Interstate 60: The Final Frontier Is the Universe

Interstate 60: The Final Frontier Is the Universe (Interstate 60: Episodes of the Road, 2002)
There are movies you remember for a single scene, and others you remember for a question. Interstate 60 belongs to the second category, and the question it leaves hovering—long after the credits roll—isn't "what did Neal do with his life?" but something far more uncomfortable: what kind of reality do we believe we inhabit?
To get there, however, you have to travel the whole way. And the road, as suits a road movie that takes itself seriously, has its distinct stages.

The Border as a Narrative Excuse

It all starts with Turner, the first character to offer Neal a way out: if you don't fit into the place you were given, you can always leave. It is the oldest and most literal border in existence: the physical territory. You cross a line on a map and the problem, in theory, is left behind.
But the movie isn't satisfied with such a simple solution, which is where Cody comes in. With him, the idea of the border begins to shed its skin. There is no longer any new territory left to discover—the map is complete—so the border shifts inward: it becomes a mental border. It's no longer about finding a different place, but about learning to distrust the place you're already in.
That shift is the hinge of the entire film, and it interests me particularly because it's precisely the movement I tend to make when reading Taleb: the problem is never the map, but the mindset with which one reads the map.

Advertising, Museums, and Skepticism as a Method

Cody teaches Neal to distrust in increasing doses, almost like someone training a muscle.
First, something small: an advertisement. Is what it promises true? Advertising, after all, is the most domesticated form of lying: it sells the possibility of escape by purchasing a representation of another life, without having to change anything real.
Then, a step higher: the Museum of Fraudulent Art. There, the deception is no longer an exaggerated promise, but a forgery posing as an original. The viewer—any viewer, not just Neal—might be looking at a copy convinced they are looking at the source.
From there, Cody begins to aim even higher: is this life you are living the one you actually want, or is it merely the one you accepted by default? The question stops being about objects and becomes about biographies.
The complete progression, if laid out in order, is this: lie → forgery → identity → reality → universe
Each step repeats the same gesture: do not accept the explanation just because someone gave it to you. It is, at its core, a thoroughly Feyerabendians attitude—"anything goes" not as comfortable relativism, but as a systematic suspicion of any method that presents itself as the only valid one—applied first to advertising, then to art, then to one's own life, and finally to the very structure of the real. The film applies Cody's method to all of reality, and that is precisely the leap that turns it, toward the end, less into a fable about finding your calling and more into a skeptical fable in the classical sense—the kind Montaigne practiced when he asked himself que sais-je? regarding any received certainty.

Broken Causality: When the Future Writes Letters

There is a detail in the movie that often goes somewhat unnoticed, yet strikes me as central: the envelopes, the messages arriving from impossible places, the things appearing without a tidy causal explanation. They deliberately produce a sense of broken causality.
We are used to thinking in sequence: A causes B, B causes C. But in the narrative universe of Interstate 60, the opposite sometimes occurs: something that shouldn't exist yet is already exerting effects on the present. Cody knows things Neal doesn't know yet. Events seem to be prepared before Neal makes the decisions that, in theory, should have generated them.
It is a narrative trick, of course—nobody sends letters from the future—but it isn't an empty trick: it builds the sensation of a self-consistent world, where past, present, and future dialogue with one another instead of lining up in a row.
And that trick has a serious relative in physics, though it is best handled with care.

The Ending: Universes, Decisions, and a Problem Physics Has Yet to Close

When the film reaches its climax and begins showing infinite universes, alternative possibilities, and versions of Neal who took a different path, it is tempting to say that the movie "anticipated" contemporary physics. That phrasing is overly generous. The correct approach is to state something more modest: the movie takes an idea related to one of the most debated interpretations of quantum mechanics and turns it into an existential metaphor.
It is worth fully understanding which interpretation this is, because the technical detail is what gives weight to the metaphor.
Quantum mechanics describes microscopic systems as a superposition of possibilities—an electron, for example, can be described as a combination of possibility A and possibility B. The problem arises when we measure: we get a single result, A or B, never both. The traditional explanation says that measurement produces a "collapse" of that superposition. But immediately, an uncomfortable question emerges: what exactly is measuring? Why would measurement, and not any other physical interaction, produce that collapse? That is the so-called measurement problem, and it isn't about quantum mechanics functioning poorly—it works extraordinarily well, with enviable predictive precision—but rather that there is no consensus on what is physically happening when it works.
In 1957, Hugh Everett proposed a radical way out: eliminate the collapse directly from the theory. In his framework, you don't say that reality "had" both A and B and that upon observing it, one of the two options magically vanished. Instead, quantum evolution continues its course, and the observer becomes correlated with the different outcomes: in one branch, they see A; in another, they see B. This is what was later popularized as "many-worlds"—though historical accuracy requires noting that Everett spoke of "relative states," not the image of multiplying universes later inherited by science fiction.
The important point for our purposes is that this remains a disputed interpretation, not an established fact. Coexisting alongside it are the Copenhagen interpretation (measurement does produce a real collapse), Bohmian mechanics (there are additional variables with non-local dynamics), objective collapse theories (collapse would be a real physical process, not a simple update of our knowledge), and several others. Papers published even through 2026 continue to treat the measurement problem as an open question, and recent reviews on "many-worlds" point out that not even its own proponents agree on what the word "world" exactly means.
That is where it pays to be precise about the movie: it isn't proving anything; it is borrowing a question. And the question, stripped of equations, is precisely the one that permeates Neal from start to finish: what happens to the possibilities we don't live? Do they cease to exist the moment we choose, or do they remain real in some way, even if we no longer have access to them?
It is worth noting, in passing, not to confuse two things that look similar but aren't the same. Relativity does give us a picture of time that is far stranger than our everyday experience: there is no single universal "now" shared across the cosmos, which gave rise to the philosophical idea of the block universe, where past, present, and future can be thought of as parts of an already complete structure rather than a future written moment by moment. But from that picture to an envelope traveling from the future to the past, there is a massive distance—and that distance is precisely where the movie leaves physics behind and begins writing literature.

Why This Fits Neal (and Us)

The entire film is constructed around the pressures pushing Neal in different directions: what his parents want him to be, what his girlfriend expects, what his father offers him, what he himself desires without daring to say it out loud, what he could have done, and what he can still do. Cody doesn't solve that conflict for him by telling him which is "the right life"—that would betray his entire preceding skeptical method. He tells him, essentially, a single word: choose.
And there, the ending takes the idea to its metaphysical limit: what if all those possibilities, in some way, actually exist? The question works as a fable even if one knows that the physics behind it is a contested interpretation rather than a verdict. It works because it doesn't depend on Everett being right: it depends on the fact that anyone who has ever made a choice knows, in their gut, that the discarded option doesn't completely disappear. It stays there, like a branch you didn't take but that—at least in imagination, if not in physics—remains available.

The True Frontier

If you trace the complete arc of the movie, the pattern is clean: first there is a geographical border (Turner), then a mental border (Cody), followed by a series of increasingly intimate borders—advertising, the museum, one's own identity—until finally the border becomes cosmic: the universe itself.
It is an almost methodical progression, which is why Interstate 60 ends up feeling less like a conventional science fiction movie and more like a skeptical fable: it starts by asking what you want to do with your life and ends by asking what kind of reality you believe you are inhabiting. The answer, as in any good skeptical fable, is not provided. All the film leaves behind, in the end, is the habit of distrusting—advertising, the copy, the inherited life, and why not, the entire universe as we think we know it.
 

Sources consulted on the many-worlds interpretation and the measurement problem: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (entries on many-worlds and Everett's relative-state formulation) and recent publications in ScienceDirect and Oxford Academic regarding the open status of the measurement problem.

Links:
•    https://plato.sydney.edu.au/entries/qm-manyworlds/
•    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666032626000311
•    https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/qm-everett/
•    https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/61879/chapter/547555640

Prepared with AI assistance for greater clarity and precision.

Few Things Are Impossible: Means, Perseverance, and the Condition of Achievement

 
"Few things are impossible in themselves; we usually lack not the perseverance to obtain them, but the means."
— François de La Rochefoucauld

 

Introduction

The debate regarding the boundaries of human achievement perpetually oscillates between the limitations of matter and the weakness of the spirit. Confronted with this dilemma, popular wisdom often resorts to polished adages that seek to settle the issue with elegance. However, upon dissecting these ideas, we discover that what appears to be a mere lexical dispute encapsulates a complex philosophical tension between structure and agency.
«Few things are impossible in themselves; we usually lack not the perseverance to obtain them, but the means.» This maxim, attributed to François de La Rochefoucauld, condenses one of the most persistent questions in moral reflection: what truly separates man from his undertakings? Is it the scarcity of resources or the weakness of the will?
The question is not trivial. Depending on how it is answered, the emphasis shifts toward structure or toward agency, toward the conditioning world or toward the deciding subject. This essay first examines what La Rochefoucauld actually said, then reconstructs the two positions elicited by the maxim, and finally confronts them with their critics, skeptics, and philosophical antipodes, proposing a reading in which means and perseverance are not rivals, but terms in a circular relationship.

