My plastic love

Every day I think about my future adult life. Literally every day, at least once. I owe the reader two explanations for this. The almost erotic pull that the prototype of the average middle-class man exerts on me, and the vivid fear I feel when I start to familiarize myself with the days yet to come. I spent my entire post-adolescence caught in this perverse yet banal dichotomy: the fear of growing up and the fascination with adult lives. I have always glimpsed a strange sweetness in that artificial sense of fulfillment adults seem to possess. Accepting that one is not special—what an extraordinary relief that must have been. Washing off the burden of being a prodigy child full of dreams and revolutions, and embracing real life, the remarkable simplicity of being ordinary. Projecting myself into this kind of future calms me down. It lifts several weights off my shoulders, if only for a moment.

If there is one thing I have always regarded with sincere esteem and admiration throughout these reflections, it is the idea of love among those born in the sixties and seventies—without going too far back, though we easily could. Or rather, not so much the idea of love, which too readily lends itself to all kinds of relativization, but the idea of bond. What is the trick? There must be one. How can two people live side by side for decades? It is a concept physically close, yet conceptually distant from my generation.

For the sake of simplicity, I will speak of “parents,” imagining that I am addressing a multifaceted mass of bodies hovering somewhere around their mid-twenties or so. Everyone else may adapt or reinterpret these ideas as they see fit. Returning to our “parents”: they are the ones who taught us about relationships. If we were to standardize the value system underlying those lessons, we would generally speak of traits such as constancy, loyalty, sincerity, and—last but not least—durability: the ability of relationships to settle and solidify over time. It is precisely at this point that many of the writer’s doubts begin to surface, but we will return to that. Alongside verbal teaching usually comes learning through imitation. And this is where the system jams, where the generational knot tightens: we always assumed, even unconsciously, that simply imitating—or merely aspiring to—relationships like those of our parents or grandparents, whether in love or friendship, would be enough to build a solid relational structure. Who could have guessed that many of those who created this tutorial would eventually fall into the same decay we now experience, ruining everything in the process?

Coming back to us, we forgot a crucial deterrent: the social context in which we stumble does not, in any way, allow us to cultivate that idea of bond that someone tried to pass down to us. The world in which our parents wove their relational web did not move as fast as the one we are forced to inhabit. And I use the word forced deliberately.

They had the time and the means to live time with others, to let it flow without pressure. We did not. Our relationships collapse violently and continuously because they are the offspring of two bitter enemies: idealization and haste. In too little time we try to build castles of astonishing fragility—out of fear of not being like others, out of fear of not being like our parents. The constant overstimulation we are subjected to, the relentless pursuit of perfection, the need to do things faster and better than anyone else: all these elements combined have destroyed our ability to generate real, lasting value. We cannot be surprised by the fragility of our social networks; the flaw is evident, and we are dissecting it here.

As for how much of all this is due to hyperconnection, there is hardly any need to dwell on it—it is an obvious fact that requires no further explanation. I constantly find myself surrounded by people watching certainties they believed unbreakable collapse before their eyes, relationships they considered made of steel. It is a plague of our time, and we did not bring it upon ourselves. We simply believed in the goodness and genuineness that walked just a few steps beside us, perhaps within our own homes. We failed to notice—or chose not to—that the very goodness and genuineness we had fallen in love with had been forged in another historical moment, within a context different from ours.

Another price to pay for keeping those spotlights on that we love so much, for remaining under everyone’s gaze, for continuing to play both contestant and judge at the same time. Very little remains in our hands, but at least someone, at this exact moment, is watching us.

For the sake of completeness, we cannot overlook another factor: instability. Too often we find ourselves having to explain to those who have already built a family how much easier it was to do so in the past than it is in 2026. Without slipping into the search for an alibi—which would not absolve us anyway—the lack of solid gears (economic, political, social) in the great machine we operate within every day cannot, and will not, grant us the freedom and serenity necessary to develop stable bonds, a future capable of standing on its own.

If this were a severe poisoning and I were a doctor, I would be unable to offer the reader any immediate antidote. A palliative, perhaps—that I could manage. We cannot possibly expect to solve enormous questions with ready-to-wear solutions, but we can alleviate our ailments. Perhaps that is what those who came before us already did, though they have no intention of revealing it. Because those who burn their hands learn better.

Perhaps the perfect formula does not exist, and continuing to search for it will only generate further problems. This is where the writer’s personal solution fits in: stop chasing paradise on earth, that smoothie of perfect lives that someone keeps trying to spoon-feed us. And above all, stop using relationships as a tool in that pursuit. Whether it is stability, consensus, approval, or a sense of future that we seek, we can no longer obsessively look for it in every relationship that crosses our path. Perhaps the very moment we stop hunting for the cure, we will realize that the great illness has passed. At that point, we will be so busy rebuilding healthy, lasting bonds that we will barely remember having been, ourselves, both poison and antidote at once. The problem and the solution. My plastic love