The main character syndrom

Before we begin: why this journal

In film photography, there is a moment that smartphones made us forget over the years: the moment when the roll waits. You lived the instant, you pressed the shutter, but the image does not exist yet. It will take weeks, sometimes years, before you develop it and discover what was really in front of your eyes.

I am a bit young to have fully known that era, but every school trip of my childhood started the same way: a disposable Kodak in the backpack, 30 photos to spend wisely, and a week of waiting after coming home to finally see the result. Half of the frames were blurry, a few had my finger in them, and it did not matter. The waiting was part of the picture.

This blog is called Develop Later for that reason. It is a journal, my journal, one you can also receive by email if you like. But it is not a media outlet, not a content strategy, nor a conversion funnel. I do enough of that in my daily life.

It is simply a place where I drop off rolls of my life: moments, ideas, irritations, joys, written in the heat of the moment and meant to be reread later.

I write from Bucharest, where I have lived for half a decade although nothing predestined me to it. I run things, I build other things, and life recently made me a father.

Cast without an audition

I recently learned that my schedule fascinates certain people. Not my ideas, not my projects, not what I am building. My calendar. Who I see, what I do with my days, how I split my hours, where I go.

I must admit that I might have felt flattered for half a second. My life must be more interesting than I thought, since some people take time out of their own to document it. Then the half second passed, and what remained was something between anger and fascination.

Fascination first, because this is a phenomenon I encounter more and more, and not only about me. This mad energy that some people spend watching other people's lives instead of building their own. Measuring, comparing, commenting.

We recently gave this a name: main character syndrome. Everyone is the hero of their own movie. And a hero, by definition, needs an antagonist. When life does not provide one, you cast one. No audition, no notice. One day you learn that you play the villain in someone's film, and that the script is already written. The only thing missing was your name on top of the poster.

Two countries, one fracture

I live between two countries, France and Romania, and I watch them both with the permanent eyes of a foreigner, constantly discovering them. What strikes me is not how different they are. It is how identical they are becoming.

Both societies are splitting along the same lines:

• extremes rising on each side,
• elections decided on a razor's edge,
• two camps that no longer talk (or shout) to each other but about each other.

The topics change, the costumes change, the mechanism never does. Whatever this is, it is not a national disease. It is a worldwide epidemic.

On jealousy, though, I expected the opposite of what I found. Romanians joke about themselves with a famous proverb: "să moară capra vecinului", may the neighbor's goat die. A whole nation describing itself as envious, with a smile. And yet, in my own lived experience, the active kind of jealousy, the kind that watches, whispers and wants to see you fail, I have encountered far more often coming from my world of origin than from my adopted one. Romania mocks its goat. Others, more discreet, actually sharpen the knife.

Take cars, since Europe judges you by your license plate. In France, park a Porsche in a city center and there is a fair chance someone will key it. Not to steal it. Just to punish you for owning it. In Romania, the same Porsche gets you one of two reactions: respect, or the suspicion that you are a cocalar or a șmecher, our local words for loud money without manners. And the aspiration goes further: a Romanian will proudly buy a German car with 300,000 kilometers on the clock, because he is not buying a car, he is buying a status. In France, we love to repeat that status cannot be bought, it must be earned. Maybe. But I have rarely seen anyone earn anything by scratching someone else's door.

Look further up and it is the same mechanics on a bigger screen. Ukraine, Russia. Israel, Palestine. China, Taiwan. Iran, United States. Each side is the main character of its own story, each side has cast its villain, and each of us, thousands of kilometers away, selects our sides. We no longer debate. We defend our casting.

I am not going to fix the situation we are living in from my apartment's office. But I can observe that the society that divides over everything, from distant wars to the price of groceries, is the same one that, at the individual level, has replaced ambition with comparison and curiosity with surveillance. Modern individualism is not thinking about yourself. It is thinking about yourself while envying others.

Who owns your time

And then came a moment of clarity, a few weeks ago.

I became a father.

Since then, my days have a very simple architecture: work, a lot of it, and my family, the rest. There are no gaps anymore. And it is precisely when time becomes rare that you discover its true value. Every hour now has an opportunity cost that I can measure in my daughter's smiles, or whatever these little grimaces are for now.

Because being fully in control of your time does exist.

All it takes is being single, childless, with a perfectly predictable job, 35 hours a week in France, 39 in Romania, no loans, no partners, no one depending on you. It is a perfectly respectable life. I have never known it: I have always chosen the opposite, projects that overflow, responsibilities that pile up, and I do not regret it for a second. But it is the only configuration where your calendar belongs to you one hundred percent. Everything else, a company, a team, a couple, a child, a mortgage, is a voluntary transfer of ownership: you trade hours for things that matter. My time no longer fully belongs to me, and far from being a failure, it is the accounting proof that my life is FULL.

So when I think of those who spend their hours taking inventory of mine, I no longer really feel anger. More like a kind of lucidity. Time is the only resource you never get back. Maybe that is the real poverty of our era: not lacking time, but not knowing who your own belongs to.

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

— often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, probably wrongly, but true anyway

Developed later

I am writing this because it took me a bit of time before realising that it should not affect me. Those who write scripts will keep writing them. It is their film, their budget, their airtime. Taking a step back made me realise the current rhythm of my life. This is the first roll I develop here, and the distance is what gave the image its sharpness.

And on this particular picture, taken a few weeks after my daughter was born, you can see quite clearly who plays the lead role in my film. She is sleeping next to us. She weighs barely more than a 5L Apa Carpatica. And she does not need a villain in her story.

Neither do I.