I. What La Rochefoucauld Actually Said

It is fitting to begin with a philological clarification. The maxim indeed belongs to La Rochefoucauld and appears in his Maxims (1665), specifically number 243, the original text of which reads:

"Il y a peu de choses impossibles en elles-mêmes; et l'application pour les faire réussir nous manque plus que les moyens."
(“There are very few things impossible in themselves; and rather than the means, what we lack to execute them is application.”)

The nuance is decisive. The popular Spanish translation inverts the meaning of the original: while the version in common circulation claims that means are lacking and will is abundant, the French text asserts the exact opposite: what is lacking is l'application—application, sustained effort, disciplined attention—and not the means. La Rochefoucauld places himself, therefore, on the side that holds the individual responsible rather than scarcity.
This stance is consistent with his intellectual profile. La Rochefoucauld was not a systematic academic philosopher, but a 17th-century French moralist culturally close to Jansenism—an Augustinian movement within Catholicism that stressed human corruption after the Fall and the futility of purely human virtues without divine grace. His moral psychology revolves around amour-propre (self-love): human virtues—generosity, courage, fidelity—are almost always masks for selfishness, vanity, or self-interest. Hence his radical anthropological pessimism and disenchanted lucidity: human beings deceive themselves into believing they act out of noble ideals when they are driven by their passions.

II. The Two Stances: Structure vs. Agency

Read in its popular form, the maxim sets up two opposing interpretations.

The Lack of Means

This perspective holds that desire and will are present, but material reality imposes limits. No matter how much perseverance a person has, they cannot build a bridge without materials or pursue a degree without access to education. Socioeconomic status, geographical environment, or available time act as real barriers that mere intention cannot tear down. Success depends largely on the tools and opportunities available.

The Lack of Perseverance

The opposing stance—which, let us remember, is that of the original text—argues that means are built or found when perseverance is sufficient. True persistence involves searching for, creating, or adapting resources over time. Initial scarcity sharpens ingenuity; long-term focus compensates for a poor start. Those who abandon their goals often blame the means, when in reality they lacked the discipline to sustain the effort long enough.
Each stance hits the mark in its own way. The first demystifies the "where there's a will, there's a way" mentality: recognizing the weight of means prevents unjustified guilt when poverty, physical limitations, or a lack of access to education impose real ceilings. Without a minimum material foundation, perseverance becomes an exhausting effort against an immovable wall. The second, conversely, warns that treating means as a given leads to conformism: perseverance is not repeating an action under the same conditions, but a dynamic process of learning, negotiating, developing skills, and gradually building the resources one lacked.

III. Synthesis: A Circular Relationship

Rather than mutually exclusive positions, both represent complementary dimensions of achievement. The means establish the starting point and initial viability: they determine the speed, required effort, and objective probability of success. Perseverance determines the trajectory and sustainability: it transforms potential into reality and takes charge of seeking or maximizing the available means.
In practice, the relationship between the two is circular: perseverance allows for the accumulation or creation of means, and possessing means facilitates the continuity of effort. The key lies not in the absolute primacy of one over the other, but in the ability to realistically assess available means while maintaining the discipline to expand them.

IV. The Critics of La Rochefoucauld

The Maxims generated controversy from the moment of their publication due to their demystifying view of human nature.

Jean de La Bruyère and traditional moralists considered that reducing the entire complexity of virtue to self-interest was an excessive reductionism. Among Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire admired the stylistic conciseness of La Rochefoucauld's sentences but criticized his radical pessimism for paralyzing social action and dismissing humanity's moral progress. Rousseau, for his part, rejected the idea that man's natural inclination was cold selfishness: society corrupts an underlying natural goodness. Nietzsche, admiring and critical at once, accepted the diagnosis regarding the falsity of traditional morality, but deemed it symptomatic of a "decadent" or resentful psychology, inherited from Judeo-Christian and Jansenist thought.

V. The Skeptics' Reservations

Confronted with the statement that "few things are impossible in themselves," the skeptical tradition—from ancient Pyrrhonism to the empiricism of David Hume—raises structural objections.
First, the illusion of omnipotence: asserting that almost nothing is impossible is an unfounded faith in human capacity; reality imposes physical, biological, and logical limits that neither will nor means can dissolve. Second, survivorship bias: we record exceptional cases where perseverance overcame adversity while ignoring the overwhelming majority who, with maximum application and means, failed due to chance or structural factors. Third, suspension of judgment (epoché): it is impossible to determine a priori whether the decisive factor was a lack of means, a lack of perseverance, or simply fortune (tyche); attributing success or failure to a single variable is an unfounded dogma.

VI. The Antipodes: Structure and Causality

Two major currents position themselves at the opposite extreme of the maxim.

Structural and Socioeconomic Determinism: Marx and Bourdieu

For the historical materialism of Karl Marx, the premise of The German Ideology summarizes it categorically: "It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness." Relations of production, resources, and social class condition and delimit laws, morality, and the very perception of merit. Without access to the means of production or capital, individual effort is reduced to selling labor power for subsistence. Marx would argue that the idea that "application or perseverance is lacking" is an ideological mechanism that holds the individual accountable for their fate, rendering underlying class inequality invisible.

Pierre Bourdieu deepens this critique in the sociological and cultural domain. His concept of habitus designates the system of durable dispositions that individuals internalize through primary socialization: the capacity to sustain effort, tolerance for frustration, or academic discipline are not magical attributes of the soul, but schemes ingrained by class experience. Added to this are forms of capital—economic (money and goods), cultural (embodied, objectified, and institutionalized), and social (networks and influence). Demanding the same "application" from two individuals with different initial capital is, for Bourdieu, a symbolic violence: whoever possesses adequate cultural capital has not only better means, but the habitus to use them in a way that appears to be natural talent or superior willpower.

Metaphysical Determinism: Spinoza and d'Holbach

On the metaphysical plane, fatalist philosophies maintain that free will is an illusion, which dissolves the maxim from its roots: the assertion that "we lack application" presupposes that the subject had the real alternative to apply more effort than they did.

Baruch Spinoza dismantles free will in his Ethics: everything happens necessarily by the nature of God or Nature (Deus sive Natura). His famous analogy of the conscious stone illustrates this: if a stone thrown into the air had consciousness, it would believe it was flying by its own will. Human beings believe they act out of "free will" simply because they are conscious of their desires, but ignorant of the causes that determine them. The exact amount of attention and persistence an individual displays is the necessary result of their constitution and external affects acting upon them.

Baron d'Holbach, in his System of Nature (1770), takes determinism to a radical mechanistic materialism: man is a physical entity subject to the laws of physics and biology, and his decisions and levels of motivation are nothing more than movements of the brain caused by internal and external stimuli. Under this view, reproaching someone for their "lack of perseverance" is equivalent to reproaching a flame for not burning brighter when it lacks sufficient oxygen: there is no independent "self" outside physical forces that can arbitrarily decide to "have more will."

Conclusion

La Rochefoucauld's maxim—read in its original sense or in its popularized version—has the merit of forcing us to name the two ingredients of all achievement: the means offered by the world and the application contributed by the subject. Its critics, skeptics, and philosophical antipodes fulfill a complementary function: they remind us that the will does not float in a vacuum, that structure does not explain everything, and that chance intervenes without asking for permission.

Perhaps the most honest lesson is this: before any concrete undertaking, it is wise to ask, without dogmatism, what is truly lacking. There are cases where the answer is "means," and honest effort consists of naming the structural injustice that denies them. There are cases where the answer is "application," and honest effort consists of sustaining the discipline that has not yet been deployed. Practical wisdom lies not in choosing once and for all between La Rochefoucauld and Bourdieu, or between Spinoza and the moralist of effort, but in the lucidity to distinguish, case by case, when the wall is outside and when it is inside.

Ultimately, by contrasting the popular quote with La Rochefoucauld's authentic text and confronting his view with skepticism, sociological materialism, and metaphysical determinism, the question of success overflows the simple dichotomy between means and perseverance. It compels us to realistically assess the material conditions and causal forces that shape us, while examining the responsibility with which we manage the discipline possible within our own limits.

In the classical tradition of fable literature, there are three emblematic fables that embody, from complementary angles, the tension raised by La Rochefoucauld between the availability of means and the decisive factor of application, perseverance, and effort:
 

1.    The Tortoise and the Hare (Aesop)

The supreme representation of La Rochefoucauld's original assertion ("We lack the application to make them succeed rather than the means").

o    The Means: The hare possesses all physical means to win the race: speed, agility, and favorable biomechanics. The tortoise completely lacks adequate morphological resources to compete in speed.
o    The Lack of Application: The hare loses not due to a lack of capacity or means, but due to overconfidence, distraction, and a lack of perseverance (l'application). The tortoise, through uninterrupted discipline and absolute focus on execution, compensates for a structural inferiority of means and reaches the goal.
o    Connection: Fits perfectly with the authentic version of La Rochefoucauld's Maxim 243: an abundance of means is useless if one lacks the perseverance to execute them.

2.    The Fox and the Grapes (Aesop / Jean de La Fontaine)

This fable addresses the problem from the psychological bias produced by a lack of means.

o    The Conflict: A hungry fox sees a cluster of ripe grapes high up on a vine. It attempts to reach them repeatedly, but the height exceeds its physical capabilities and means of reach.
o    The Defense Mechanism: Realizing it lacks the means to achieve its goal, the fox gives up and rationalizes its failure by saying: "They don't matter, they're sour."
o    Connection: Illustrates the distortion described by the French moralist: when human beings lack the means or application to achieve an end, they prefer to declare the goal impossible, undesirable, or unworthy, rather than recognize their own limitation or lack of sustained effort to build the ladder to reach it.

