develop an original perspective and have the courage to express it — not just to prompt an AI to generate something that looks like one. These are the skills that survive. They are also, conspicuously, the skills you cannot outsource to an algorithm.

“The goal of education has never been to produce people who are good at school. It has always been to produce people who are good at life. AI just makes that distinction impossible to ignore.”

— DR. MIA VANDENBERGHE, KU LEUVEN

The countries getting AI in education right have stopped treating school as a content delivery system and started treating it as a capability development lab. Less “what can students recite?” More “what can students do with what they know?” And increasingly, what they can do includes directing, interrogating, and critically evaluating AI output — which is, arguably, the defining literacy of the next decade. The students who understand both how to use AI and when not to trust it will have an enormous advantage over those who simply know how to use it. 

Students explore AI-assisted research methods. The question is no longer whether AI belongs in the classroom — it is how to use it wisely. 

Students explore AI-assisted research methods. The question is no longer whether AI belongs in the classroom — it is how to use it wisely. Photo: Unsplash

What a Hair Salon Knows About AI in Education

I am, in the education sector’s official terminology, a continuing professional development facility that also does highlights.

More seriously: Salon California is, among other things, a space of continuous learning. I like to keep with the chemistry that evolves every season. I understand face shape, texture, and cultural context. The craft updates constantly and there are no exams — only clients who either come back or do not. I have been using AI for over a year now: to research techniques, understand better color theory, communicate across languages with clients from Belgium and beyond.

What I have found exactly mirrors what educators report. AI does not replace knowledge. It accelerates the gap between the curious and the complacent. I have lived both sides — the months before I fully committed to AI tools, and the months after. The hairdresser who leans in does not get replaced. She becomes considerably better at her job. The one who holds out is not protected by her resistance. She simply falls behind.

Curiosity, it turns out, is the metacognitive skill everything else depends on. It is not taught. It is cultivated — in spaces where questions are welcomed, in relationships that go beyond information transfer into genuine intellectual companionship. That describes both a great classroom and, we will modestly suggest, a great salon chair.

The Part Nobody Puts in the Brochure

There is a version of the AI in education story that is genuinely exciting. There is also a version that should make policymakers put down their conference lanyards and think very hard.

The benefits of AI tutoring are accruing unevenly. Schools in wealthy districts have the devices, the bandwidth, and the trained teachers to make this work. Schools in economically disadvantaged areas often have none of these things. The personalization revolution, right now, is a revolution for the privileged. This mirrors a pattern we have noticed elsewhere — we explored the same fault line in our piece on language, power, and who gets access to opportunity. The technology that could reduce inequality is currently, in many places, reproducing it.

This is the real challenge for Belgian and European education policy: not whether to embrace AI in education, but how to ensure its benefits are distributed rather than concentrated. Universal device access, teacher training at scale, open-source tools that schools can use without expensive licences — these are the questions that will determine whether AI improves equity or deepens it. A student with a basic smartphone can, today, access a private tutor of extraordinary quality at any hour in any language. That fact is either a revolution in access or a cruel irony, depending entirely on whether that student has a smartphone.

Belgium Is Getting This (Mostly) Right

There are genuine reasons for optimism here. Belgium’s Flanders region has committed to AI literacy as a core curriculum element through 2030. The EU’s Digital Education Action Plan explicitly targets underserved communities and sets binding targets for member states. UNESCO has been building open-source AI tutoring tools specifically designed for under-resourced schools globally.

The historians of education will write about this moment as either the inflection point where we finally got serious about what school is for — or the moment we handed another powerful tool to the people who already had all the others. Which version happens depends on decisions being made right now, mostly by people in committee rooms. I am watching, from my chair in Brasschaat. Taking notes. Occasionally asking uncomfortable questions of my clients who happen to be in those committee rooms.

Learning to Learn (The Actual Point)

The most profound shift AI brings is not to the curriculum but to the concept of learning itself. For generations, education has been a phase of life — something you complete, receive a certificate for, and then largely stop doing. The credential signals readiness. The learning effectively ends.

In a world where the knowledge landscape shifts quarterly, where new tools require new literacies continuously, the most valuable skill is not any particular body of knowledge. It is the capacity to acquire new knowledge efficiently, critically, and autonomously. To learn to learn. Which, as any teacher will quietly admit over a coffee, is what school was always supposed to be doing.

I am working on my small piece of it in Brasschaat. The haircut that leaves someone curious about something they were not curious about before. The conversation that reframes a problem. The question asked at the right moment in the right chair. That counts too. Probably more than anyone gives it credit for. And if you have read this far, congratulations — you are clearly the kind of person who is going to be absolutely fine in whatever the next decade throws at us.

Salon California Journal

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.