The Self at Work: It’s the Time of the Person

English. Spanish. Italian Video

Julián Carrón - Thank you for this new invitation to share this initial moment that kicks off a new year in which we will have to return to facing, in order to help us understand, the drama of our own selves. Each of us has been able to experience, by listening to the songs that already had this existentially decisive question as their theme, the dissonance or correspondence with what we have heard. So, from the very first moment, we are immersed in what we want to do today and throughout this year: to understand better and better what we are. And this is particularly challenging at the present moment.

For this reason, the first point of my talk is “The Fear of the Present.” During the summer weeks, while I was thinking about this talk, I was struck by a debate in the Italian press that is paradigmatic of the times we are living in. It was triggered by an article by Michele Serra in La Repubblica, which focused on today's apocalypse, a world that towers over people and eludes their understanding.

Serra writes: "There is a very significant development, I believe, and that is the substantial loneliness of many (and, he adds in parentheses, almost all) in the face of evil and destruction. The famous points of reference, the beacon in the storm, the refuge in the tempest, seem to have faded or disappeared." He then asks: “What do we do now? Deep down, under what great common roof can we gather to dispel our fear and react to the scandal, and put some measures of comfort and remedy in place?”

Among the various comments on his provocation, Marcello Veneziani's is significant. The “sad decline, the fear of the present, the great fear that runs through the world, the unhappiness of today”—he describes—are “the gastric juice of a widely shared epochal malaise.”

Faced with this malaise, Veneziani emphasizes the inability to understand the problem. “We limit ourselves,” he says, “to photographing reality, at the moment without any other key to explanation.” This is one of the reasons why society is sinking into nihilism, and we are contributing to it. We blame Trump, Musk, this or that, without realizing the glaring disproportion of plans, the gap between diagnosis and prognosis.

These references are just one of many examples of the disorientation we find ourselves in, of the disproportion between the widespread malaise at all levels and the attempts to deal with it. Because, even before any answer, what escapes our understanding is the nature of the problem.

We see this firsthand, even in our relationships with our talents, where we see this drama of understanding ourselves fully bubbling up. In this sense, the synthesis offered by Benedict XVI in Caritas in Veritate is illuminating: the social question has become radically an anthropological question. In describing the claim of technological absolutism, which believes it has unveiled every mystery and arrived at the root of life, Benedict spoke of a world that, paradoxically, no longer recognizes the human, and doesn't even touch on the problem of man. What is missing is what reveals man to man.

Pope Leo, too, in various speeches at the beginning of his pontificate, and in particular when addressing the million young people at Tor Vergata, has put the anthropological question, that is, the question of each of us, back at the center. As Paolo Pombeni, a historian from Bologna, noted in Il Mattino, speaking of a “return to the primacy of the human situation over the social situation, of the mystery of the individual over the explanation of historical contradictions.”

Without forcing partial interpretations, Pombeni emphasizes that the Pope doesn't start from a reference to a great doctrine, but from an experience, from that need for truth that leads man to question himself. That is, in the foreground is the problem—which we see every day—of the restlessness of the human heart. Luciano Violante, commenting on World Youth Day, also emphasized the imposition of the question of meaning and the inadequacy of the physical world to answer it. The point of the question was: “What is the meaning of life?” The search for meaning must be undertaken not only by young people, but also by adults, as we know. What does it mean to live through a change of era? How do we equip ourselves?

We therefore see the problem emerging with particular force before us, especially in young artists or famous people who document something that we often feel close to because of their loyalty to themselves. To give some recent examples from the present day, the 27-year-old singer Gaia Gozzi, whose career is on the rise, says of herself on Instagram: “Today, the diabolical trinity came to visit me.”

"I feel that emptiness, anxiety, and loneliness have come to stay longer than usual. In a short time, they have laid down the law, gagged my soul, and taken it hostage. I have traveled extensively, both internally and around the world, in search of an answer, a solution, a method that could appease this incessant need to fill my life. I have reached the forests of the Amazonian Acre, the endless expanses of Icelandic volcanic beaches, the humid Vietnamese rice fields. Although I have added countless experiences and lessons to my baggage, I have not yet reached a conclusion. I am talking about small momentary pleasures and dopamine that can easily become useless band-aids placed over a deep and still open wound. This effort needs to be given space to breathe, to be oxygenated; the anxiety of solving a problem is a problem in itself. An apparent solution that, in the form of a 'cure', infects even more deeply the child in me who just wants to be seen, revisited, loved, accepted, sought after, without needing to do anything, but simply to be."