3.    The Crow and the Pitcher (Aesop)

Represents the situation where perseverance sharpens ingenuity to supply or create means that are not given beforehand.

o    The Plot: A thirsty crow finds a pitcher with a little water at the bottom, but its beak cannot reach the liquid. Instead of giving up for lack of means (a longer beak), the crow begins dropping small pebbles into the pitcher, one by one.
o    The Result: Through sheer application and patience, the water level rises until the crow can drink.
o    Connection: Reinforces the idea that constant application not only utilizes existing means, but is capable of altering the physical conditions of the environment to generate the means that were missing.

Essay created with AI assistance (Gemini; Mistral) and edited by the user.

Bion of Borysthenes.

Bion of Borysthenes. I was unaware of the existence of this philosopher; I didn't even remember ever hearing or reading about him. And now that I am reading Montaigne's Essays, I felt like searching for something related to him. And why Montaigne? Because this author mentions the philosopher Bion on a few occasions. A particularity of Montaigne is that in his work he mentions many characters and events; there, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, Pyrrhonists, and humanists coexist—that is, a plurality of voices even though he was, or at least is recognized as, a skeptic. That mix is no coincidence, but a mosaic that reinforces his skepticism: if so many philosophies contradict each other, none can claim absolute truth.

Biography. Who was Bion of Borysthenes?

Entry with the biography in J. Ferrater Mora's Dictionary of Philosophy.
BION OF BORYSTHENES (fl. 230 BC), a student in Athens of the Academic Crates (whose doctrines he harshly criticized), of the Cyrenaic Theodorus, and of the Peripatetic Theophrastus, adhered to Cynicism, which he popularized, especially through the introduction of the literary form known as the diatribe. According to Diogenes Laërtius (IV, 53), Bion of Borysthenes—who had been the slave of a rhetoric master—was distinguished by his literary skill and especially by his brilliant parodies. Now, Bion's Cynicism was much more of a hedonistic type (perhaps influenced by the Cyrenaics) than an ascetic one. Consequently, Bion—like his imitator, Teles, and like Menippus of Gadara—almost completely abandoned the old Cynic idea of effort and the hardening of the wise man to give Cynic life that rhetorical, skeptical, and realistic tone that prevailed during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Horace followed and imitated some of the literary forms developed by Bion.
J. P. Rossignol, Fragmenta Bionis Borysthenitae philosophi, Lutetiae, 1830 and F. W. A. Mullach, Fragmenta philosophorum Graecorum, II, 423 et seq. — On Bion: J. M. Hoogvliet, De vita, doctrina et scriptis Bionis, 1821. — Art. by H. von Arnim on Bion (Bion, 10) in Pauly-Wissowa.

The bronze head of a philosopher was recovered in 1901 from the Antikythera shipwreck. It was part of a life-size statue of the man. Date of creation: between the 3rd century BC and 1st century BC. It is not certain that it represents the figure of the philosopher Bion, although it is the main hypothesis most cited by art historiography. The sculpture—formally known in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens as the Philosopher of Antikythera (3rd century BC)—does not retain any inscription confirming who it is. Therefore, the attribution to Bion of Borysthenes is a probable attribution, but not a definitive one.

•    The Bion of Borysthenes hypothesis: It is the most accepted identification by various archaeologists due to the features of the portrait: an expressive face of maturity, a thick combed beard, and unkempt hair that fit the stylistic profile of Cynic philosophers (the movement to which Bion belonged).
•    Other possible attributions: Over the decades, other specialists have proposed that the portrait could represent the Cynic Antisthenes or contemporary orators/philosophers of the Hellenistic period.

Links.
•    https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:Antikythera_philosopher.JPG
•    The Bronze Head of Antikythera – A Late Classical or Very Early Hellenistic Masterpiece? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349657262_The_Bronze_Head_of_Antikythera_-_A_Late_Classical_or_Very_Early_Hellenistic_Masterpiece
•    http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/4/eh430.jsp?obj_id=5564

Bion in Montaigne's Text. He mentions Bion. "And the philosopher Bion, speaking of that king who pulled out his hair in grief, was he not witty when he said: 'Does this man think that baldness relieves grief?' Who has not seen people chew and swallow playing cards, or gorge themselves on a bag of dice, to have something on which to avenge the loss of money?" Essays. Montaigne. Book I. Chapter IV. How the soul discharges its passions upon false objects when true ones fail it.
This passage belongs to Chapter IV of Book I of the Essays, and he quotes it just as he is building a broader argument: that the soul, when overwhelmed by passion, needs to discharge itself onto something, and if it does not find the true object (the real cause of grief or anger), it invents a false one just so as not to be left with an unreleased passion. The king pulling his hair out, the gambler biting cards: they are not reasoning; they are acting out emotion on whatever surface is available.
Why Montaigne quotes him. The entire chapter is an accumulation of examples—Caligula wanting to destroy the world over his sister's death, Xerxes lashing the sea, Cyrus taking revenge on a river—that all point to the same thing: passion does not obey reason; it seeks an object even if that object is absurd or non-existent as a real cause. Montaigne is not assembling a systematic thesis (that would be the Stoic approach); he is stacking concrete cases to undermine, through empirical accumulation, the claim that human beings govern their affections with reason.
The connection with skepticism. That is the Pyrrhonian nerve of the essay. The Stoics maintained that reason could—and should—master passion. Montaigne uses these examples as evidence to the contrary: if even kings and philosophers end up biting dice or tearing out their hair, reason does not have the control attributed to it. It is not a frontal attack with a deductive argument; it is the typical technique of the essai: testing the idea with cases, not syllogisms, and letting the accumulation of anecdotes generate doubt. Montaignian skepticism does not say "this is false"; it says "look how much evidence there is that we do not know what we think we know about ourselves." It is failed self-knowledge put on display, not refuted by logic, but by observation.
Bion's specific Cynicism. Bion of Borysthenes was an itinerant philosopher with Cynic training (and also touched by Academic skepticism), famous for his biting diatribes. The phrase about baldness is Cynicism in its purest state: it takes a conventional and "noble" gesture—mourning, tearing out hair as a sign of genuine grief—and reduces it to its absurd literalness. That is the Cynic method: deflating pretension through sharp irony, showing the gap between what the gesture claims to mean and what it actually does.
Why Montaigne turns to Bion and not another. Because Cynicism and skepticism, although starting from different places, function as rhetorical allies: neither builds a positive system; both are corrosive to self-complacency—the Cynic through direct mockery of convention, the skeptic through methodical suspension of judgment. Montaigne, who distrusts any discourse that claims to own the truth about the human soul, finds in Bion's joke a perfect tool: there is no need to refute the Stoic with another treatise; a single phrase exposing the ridiculousness of the gesture is enough. It is exactly his own method on a minimal scale—the Cynic aphorism as a miniature of the skeptical essay. The skeptical essay operates by dismantling absolute certainties through exploration, systematic doubt, and argumentative detours. When that same impulse toward suspicion undergoes maximum condensation, the result is the Cynic aphorism: not a dogmatic maxim seeking to establish a truth, but a quick thrust aimed at dismantling an illusion.

