Our memory deceives us: we think we know, yet time and distance shape our recollections, idealizing people, eras, and places. This cognitive bias—natural and almost necessary—sweetens the past to make the present bearable. But when it comes to the past, an uncompromising realism is required: your decisions will become more effective, freed from the grip of emotion in favor of reason.
People change little, or not at all
When we set off for new horizons, we often revisit those we left behind—filtered through the new presences and energies that now accompany us. If you were unhappy in your country of origin and now you feel good in your adopted country, you will certainly tend to embellish the past, because it must be consistent with the emotions you feel today. This is what one might call an adjustment bias: to make your present and your past coherent, you will tint your past with new colors so that they match the colors of the present. In short, you rewrite your personal history. This isn’t a bad thing—so long as you don’t make important decisions based on these distorted new assumptions.
Accepting incompatibility will save you time
Idealizing people is like building on sand: sooner or later, the illusion shapes our choices, then collapses, and reality hits us with the force of a boomerang. When we elevate someone to perfection, the slightest crack in the illusion triggers anger. The past exists for only one purpose: to help us grow and to teach us what we must retain.
People don’t change—and that’s a good thing
Assuming that people change little spares you many detours: the world becomes more readable. One’s true nature rarely stays hidden for long; actions always end up speaking, while naïveté inclines us to believe words that do nothing but feed the illusion. Often, a lucid and detached look at behavior is enough to form a judgment.
Give up the desire to change the other
Since people change little—both you and the other—the relationship with others remains broadly the same over time. It follows that the bonds we maintain rarely evolve in depth. Everything becomes simpler: it is futile to force the course of things while hoping for a miracle. A relationship that stalls today will stall again tomorrow. Better, then, to save your time and energy—either by lucidly accepting this reality, or by choosing to end it.
People sometimes change, but you will never know when
Being a parent, coach, or educator of a young person is one thing; being a friend or partner of an adult is another. In the first case, influence is real and structuring; in the second, it remains uncertain, because the other person is already formed. It is therefore wiser to welcome people as they are. Yes, people sometimes change, but no one knows when or how: it depends only on them. At that stage, there is nothing to control except your own attitude—and stoicism is called for.
Improve yourself first
Time and energy are scarce resources: it is better to devote them to those who truly matter—starting with yourself. And if there is no one to receive this precious capital, then invest in your own growth until that person appears.
If you want to be a good person, simply refrain from doing harm
If, up to now, no friend or partner has come to share your hours, perhaps you must first look at what you offer the world. For, according to the law of reciprocity, you only attract in the long run what resembles you: to meet people of value, you must learn to become one yourself. But this transformation begins less with grand declarations than with silent discipline: before trying to do good, you must refrain from doing harm. Just as you cannot paint a dusty wall a beautiful color without cleaning it, you cannot build a more just life on habits that damage it. The essential question remains—almost vertiginous: how do you go about it, concretely, to get there?
To refrain from doing harm, you must first recognize it
Harm is not only a visible wrongdoing: it often resembles a void—the absence of virtue—that seeps into thought, slips into speech, and ends up weighing on actions. By contrast, virtue is not a moral ornament, but an inner strength. Among these strengths, one supports all the others: courage. It is courage that opens the way to kindness, generosity, a sense of justice, self-mastery, and even that rare disposition called the sense of sacrifice. Without courage, values often remain mere intentions. To improve with awareness, then, is first of all to grow in virtue. And you can move forward step by step: working on one value at a time is a fruitful strategy, because virtues answer one another, reinforce one another, and spread. There is an effect of influence and proliferation: what you cultivate in one corner of yourself transforms the rest. For there is a discreet but persistent law: virtue attracts virtue, just as vice attracts vice.
People don’t change, and you can spot their character faster—so find a single criterion to separate your friends from the rest
You may be maintaining toxic relationships without even realizing it. It is up to you to sort out the people who truly matter from those who, in the end, hold you in contempt.
Finding the criterion to separate the wheat from the chaff
Your time and energy are not renewable goods: they get depleted. And yet there is always a crowd of people ready to draw from that capital—sometimes without even noticing, sometimes knowing perfectly well. Then a decisive question remains: whom should you give to, and how do you give rightly? To decide without losing yourself in endless justifications, it can be useful to adopt a simple, almost immediate criterion: not what people display at first glance—benevolence is easy to wear as a façade—but what they reveal over time, where masks hold less well. A surprisingly telling field of observation is messaging (WhatsApp or otherwise). The way someone responds to you—the delay, the tone, the precision, and above all the reality of the response—often betrays the esteem they have for you. Repeated silence speaks clearly: you do not build a friendship on absence. Systematic delay relegates you to the status of an option. And constant coldness, when you reach out warmly, calls for distance—especially if the other person refuses to explain that change.