It wasn't just Italian rapper Shiva, interviewed by Le Iene. He says: “Since I was a child, I've felt a giant void inside. I always feel misunderstood. I have everything: money, friends, family, and success. But I still feel that something is missing. I'm only happy when I distract myself. That's why I always distract myself: I eat, drink, record, and gamble.” To the questions: “And are you happy at that moment?” “Yes, because you're not thinking,” they reply: “Exactly, and you don't know why. You're just born that way.”

The drama, as Gaber said, is “the word I.” And this strange cry that hides within itself the fear of being nobody. Often, each of us finds the only way out is to escape from ourselves. This was recounted by Stephen Basile, 32, a well-known entrepreneur and influencer with over a million followers on Instagram. He writes: "After two months spent traveling around the world, between parties, new faces, and thousands of euros wasted, I found myself faced with a reality that I already knew but can no longer ignore. I am sickened by the superficiality that pervades relationships. A void masked by euphoria, a constant race to fill time with nothing. I lived the dream life that everyone would want, experiences that should have made me feel alive, but in the end, they only left me feeling empty. I looked into the eyes of many people, but in few did I see anything real. This lifestyle, this constant distraction, this pursuit of emptiness made me lose the person I truly loved. I was supposed to leave for yet another vacation in Sardinia with friends. Everything was already organized and paid for, but this morning I decided to cancel the trip. I no longer want to run away and escape. Pretending that this way of life belongs to me is not a rejection of the world, but a return to myself. I know I'm not the only one who has pretended to be fine, who has worn a fake smile and adapted to a rhythm that didn't belong to me. I know what it means to fill every moment so as not to hear the emptiness, to seek company so as not to feel the loneliness, to chase fleeting moments so as not to face the slow pain we carry inside. Each of us, in our own circumstances, can trace all the attempts at distraction, all the palliatives we resort to, as well as the suffocation caused by constantly running away from ourselves. Deciding to no longer ignore discomfort and the attention to oneself necessary to do so are the least obvious things in the world."

For this reason, how right Don Giussani was when he wrote years ago: “The supreme obstacle on our journey as human beings is the neglect of the self. The first step, then, on a human journey is the opposite of this neglect, that is, interest in one's own self, in one's own person. An interest that would seem obvious, but is not at all. It is enough to look at our daily behavior to see what immense gaps of emptiness of consciousness and loss of memory characterize it.”

And who am I? Second step. So what does our experience tell us, what do we see in these people who recount it? It's easy. To answer this question, the method is simple, as we are doing: observe the experience. Look at the experience and discover yourself in action. It amazes me that even one gets tired of running away. “I no longer want to run away or pretend.”

"I need to return to myself." There are those who, like him, by not censoring this wound and no longer wanting to run away from themselves, come to feel the decisive step of trying to understand themselves. There are people who feel the urgency to understand who they are and what they want. The experience recounted by the great rapper Marracash is a shining example of this.

“I don't have a single friend who is doing well, not one. And I'm not always in great shape either. Success and money are useful at the beginning. They help you get out of nowhere, when they make the difference between not being able to go on vacation and finally being able to go. But from then on, you need something else. You need something that takes your life into its own hands. You need to understand who you are and what you want to do that is beautiful.”

It is precisely someone who has had this experience who can advise young people who still have the desire to achieve what he has achieved: “I would give the Rolex to the kids and then ask them, ‘Has it changed your life?’ I've lived through it; I went from having nothing and thinking I would live the same life as my parents in public housing to then having the money I need to be free. But there is a level beyond which money no longer makes a difference. There are other things that change your life and make you grow up. You only feel free when you know who you are and what you want.”

This need, which, as you can see, emerges from the experience of living, of knowing oneself, and of not stopping at impressions and the surface, pulsates within the person. As one of us wrote, reflecting on a project we did together last year: "During this year, my first journey of religious encounter helped me discover parts of myself that often remain in the background in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. In particular, I learned to stop, to listen to myself more deeply, to ask myself sincerely what gives meaning to my choices and what really matters in order to be happy."