He mentions Bion: "My spirit was always on that side. All things considered, it takes more effort to guard money than to earn it. If I did not do quite as much as I say, at least it cost me an effort to avoid doing it. I derived little or no profit from it. Having more spending capacity did not make it weigh any less heavily on me. For, as Bion used to say, the hairy man gets just as angry as the bald man if his hair is pulled; and once you have accustomed yourself and fixed your fantasy upon a certain pile, it ceases to be at your service. You would not dare diminish it. It is a building that, so it seems to you, will completely collapse if you touch anything. Necessity will have to grab you by the throat for you to reduce it. And previously, I used to pawn my rags and sell a horse far less forcibly and reluctantly than what then made a dent in this favorite purse, which I kept aside. But the danger lay in the fact that one can hardly establish safe limits to this desire—they are hard to find in things believed to be good—and fix a boundary to saving. One continues to enlarge the pile, increasing it from one number to another, until vilely depriving oneself of the enjoyment of one's own goods, basing everything on custody, and not using them. According to this form of use, the richest people in the world are those in charge of guarding the gates and walls of a fine city. Every wealthy man is, in my judgment, avaricious. Plato thus ranks bodily or human goods: health, beauty, strength, wealth. And wealth, he says, is not blind, but very clear-sighted when illuminated by prudence." Essays. Montaigne. Book I. Chapter XL. That the taste of goods and evils depends in large part on our opinion.
This passage is central to Chapter XL because Montaigne is not talking about money in general, but illustrating his thesis: that pleasure and pain do not reside in things themselves, but in the opinion and habit we project onto them. Bion's anecdote is the argumentative hinge of the whole fragment.
Who Bion is and why he quotes him. Bion of Borysthenes is a curious figure: he passed through the Academy, through hedonistic Cyrenaicism, and ended up fixed in the Cynic orbit through Crates (a pupil of Diogenes). He left no system of his own; he left a style—the diatribe, the sharp aphorism, the maxim that strikes without constructing doctrine. Montaigne almost certainly takes him via Plutarch (who collects the same image in On the Love of Wealth), and it serves him perfectly because Montaigne himself proceeds in this way: he does not cite authorities to ground a system, but to "essay" a personal intuition using borrowed material.
The logic of the aphorism (bald/hairy). Bion's point is of almost behavioral precision: the pain of loss is not proportional to the amount one possesses, but to the mental fixation (the "fantasy," as Montaigne says) placed upon it. It hurts the bald man just as much to have his only lock of hair pulled as it does the hairy man to lose one out of a thousand. This is what Montaigne finds in himself: he loses a horse with less anguish or pawns clothes—things he never "accumulated" with attachment—than touching his "favorite purse," precisely because that purse became a symbolic building, not an objective sum.
The skeptical link. There lies the Pyrrhonian heart of the chapter. The title itself—that the taste of goods and evils depends on our opinion—is a classic skeptical thesis: nothing is by nature (physei) good or bad, pleasant or painful; it becomes so by custom and judgment (nomos, doxa). The Pyrrhonists (Sextus Empiricus being the underlying source) held that opposing appearances have equal force (isosthenia) and that suffering arises from dogmatically adhering to the belief that a certain thing "is" valuable. Bion's example is almost a skeptical thought experiment in miniature: it shows that pain does not follow the real magnitude of the loss, but the fixed belief about the object. Montaigne does not say "saving is bad"; he suspends judgment on the objective value of money and demonstrates that suffering is an artifact of the mind, not a property of the thing.
The Cynic link. But the passage does not remain solely within epistemic relativity: it has a moral edge that is purely Cynic. The final paradox—that the richest people in the world are, strictly in terms of use, the guards who watch over the gates and walls of a city—is an inversion in the style of Diogenes: the person who "possesses" actually serves what is possessed; ownership does not liberate, it enslaves in perpetual vigilance. It is the same gesture Diogenes makes by living in a tub and mocking Alexander: real wealth is the reduction of need (autarkeia), not accumulation. When Montaigne says "every wealthy man is, in my judgment, avaricious," he is applying that Cynic diagnosis of pleonexia (the desire that has no natural limit, "safe limits are hard to find… in things believed to be good").
How they connect. Skepticism provides the epistemology (why pain/pleasure has no objective foundation, only opinion); Cynicism provides the ethics (what to do about it: do not fix your fantasy on the pile, because to possess is to begin serving). Montaigne merges them without declaring allegiance to any school—which is exactly his method: he uses Bion as one uses another's tool to carve out an observation about oneself, not to prove a system. Cynic ethics answers the question of what to do after discovering that nothing has intrinsic value. Cynic ethics is active and provocative; skeptical ethics is passive and adaptive. An echo that might resonate: the quote from Plato at the end (wealth as blind except when illuminated by prudence) is almost an anti-Cynic closure within the same paragraph—it tempers the radicalism of Bion and Diogenes with the idea that wealth is not bad in itself, but in the blind relationship one maintains with it. Here Montaigne returns to his usual tone: he does not advocate for asceticism, but for clarity regarding one's own attachment.

He mentions Bion. "They affirm, he says, by virtue of the reason of their judgment, that whatever is told about hell and future punishments is fiction. But when the opportunity to experience it arises, when old age or illness brings them close to death, the terror of it infuses them with a new belief out of horror for their future condition. And since such impressions make minds fearful, he forbids in his laws any instruction regarding such threats, as well as the belief that any evil can come to man from the gods except with a view to a greater good, when appropriate and with a medicinal effect. They tell of Bion that, infected by the atheisms of Theodorus, he had long mocked religious men; but that, when death caught him by surprise, he surrendered to the most extreme superstitions, as if the gods vanished and re-emerged according to Bion's need." Essays. Montaigne. Book II. Chapter XII. An Apology for Raymond Sebond.
This passage belongs to one of the sharpest moments of the Apology for Raymond Sebond, the longest and most radical chapter of the Essays, where Montaigne develops his Pyrrhonian skepticism against the presumption of human reason.
The argument Montaigne is building. Just before mentioning Bion, Montaigne is discussing an idea he takes from Plato (The Laws): that although hell and future punishments may be "fictions"—useful constructs, not rationally proven truths—those same fictions re-emerge with full force the moment death approaches. Old age or illness causes terror to reactivate a belief that reason had discarded. For this reason, he says, the prudent lawmaker forbids teaching that the gods can do harm to man except for a "medicinal" purpose (a kind of therapeutic, non-dogmatic theology).
Bion as concrete proof of that thesis. Bion of Borysthenes is the historical example Montaigne uses so as not to remain in abstraction. Bion was a curious figure: he passed through several schools (including the Cyrenaic, hence the "contagion" with the atheism of Theodorus, a follower of that movement) and ended up adopting the Cynic style—a wandering life, biting satire, provocative contempt for conventions, including religious ones. He became famous for openly mocking pious people.
But according to the anecdote (which comes from Diogenes Laërtius, and which Montaigne probably knew through Plutarch), when death came upon him, Bion abandoned that posture and fell into the most extreme superstition. Montaigne concludes with a devastating phrase: "as if the gods vanished and re-emerged according to Bion's need"—that is, Bion's gods were not the object of a stable conviction (neither in atheism nor in faith), but a reflection of his own mood and fear.
How it connects to Montaigne's skepticism. Here is the core: Montaigne does not use this example to mock Bion or to defend official religion. He uses it to demonstrate the radical inconstancy of human reason in the face of passions, which is the engine of the entire Apology. His point is: Bion's religious "Cynicism" or skepticism was not a solid rational conclusion, but an intellectual posture, almost a rhetorical fashion (Bion was famous precisely for his biting wit, for dressing philosophy "in courtezan robes," according to Eratosthenes' famous phrase about him). It was surface skepticism, maintained as long as there was nothing at stake. When a real existential threat appears (death), that position collapses instantly, revealing that underneath there was no deep rational conviction, but pure fear disguised as philosophical certainty.
This is exactly the type of argument Montaigne repeats time and again in the Apology: reason does not govern man; it is governed by him—by his humors, his fear, his vanity. Neither the defiant atheism of Bion alive nor his desperate superstition dying were the result of a stable judgment; they are two sides of the same weakness. That is why Montaigne, later in the same chapter, will extend this distrust to all human claims of knowing ultimate truths through reason alone, which forms the basis of his fideism: if not even the sharpest philosopher can maintain a firm stance in the face of death, what authority does reason have to rule on the divine?
In summary: Bion is mentioned neither as a villain nor as a buffoon, but as a mirror of man in general—living proof that "rational" convictions regarding gods and death are, for Montaigne, more an effect of circumstances and passions than a stable achievement of the understanding.
Connection with modern skepticism. I will take a phrase to relate it to a more modern and current reading of skepticism. The phrase "maintained as long as there was nothing at stake" is the perfect gateway to connect Montaigne with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's contemporary concept of "skin in the game," as well as his critique of superficial and bookish skepticism. Fake skepticism vs. flesh-and-blood skepticism. For Taleb (and for Montaigne), there is a vast difference between opining from the comfort of an ivory tower and suffering the real consequences of your actions or beliefs.

•    Bion (the case Montaigne refers to): Played at being a skeptic or a Cynic when everything was going well. He had an elegant "opinion" about death and the gods, but it was a theoretical stance.
•    The acid test: When the Grim Reaper arrives (the real threat), that intellectual conviction evaporates because it was never anchored in the reality of "skin in the game." It was merely rhetoric to impress at banquets. Skin in the Game. In Taleb's philosophy, no one can consider themselves the owner of a true belief or knowledge if they have nothing to lose by it. If you say you do not fear death or that you despise religion, but you enter into absolute panic and recant everything at the first symptom of a serious illness, it proves that your stance lacked skin in the game. Montaigne, being a great precursor of this existential empiricism (bringing philosophy down from its metaphysical pedestal and placing it directly on the terrain of everyday experience), detested armchair philosophy. For him, ideas are worth as much as a man's behavior when life gets difficult. Montaigne's true skepticism is not an abstract mental game; it is a humble acceptance of our bodily weakness and our passions. Superficial skepticism vs. deep skepticism. Taleb frequently distinguishes between intellectuals who theorize about the world ("intellectual yet idiots" or IYI) and those who operate in the real world under risk.
•    Bion's superficial skepticism survives only in the absence of risk.
•    Montaigne's radical skepticism, by contrast, is profoundly honest: it recognizes that reason is weak before passions and fear because both share the same mortal flesh.

Why do some authors label Bion as a "hedonistic philosopher"?
A biography defines him as: "Bion of Borysthenes (c. 325–250 BC) was a Cynic philosopher known for his provocative style and his hedonistic approach within Cynicism."
They call him a hedonistic philosopher (or, more precisely, a hedonistic Cynic) due to his blend of Cynicism with Cyrenaic influences.
Diogenes Laërtius places him among the Academics due to his initial training, but modern scholars consider him an atypical Cynic.
He studied under several schools: the Academy (Xenocrates and Crates of Athens), Cynics, Theodorus the Atheist (a Cyrenaic philosopher), and Theophrastus (Peripatetic). The influence of Theodorus and the Cyrenaics is key: they advocated pleasure (especially physical and immediate pleasure) as the supreme good.
His Cynicism was not the ascetic and rigorous style of Diogenes of Sinope. According to sources like Ferrater Mora's dictionary, "Bion's Cynicism was much more of a hedonistic type (perhaps influenced by the Cyrenaics) than an ascetic one." He largely abandoned the idea of the extreme hardening of the wise man and adopted a more rhetorical, skeptical, realistic, and accommodating tone.
He accepted, in the Cyrenaic style, making use of present circumstances (wealth or poverty) and diverse social roles, including relationships with kings (such as his connection with Antigonus Gonatas). Diogenes Laërtius describes him as someone who sometimes lived in a degree of luxury, moved from city to city, adopted young men, and was a "lover of himself," though these accounts stem partly from hostile sources.
In summary: he was not a pure hedonist in the style of Aristippus of Cyrene, but an eclectic Cynic who softened classic Cynic rigor with hedonistic/Cyrenaic elements. That is why Spanish Wikipedia presents him directly as a "hedonistic Cynic and skeptical philosopher," and he is known for popularizing a more flexible and satirical version of Cynicism that influenced the diatribe and Latin authors such as Horace.
The label reflects that philosophical hybridization rather than a systematic defense of pleasure as the sole end. He is difficult to fit into a single neat box, which is why labels often appear together or with nuances: atypical Cynic, hedonistic Cynic, eclectic, etc. He is difficult to fit because he did not allow himself to be boxed in. That very difficulty is what makes him interesting. That combination makes him a hybrid figure of the early Hellenistic period: Cynicism was transforming, moving away from harsher rigorism and drawing closer to more rhetorical, skeptical, and "realistic" forms. Bion precisely represents that transitional moment. That is why modern scholars usually say "Cynic with strong hedonistic/Cyrenaic inclinations" or "atypical Cynic" instead of forcing him into a single label.

Links:
•    https://www.ferratermora.org/ency_filosofo_ad_bion.html
•    https://symploke.trujaman.org/Bion_de_Bor%EDstenes
•    https://www.informacion.es/sociedad/2026/05/13/bion-boristenes-filosofo-cinico-hedonista-130091097.html
•    https://concepto.de/hedonismo/
•    https://e-torredebabel.com/compendio-de-las-vidas-de-los-filosofos-antiguos-bion/
 

Something interesting to me, given my interest in chance, randomness, luck, and fortune, are these two fragments: "Far from considering her a deity properly speaking, the early Cynics despised Fortune, refused to take her seriously, and interpreted her blows as a stimulus for moral effort. However, starting with Bion of Borysthenes (c. 335–245 BC), their attitude changed significantly. They sought to accept whatever she sent them, regarding her as the khorēgos of the great human comedy, the director who assigns each person their role on the stage of life, and whom, therefore, we must obey." "Only one of his ideas cannot be attributed to the first generation of Cynic thought. It arises when Bion expresses himself regarding the idea of Tychē, Fortune. In fragment 16 Kindstrand, preserved in Teles' diatribe On Self-Sufficiency, Bion compares Fortune to a poet. The poet distributes roles to actors, and good actors know how to perform well in their roles. Similarly, Fortune distributes roles to men, and good men know how to accept the roles assigned to them: one is a king and another a beggar; one commands and the other is commanded. Consequently, Bion advises every man to accept the role assigned to him. This attitude is markedly different from that maintained by earlier Cynics, who criticized Fortune and laughed at her attacks. But this is the only aspect, I believe, that does not agree with Diogenes. Thus Bion could very well have found the content of his critiques in Cynicism, even if he expressed them in his own particular style." The Cynics. R. Bracht Branham; M.-O. Goulet-Cazé (Eds). Seix Barral Manuales de la Cultura. 2000.

The fragment highlights one of the most interesting philosophical evolutions of Cynicism: the transition from frontal combat to strategic acceptance of life. Early Cynicism (Diogenes, Crates): Provocation and combat. Initially, Tychē (Fortune/Chance) was not seen as a sacred destiny, but as a rival to be challenged. For the early Cynics, setbacks of luck were not misfortunes, but a "moral gymnastics" (askēsis). Poverty or exile were not suffered: they were actively used to demonstrate the wise man's autarky (self-sufficiency) and apathy (imperturbability). The shift with Bion of Borysthenes: The theater metaphor. Bion introduces a crucial nuance that would enormously influence later Stoicism (especially Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius): life as a theatrical play.
Fortune is no longer an enemy to fight against, but the khorēgos (the producer/director of the play). You do not choose whether you play the role of king, beggar, or servant; your sole moral duty is to flawlessly act the role assigned to you by the director, without wishing for another.

The diatribe. *"Quite simply, the map of Greek literature was never the same after the Cynics. Nor were their innovations limited to prose: the Cynics wrote in iambics, elegiacs, and hexameters, and Cercidas invented a new meter, the meliamb, for a political poem from a Cynic perspective.
The diatribe, frequently associated with Bion of Borysthenes, constitutes another fine example of a form that was certainly extra-literary or oral in the Classical period, and which the Cynics established as a characteristic part of their own literary repertoire."* The Cynics. R. Bracht Branham; M.-O. Goulet-Cazé (Eds). Seix Barral Manuales de la Cultura. 2000.

 The concept of the diatribe as a written work arose in the 3rd century BC, attributed to Bion of Borysthenes, the Greek Cynic philosopher. Just as some authors credit him with inventing it as a genre, others argue that he brought it from the oral world into the written world, and others hold that he was the one who popularized it.
A diatribe (from Classical Greek: διατριβή, diatribē, "spoken discourse," "lecture") is a violent, sometimes abusive text directed against individuals or social groups. As a written work, its purpose was to reach a broader audience, although at that time it did not carry the somewhat offensive connotation the word has today; rather, it consisted of Bion's humorous yet sharp attacks against human flaws and weaknesses.
In its original meaning, this term named brief ethical speeches delivered by Cynic and Stoic philosophers. However, due to the polemical tone that typically characterized these popular moral lectures, the concept quickly shifted toward its modern sense of invective.
 

Core sources:
•    The Essays. Michel de Montaigne. (According to the 1595 edition by Marie de Gournay). Prologue by Antoine Compagnon. Edited and translated by J. Bayod Brau. Digital edition. Epublibre 2014. https://archive.org/details/montaigne-michel-de.-los-ensayos-epl-fs-1580-2014/mode/2up
•    https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/ensayos-de-montaigne--0/html/
•    Montaigne. Essays (I)(II)(III). Complete edition. Ediciones Orbis. 1984. Translation by Juan G. de Luaces.

Transparency note: This article was drafted with the assistance of Claude, Gemini, and Grok for text analysis and structuring. The illustrations, informative graphics, and visual infographics were generated with the support of Gemini, Copilot, and ChatGPT.

The Anomaly of the Evaporated Sale: Chronicle of a Non-Exchange and Its Skeptical Deconstruction

I. The Chronicle of the Events
About five months ago, while browsing through the main feed of Facebook posts—where algorithms distribute content in an ostensibly random manner—I stumbled upon a message inside a group dedicated to crocheting. A user expressed her intention to sell amigurumis for the explicit purpose of paying for her university studies. I perceived a concrete opportunity for a commercial exchange in that post: purchasing her handcrafted items to later list them on my own sales channels, obtaining a legitimate profit margin for the intermediation.
Upon examining her initial Facebook profile, I noticed it lacked a personal photograph but included a direct link to an Instagram account. Upon accessing the latter network, I verified a series of posts with photographs of amigurumis that exhibited remarkable technical execution, featuring well-crafted pieces and neat finishes. However, the catalog suffered from a fundamental operational omission: none of the images specified the size of the pieces or their respective prices. Given that I conduct my business through formal platforms that apply sales commissions, having unit costs and exact dimensions was an indispensable requirement to calculate the net profit margin, without there being the slightest intention on my part to haggle over the value of her work or hinder the process.
I wrote a direct message via Instagram, drafted with formal courtesy. I introduced myself transparently using my official profile—which displays my face, real name, associated social networks, and usual contact details—and inquired about the physical dimensions and price quotes of the products. Following that first interaction, I observed a striking phenomenon: the seller proceeded to edit her old posts to add the sizes of the pieces, but regarding prices, she instructed me to ask individually for the specific models that interested me. Although her profile bio claimed she had a "catalog"—a concept that commercially assumes a structured inventory list with fixed prices—the seller opted for a trickled-information management scheme.
I agreed to adapt to her methodology. I initially asked about a first batch of three models, whose values she sent me one by one. After receiving the figures, I repeated the procedure by asking about a second batch of three pieces. Up to that point, the accumulated sum of the quote had already reached a considerable figure for this type of craft production. My effective budget allocated for this operation represented a significant and ample amount for the scale of the venture, equivalent to a substantial volume of retail purchasing. Even the logistical aspects regarding shipping or the meeting point at the train station were extremely simple to resolve, given that we shared the same direct railway line, and failing that, private courier costs were on me.
The anomaly occurred immediately after sending a third message inquiring about quotes for three additional pieces. Instead of responding with the requested prices, the seller proceeded to delete all previous messages where she had provided the numerical values and permanently cut off communication. She did not block my profile; in fact, I still have access to her account and, to this day, I observe how she regularly posts new products. Faced with her categorical silence, I opted for the logical course of action: not to insist. Sometime later, I noticed that her Instagram account had been updated: the user added a profile picture and incorporated her real first and last name into the description.
Analyzing the counterpart's behavior from standard commercial practice yields a purely absurd result. My conduct lacked opacity: I operated with public and verifiable credentials. If the situation concealed a scam attempt, that behavior would have required capturing the money beforehand—something that was never requested or executed. If the cause for the retreat lay in a distrust of a stranger, my profile offered absolute transparency and, paradoxically, it was she who ended up exposing her personal details later. Nor does she seem to have routed the sale through an alternative channel, as the exact same pieces remained displayed on her social network without being sold. The final balance of the event is a contradiction: the buyer was left without the merchandise, the seller was left without the money, and a transaction that was potentially beneficial to both parties dissolved into thin air without a single rational explanation.

II. Analytical Deconstruction and Intersecting Perspectives
To unravel the nature of this interrupted interaction, it is futile to force reality into a linear narrative that attributes the outcome to a single decisive factor. Human behavior in unstructured digital environments responds to multiple overlapping dynamics that can be examined by breaking down each participant's conceptual frameworks, the gap in their operating models, and insights drawn from empirical and philosophical analysis.

1. The Buyer's Perspective: The Logic of the Symmetrical Commercial Operator
From the buyer's standpoint, the interaction unfolded under the premise of rational market behavior. In economic theory and the daily practice of commerce, a basic transaction responds to a vector of known variables:

Supply + Clear Information (Dimensions and Price) = Purchase Decision

By presenting oneself with a verifiable identity on social networks, immediate liquidity to execute the payment, and the explicit willingness to absorb logistical costs without disputing the seller's margin, the buyer reduces the counterparty risk for the merchant to zero.
Consequently, the abrupt interruption of the dialogue breaks the principle of mutual benefit that governs voluntary exchanges. The buyer's mind—accustomed to transparent processes and the evaluation of opportunity costs—seeks to resolve the anomaly by fitting it into logical-deductive categories:

•    Is there a foiled fraud attempt?
•    An unfounded fear of identity theft?
•    An insurmountable logistical inexperience?

When examining the empirical evidence and noting that none of these hypotheses has sufficient backing (there was no request for money, the pieces were not sold to third parties, and the seller's identity was eventually formalized later), the situation results in a state of analytical perplexity.

2. The Counterparty's Perspective: Psychological Opacity and Sudden Scale
Although the internal mental state of the seller remains inaccessible, it is possible to reconstruct the likely variables that conditioned her behavior by applying the psychology of uncertainty in novice merchants:

•    The Vertigo of Scale and Lack of Infrastructure: For an informal seller monetizing a craft hobby sporadically, the standard dynamic consists of single-item sales and slow negotiations with retail customers. Facing a buyer who, in the span of three messages, scales the accumulated quote to a high amount—with an explicit spending horizon far above that of an average client—is not necessarily perceived as a commercial success, but as a threat to her operational capacity. The prospect of having to pack, produce, or manage a massive volume of pieces for which she lacks supplies, time, and structured logistics triggers a phenomenon of paralysis or burnout.
•    Lack of Skin in the Game: By not operating as a formalized business whose survival depends on commercial reputation and cash flow, the seller incurs no real costs by abandoning the transaction. The opportunity cost of losing a high-volume purchase is an abstract concept to her compared to the tangible, immediate cost of managing the stress the operation demands.
•    Algorithmic Paranoia and Asymmetric Risk Perception: Informal digital commerce is rife with criminal dynamics (fake transfer scams, payment triangulation, stolen accounts). Paradoxically, the behavior of an "overly professional" buyer—who doesn't haggle, requests technical information all at once, operates with volume, and proposes swift coordination—can be interpreted by an inexperienced mind conditioned by distrust bias as a suspicious behavioral pattern. Unable to process whether the interaction is legitimate or a complex trick, the primary biological response is flight: deleting the price history to eliminate the commitment made and taking shelter in defensive silence.

3. The Neutral View: The Clash Between Industrial Culture and Craft Culture
From an outside perspective detached from the interests of both parties, the event ceases to be an individual mystery and reveals itself as a clash between two incompatible paradigms that coexist in contemporary digital commerce:

The null outcome is not the product of targeted malice or a strategic calculation, but rather the breakdown of communication caused by the incompatibility of these two operational models.

III. Theoretical Frameworks and Philosophical Interpretation
By elevating the event from a commercial anecdote to a philosophical and epistemological scale, the interaction transforms into a practical exercise on managing uncertainty, the opacity of other minds, and the limits of rational analysis.

1. Ancient Skepticism: Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrho, and the Suspension of Judgment (Epoché)
The ancient Greco-Roman skeptical philosophers maintained that the primary source of mental disturbance (turbatio) lies in the dogmatic claim of finding true causes and hidden reasons behind every observed phenomenon.
Sextus Empiricus would argue that the buyer in this case is incurring unnecessary intellectual suffering by attempting to decipher the "ultimate truth" that motivated the seller's silence. The internal reasons of human beings are, by definition, opaque and unreachable through direct observation. There is no way to verify whether the girl suffered a domestic issue, grew too lazy to calculate her remaining stock, was overwhelmed by cost mathematics, or simply decided to change her mind on an impulse of the moment.
Faced with the insufficiency and contradiction of the available evidence, the path proposed by Pyrrhonian skepticism consists of three steps:

1.    Recognize the Opacity: Accept that the amount of verifiable data is insufficient to build a certain hypothesis.
2.    Apply Epoché (ἐποχή): Deliberately suspend judgment regarding the behavior of others. Renounce the attempt to classify the action as "irrational," "stupid," or "malicious."
3.    Achieve Ataraxia (ἀταραξία): Attain mental imperturbability. Once it is accepted that the event belongs to the category of the unknowable, perplexity dissolves and peace of mind is restored. There is nothing to understand because the phenomenon lacks sufficient data to be understood.

2. Empirical-Probabilistic Skepticism: Ockham's Razor and Bayesian Analysis
If the situation is analyzed using the tools of modern empirical probability, the search for complex explanations loses ground against the statistical distribution of human behavior in informal settings.
From a Bayesian perspective, the a priori probability that a seller on social networks acts with professionalism and commercial rigor is surprisingly low in informal segments. Evaluating the evidence of the case:

•    There was no financial loss (0$).
•    The products remain unsold on the social network.
•    The seller did not block the user and later added her real photo.

Applying Ockham's Razor (the simplest explanation is usually the correct one) tells us that the hypothesis with the highest probabilistic density is the sum of logistical inexperience + paralysis caused by uncertainty. Claiming there was an elaborate plot, a sophisticated scam, or a personal affront is an over-interpretation of the facts. Empiricism demands sticking to observed data: a low-complexity system that collapsed when faced with a demand exceeding its processing capacity.

3. Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Noise, Asymmetry, Narrative Fallacy, and System Fragility
Nassim Taleb's thought offers a particularly sharp analytical framework to evaluate this class of micro-anomalies in complex and unpredictable systems:

•    Noise versus Signal: The fundamental error of over-intellectualized analysis is treating noise as if it were a signal. In daily human interactions and disorganized digital platforms, a vast percentage of events are pure random noise: people acting erratically, absurd decisions made out of fatigue, or minor irrational impulses. Trying to extract a profound economic lesson or a general market rule from the erratic and insignificant behavior of an amateur seller is over-interpreting noise.
•    The Narrative Fallacy: Humans experience an almost biological aversion to a causal vacuum. We need to construct a coherent, articulated story ("she got scared because she saw my profile," "she thought I was going to scam her," "she regretted the price") to explain why a transaction didn't go through. For Taleb, the real cause is almost never an elegant story, but the inherent fragility of the other party's structure: the seller didn't have a business model, she had a hobby. The exact moment the hobby demanded the rigor of a real business, the system collapsed and the narrative broke down.
•    Asymmetry and the Dynamics of Optionality: Taleb analyzes interactions through the lens of risk distribution and optionality:

o    The seller operated from fragility: She lacked the robustness to withstand variability and demand. A massive price inquiry represented an external "shock" that broke her small informal structure.
o    The buyer operated from an antifragile position: Although time was invested in the interaction, the financial loss was precisely zero dollars. The event caused no equity damage and, in exchange, provided valuable information to refine supplier selection algorithms in future operations, increasing the ability to filter out informal profiles early on.

IV. General Conclusion
The informal market is not a purified environment where rational economic agents operate solely to optimize their gains. It is populated by individuals with disparate levels of preparedness, varying emotional volatilities, and highly fragile structures.
The dissolution of the purchase should not be read as an enigma to be solved or an affront to commercial logic. The final explanation lies not in a Machiavellian deception or a hidden strategy, but in the plain and simple manifestation of disorder, inexperience, and the asymmetry of expectations in an unregulated environment. From commercial practice, the buyer's conduct was flawless; the rest is simply the intrinsic randomness of living in society, toward which the only philosophically sound stance is the suspension of judgment and moving on to the next opportunity.

The Business of Dissatisfaction: A Talebian and Critical Analysis of Running "Coaching"

An Instagram reel recently caught my attention. It came from a well-known influencer in the running community, saying something that struck me and about which I wished to share my perspective. It is nothing new, nor was it said by just anyone; it comes from a physical education trainer with credentials that grant him, in the eyes of the public, a certain authority to speak on the matter.
The reel states the following:

“If every day you go out and run X kilometers on the same route and do it in X minutes, you are going to become a specialist at running X kilometers in X minutes on that route. You won’t run faster, you won’t go further. You will not progress. Engrave that on your forehead. Planning and variety are key to making progress.”

This phrase rubs me the wrong way. It serves as a catalyst for outlining a personal stance grounded in disagreement, because this is not an isolated idea expressed by a single individual: it is repeated across running groups and multiplied in the comment sections of viral posts on mainstream social networks, where it becomes part of the ambient noise.
The video is accompanied by a brief complementary text:
“Then it is very likely that a moment will come when you stop progressing. Your body adapts to the stimulus you repeat. To keep improving, you need to vary your training and challenge it progressively.”
Immediately following this, the viewer is invited to comment with a keyword to receive an explanatory video via private message.
Here we face a repetitive (and effective) structure for client attraction and conversion. I am not judging nor morally condemning it; it is an everyday empirical phenomenon on digital platforms. My focus is on the content of the message used as bait. It is questionable in its dogmatic and generalizing zeal when dictating that "you won't run faster, you won't go further, you will not progress." Faced with this premise, I propose a structured view rooted in classical skepticism and supported by the conceptual tools of Nassim Nicholas Taleb—fundamentally his arguments in Skin in the Game and Antifragile.

The Instagram Message: Structure and Identified Pitfalls
The core of the discourse conveyed in the reel can be summarized in three key points:

•    The Premise: "If you always run the same, you won't progress."
•    The Prescription: "You must plan with variety."
•    The Call to Action: "I will send you info via private message."

From this scheme, three main flaws can be identified:

1.    Semantic Vagueness in the Term "Progress": It is used as an abstract and self-sufficient concept, failing to define what it means in concrete operational terms (faster speed, greater cardiovascular endurance, injury prevention, long-term adherence, or mental health?).
2.    Devaluation of Consistency: The repetition of a routine is implicitly denigrated, despite physiological and behavioral evidence showing that regularity itself produces sustained adaptations and prevents dropout.
3.    Opacity in the Transaction: Diverting the response to the private realm follows the mechanics of a sales funnel, where "valuable" information is withheld to be traded for capturing a potential lead.

Delimiting the Problem: What Is Being Criticized and What Is Not
It is essential to separate the wheat from the chaff to avoid sweeping generalizations. This critique is not directed against running groups, physical education, or guided sports practice. There are professionals and running communities that:

•    Operate from a pedagogical ethic, focusing on the real biological, psychological, and contextual possibilities of each individual.
•    Avoid resorting to empty abstractions like "progressing" without specifying metrics adapted to the individual.
•    Openly recognize that maintaining a stable routine against sedentary lifestyle or abandonment already constitutes a valid and substantial form of progress.
•    Adjust workloads based on the runner's reality rather than a purely commercial logic that views the subject as a wallet with running shoes.

The critique presented here is aimed exclusively at the normative, abstract, and commodified discourse that devalues an individual's autonomous habit for the sole purpose of prompting the purchase of a service.
The social media ecosystem exhibits a dual dynamic between supply and demand. On the user side, there are those who rigorously research whom to train with, and those who enter drawn by marketing sophistication or third-party recommendations, gradually adapting to that environment with varied experiences (integration, frustration, or abandonment). On the provider side, the offer spans university-educated professionals and experienced athletes to individuals with informal training courses of a few months who jump into the coaching market. In this scenario, analyzing information and risk asymmetries becomes indispensable.

Critique from Classical Skepticism
Skepticism demands suspending judgment when facing categorical assertions that lack rigorous demonstration, requiring universal claims to pass through four methodological filters:

1.    Demand for Precise Definitions: A concept like "progress" must be open to measurement or operationalization. Otherwise, it functions as an empty label manipulated according to the sender's convenience.
2.    Empirical Verification: Evidence in health sciences indicates that regular physical activity—even without variation in volume or intensity—provides the vast majority of cardiovascular, metabolic, and psychological benefits. Competitive performance optimization represents a marginal boundary in terms of overall health.
3.    Detection of Fallacies: Presenting as a universal rule what only applies to a specific subset (athletes seeking to maximize performance) constitutes a fallacy of hasty generalization.
4.    Assessment of Incentives: When knowledge is not shared openly and is instead made contingent on a private interaction, skepticism compels us to consider the presence of an underlying economic interest.

Here appears the central flaw highlighted by skeptical doubt: the gap between a general proposition and its application to an unobserved particular case. The speaker has not evaluated the individual subject they are addressing; they issue an abstract diagnosis about "the person who goes out to run X kilometers in X minutes" as if they were an interchangeable entity, ignoring their history, physiological ceiling, and actual goals.
The regularity of maintaining a route and pace over time represents a victory over entropy and the inertia of a sedentary life. To sell a solution, commercial discourse needs to make that fundamental alternative invisible (running regularly versus not running at all) and replace it with a dilemma of convenience (running on your own versus purchasing a structured plan).

The Ambiguous Use of the Word "Progress"
The rhetorical pillar of the message lies in treating the concept of "progress" as if it possessed a single, obvious, and universal meaning.
The dictionary defines the verb to progress as:

Progress: intr. To move forward, improve, or make advances in a specified area.

However, in the domain of physical activity, "moving forward or improving" acquires substantially different meanings depending on the person:

•    Increasing speed or improving race times.
•    Increasing distance or weekly mileage volume.
•    Preserving muscle mass and aerobic capacity against natural aging.
•    Preventing recurrent injuries.
•    Sustaining weight loss or metabolic health.
•    Maintaining a space for stress regulation and mental health.
•    Developing discipline and long-term adherence.

The analyzed message takes for granted that the only legitimate form of progress is a continuous increase in athletic performance. Nonetheless, an individual who completes 5 kilometers daily for years at the same intensity may not be increasing speed, but they are preserving functional capacity that would otherwise be lost to atrophy or aging. They are not stagnant; they are sustaining a plateau of well-being and preventing biological decline.

Furthermore, it falls into a false dichotomy: it poses that repeating a routine is equivalent to failure due to stagnation, while varying according to an external plan is the only path to success. This logic overlooks the fact that consistency itself is the factor with the highest correlation to long-term health. Just as a musician practicing scales daily refines execution accuracy without needing to change the score, the consistent runner consolidates motor patterns and stable vascular adaptations.

Overgeneralization and Individual Limits
The principle of progressive overload and stimulus variation are valuable tools in sports training when the explicit objective is maximizing race times in competitive contexts. However, extrapolating these principles to the entire population that runs is a conceptual error.
A diverse typology of runners exists: recreational, medically advised, self-taught, casual, those using running as a cross-training exercise for other disciplines, and those simply seeking a space to unwind. For the vast majority, the search for continuous quantitative improvements is neither a priority nor a biological necessity.

The Law of Diminishing Returns and Physiological Limits
Every person has biological, genetic, age, time availability, and recovery limits. Demanding linear and indefinite progress ignores that biology operates through homeostatic systems with clear physiological ceilings.
Marginal Health Benefit
  ^
  |  +--------------------------------------------- (Plateau of Well-being)
  | /
  |/  <- Regularity delivers the primary health impact.
  |
  +-------------------------------------------------> Training Load / Complexity
 

As the diagram illustrates, transitioning from a sedentary lifestyle to regular physical activity (even repetitive) yields the largest jump in terms of morbidity and mortality reduction. Additional increases in intensity or training load sophistication deliver diminishing marginal benefits for overall health, even if they increase competitive performance and, occasionally, the risk of overuse or injury.

World Health Organization (WHO) Guidelines
Global WHO guidelines on physical activity for adults (ages 18–64) prescribe:

•    A minimum of 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity, or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous-intensity activity per week.
•    Accumulating roughly 30 minutes daily, 5 days a week, at a brisk walk or moderate jog thoroughly meets the requirements for preventing cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, and cognitive decline.

From a public health perspective, meeting these metrics through an identical, constant routine fully satisfies requirements for a healthy life. Frame the absence of variation as a "defective stagnation" state directly contradicts established medical evidence.

Analysis Through Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Lens
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's thought is fundamental to dismantling the incentive structure and biases present in this type of commercial discourse.

1. Risk Asymmetry and "Skin in the Game"
Taleb's core concept in Skin in the Game is that a system becomes fragile and unfair when people offering advice or making decisions suffer no consequences for their mistakes.
In the case of the social media coach issuing a categorical judgment in a reel:

•    Cost to the Speaker: Zero. If their recommendation to introduce unmonitored variation causes an injury, if the plan yields no results, or if the message demotivates the runner into quitting, the speaker suffers no physical, financial, or reputational harm.
•    Benefit to the Speaker: Asymmetric in their favor. If they manage to sow doubt about the effectiveness of the viewer's current routine, they capture a potential client for their courses or consultations.
•    Risk to the User: Assumes the entirety of the physical risk (overuse injuries), financial risk (paying for the service), and psychological risk (feeling inadequate).

Taleb frequently cites the maxim never to take advice from someone who makes a living giving advice, unless their recommendations are subject to a penalty in case of failure. The trainer selling closed plans via private messages evades public scrutiny of their results and transfers responsibility for failure onto the client, arguing they "failed to execute the variation with required intensity."

2. Survivorship Bias and Intellectual Hubris
Motivational discourse often looks at elite athletes or exceptional success stories and retroactively reconstructs the rules that brought them there, presenting them as mandatory for the general public. This ignores that the elite is the result of a combination of genetics, an unsustainable workload for the average citizen, and selection bias.
Projecting those demands onto the amateur runner who has a limited margin of time and energy represents intellectual overconfidence. A "lack of progress" is diagnosed from an abstract theory that ignores the individual's actual circumstances.

3. Causal Opacity and the Via Negativa
Taleb emphasizes that complex systems are characterized by causal opacity: we rarely know with absolute certainty all the factors leading to a successful outcome. Thus, evolution and learning operate more efficiently through the via negativa (eliminating errors and risks of ruin) than by imposing predictive theories.
Applied to training:

•    There is no universally applicable, perfect plan.
•    The priority for long-term sustainability is eliminating what causes injury, excessive fatigue, frustration, and abandonment.

For a significant percentage of the population, keeping the same route and time for years is precisely the antifragile strategy that has allowed them to maintain consistency without falling into burnout or overuse injuries. Forcing unnecessary variation introduces fragility into a system that was already operating smoothly.

4. Revealed Preferences
A classic economic principle echoed by Taleb is that people's actions reveal their true preferences far more accurately than their words.
If an individual goes out to run exactly 8 kilometers at the exact same pace for years, their actions reveal that their real priority is not cutting down marathon times, but enjoying the route, regulating health, or keeping a daily window for introspection. Imposing competitive performance metrics from the outside is an arbitrary intrusion aimed at creating the necessary dissatisfaction to sell a solution.

Sales Funnel Structure and Risk Transfer
The pattern observed in running coaching is not an isolated event; it matches a widespread rhetorical architecture in various attention economy domains like self-help, market spirituality, and informal financial consulting.
[ Inoculation of Insecurity ] -> "What you do is useless / You are stuck"
              │
              ▼
[ Information Asymmetry ]    -> "The solution is complex / DM for info"
              │
              ▼
[ Commercial Conversion ]    -> Sale of courses, workshops, or subscriptions
              │
              ▼
[ Transfer of Risk ]         -> If it fails: The client "didn't apply the method correctly"

The mechanism operates through these steps:

1.    Creating the Problem: The user's current autonomous behavior is disqualified ("you will not progress"), sowing doubt about its effectiveness.
2.    Generating Asymmetry: The solution is placed behind a private barrier ("comment the word X and I'll send the video"). If knowledge were purely educational, it would be shared openly.
3.    Monetizing Insecurity: The structured plan is offered as the only way out of the supposed plateau.
4.    Shifting Guilt: If the user fails to achieve promised results, the system narrative attributes failure to a lack of commitment or execution by the client, protecting the validity of the sold method.

Limits and Nuances of the Analysis
To maintain skeptical rigor, it is indispensable to examine potential objections to this critique:

•    Standard Business Practice: It could be argued that using lead magnets and private interactions is a standard digital marketing technique rather than evidence of bad faith. Many qualified professionals use these channels to segment their audience and offer tailored attention.
•    Shared Reference Frames: The content creator may have been addressing a specific niche of runners who already share the implicit goal of improving race times, taking that context for granted without needing to clarify it in a short video.
•    Physiological Validity of Variation: Exercise physiology confirms that to maximize performance adaptations in competitive athletes, stimulus variation (interval sessions, long runs, strength work) is superior to load monotony.

These qualifications temper attributing deliberate deceit: it is very likely that the creator is simply reproducing a standardized rhetorical and commercial format in their industry without having analyzed the philosophical premises or risk asymmetries it entails.
However, these objections do not alter the main diagnosis: the risk asymmetry between the advisor and the practitioner remains intact, and the arbitrary disqualification of autonomous routines continues to function as a tool to induce dissatisfaction.

From Skepticism: Why Don't Most People Stop to Analyze or Demand Transparency?
Most people who fall for these traps—the "you won't progress if you keep doing the same thing" followed by "DM me"—do not safeguard themselves. They do not analyze, carefully select, demand transparency, or cross-reference claims. Classical and modern skepticism (from Hume and Pyrrho to Taleb or Kahneman) explains this without resorting to moral superiority.

1. The Cognitive Cost of Doubt
Skepticism is not free. Suspending judgment, asking for clear definitions, demanding evidence, and detecting risk asymmetries require time, attention, and mental energy. Most people do not live in "permanent critical analysis" mode; they live in daily survival mode: work, family, fatigue, scrolling, immersed in routines.
When a short, emotionally charged message with an authoritative aesthetic appears on a feed, the brain applies the cheapest heuristic: "if it sounds confident and comes from someone who seems to know, it's probably true." Doubting is costly; accepting is cheap. Systematic skepticism is a cognitive luxury few can afford constantly, especially on topics that don't feel existential.

2. Default Trust and Authority Bias
Human beings are not born skeptical; we are born trusting. Trust is the evolutionary default: in a social group, distrusting everyone is isolating.
When a message comes from someone presented as a "physical preparation trainer," complete with followers, technical vocabulary, and expert aesthetics, authority bias kicks in. The recipient does not ask, "what concrete evidence does this person have regarding my body?" They implicitly ask, "who am I to contradict someone who knows?" That status asymmetry is enough to quiet doubt.

3. The Fallacy of the Default "Principle of Charity"
In everyday interactions, we operate under an implicit presumption of good faith: we assume that if someone speaks with conviction, professional credentials, or thousands of followers, they do so from legitimate knowledge and pedagogical intent. Skepticism is a deliberate break with that default credulity.

4. Confirmation Bias and the Desire for a Simple Fix
When a runner who hasn't improved race times in months is told, "You're not progressing because you're doing the same thing; I have the key," the message appeals directly to desire rather than logic. The runner wants to resolve the discomfort or frustration the message itself just injected. The trap succeeds because it offers a comfortable narrative: the problem isn't their biological limit or context, but that they lack the "secret method" someone else can sell them.

5. The Trap of Emotionally Useful Vagueness
Vague words like "progressing," "getting stuck," or "challenging yourself" sound profound while remaining unanchored. That vagueness is a feature for marketing, allowing every person to project their own dissatisfaction onto the message. Skepticism demands precise definitions; marketing relies on emotional resonance.

6. Low Perceived Cost of Error
Falling for this tactic doesn't cost a fortune at once—it costs a plan or a month of coaching. Because the cost is relatively low and the promised benefit is high, most people do not trigger a full "due diligence" process.

7. Revealed Preference for Simple Narratives
People reveal their true preferences through actions: most prefer a simple narrative ("if you don't vary, you don't progress") over real complexity ("it depends on age, genetics, goals, injury history, adherence, sleep, stress..."). Simplicity sells; complexity is unappealing in a 30-second video.

8. Blindness to Risk Asymmetry (Skin in the Game)
The average person evaluates message content ("does what he says about variety sound logical?"), but fails to evaluate the speaker's position ("what does he gain if I believe him, and what does he lose if I get injured?"). Unawareness that the speaker faces zero downside is the structural vulnerability charlatans exploit.

9. The Illusion of Immunity
Even critical thinkers believe they would spot the trap. That is another bias: illusory superiority. Serious skepticism begins by acknowledging that one is equally vulnerable to these traps when a message targets personal insecurities regarding performance, discipline, or self-esteem.
In short, skepticism explains this phenomenon not as "people being foolhardy," but through limited attention economies, evolutionary trust biases, aversion to cognitive exertion, and a preference for simple narratives promising control.

Conclusion
A critical analysis reveals that the primary flaw does not lie in the technical validity of stimulus variation—a scientifically supported tool when maximizing competitive performance—but in the instrumentalization of language to manufacture artificial dissatisfaction. A vague notion of "progress" is leveraged to devalue individual consistency, imposing the logic of infinite competition onto a practice that, for most, serves health, habit, and biological balance.
From a skeptical perspective, the message lacks rigor by issuing universal diagnoses on individuals whose circumstances, goals, and physiological limits are unknown. From a Talebian perspective, the core issue is asymmetry and the absence of skin in the game: the person issuing the categorical statement incurs no cost for error, demotivation, or injury, while privatizing the financial gain derived from inducing consumption.
Medical science confirms that regular physical activity sustains the majority of health adaptations and that performance faces natural biological ceilings. Obscuring that maintaining a plateau of well-being is already a victory over a sedentary life is not an innocent omission; it is the space deliberately crafted to position a sale.
Real progress is not measured in constant acceleration or routine complexity, but in autonomy, consistency, and the honesty to recognize when what you do is already enough. Faced with empty rhetoric commercializing inadequacy from behind private messages, the daily practice of maintaining the same route, distance, and pace remains a meaningful statement of discipline against inertia.

"Real progress is not measured in kilometers or minutes, but in consistency and honesty. False progress is measured in likes, sold courses, and private messages."

References and Cited Sources
•    Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Skin in the Game, Antifragile.
•    World Health Organization (WHO): Global recommendations on physical activity for health.
•    Real Academia Española (RAE): Definition of "progresar".
•    Economic Concepts: Law of diminishing returns, revealed preferences.