“Our first interest is therefore our own subject,” says Don Giussani, “and our first interest is that the human subject that we are, each one of us, be constituted and, therefore, that my human subject understand what it is and be conscious of itself. In fact, it is what lies at the root of the totality of everything we do.”

But what drives man, from within his experience, to want to understand what is in this dramatic situation in which he finds himself, knowing that running away is useless and that he returns to himself, as we have seen? What remains "healthy" in man that allows him to wait?

Third step: waiting. In a unique way, Giussani described this factor that remains intact in man despite everything. As we see, not only when he said it, but also now that things have become even more complicated. In today's world, so devoid of presence, where man is so lonely and therefore so yielding, so captive to anyone who appears stronger than him, in this world the expectation of salvation remains intact at the bottom, whatever word we use. The expectation of truly being ourselves. And this is experienced to the extent that a certain dignity, a certain originality, and a certain pity remain in a man. Because, whatever we think of the truth, it is inseparable from the expectation that it will emerge.

Adorno said that “the real image of salvation” is that which the situation in which we live leaves “the melancholic ambiguity of experience affectively intact in man.” There is a melancholy within us, as we see in all these authors and fellow travelers we have mentioned, because man expects the truth of things, however it is conceived, to emerge, within appearance, as the image of salvation: something that allows us to live with ourselves, without having to escape. This expectation, which despite everything and all the mess remains ineradicable, is the irreducible core of man.

“How can we fill this abyss of life?” asks Miguel Manara in Milosz's unsurpassed work. Because desire is always there, stronger and crazier than ever, like “a sea fire whose flame burns in the deepest blackness of the universe,” it is a desire to embrace infinite possibilities.

Today, just when it seems that the lack of meaning is established, that nihilism has won, desire emerges more acutely. Miguel Manara's boundless need, the irreducible demand for total satisfaction, for fullness, for this irreducibility that gives us no peace... It is precisely this passage and this irreducibility that challenge our reason. But where does this irreducibility come from? What is this irreducibility that we try to ride in every way and cannot find? Meaning. Because our irreducibility, precisely because it demands an explanation, demands an origin.

We tend to take this nature of ours for granted. Other beings do not perceive this irreducibility, so they do not perceive emptiness, nor do they perceive boredom. What is this irreducibility that we find within ourselves and that makes us make so many attempts to understand it, to resolve it, to reduce it, and to find an adequate response to this irreducibility?

The first thing we must help ourselves to understand—and not flee from—is that we often don't start from our true experience, as we see in the characters we have mentioned; that is, from experience in its completeness and genuineness. We often have the perception that man is a finished product, but the more we live, the more life brings out what we are: it is always something that reveals itself before our eyes with an immensity that we could not have imagined. But despite this, we identify experience with partial impressions, as we have seen, reducing it to a stump instead of opening ourselves completely with an attitude of expectation.

For this reason, the more we realize what this structural disproportion is that we hear about in “the religious sense,” this irreducibility, the more we realize that no attempt can give us an adequate answer when man is reduced simply to an object of scientific research.

As Stein says, even if all our possible scientific questions were answered, the problem of life wouldn't even be touched upon. Now we see how all scientific progress doesn't leave even a moment to adequately answer this question. For this reason, if we don't have this compassion, this tenderness for ourselves, to try to understand what we are, we won't be able to understand either ourselves or the young people with whom we constantly interact.

Why? Because we thought we knew man. But, as another author says, the life of a man, a human life, is not enough to know man. This mystery of our self, the eternal mystery of our being, as Leopardi said and Ratzinger describes, appears more and more before our eyes: "The thing that is most our own, that which ultimately belongs to us, that is, our self, is at the same time the thing that is least our own. Because we have received it. We have it within us, but it is given." It is in itself and at the same time what I have and what belongs to me the least.

And St. Augustine said it even more effectively with his brilliant synthesis, which we can remember today, on his feast day: “What is as much yours as yourself?”

“And what is less yours than yourself, if what you are belongs to another?” “In my life, I have never encountered mysteries greater than myself,” the literary giant Cormac McCarthy acknowledges with rare honesty in one of his novels.

And why? What is this that we are? Don Giussani describes it very well in The Religious Sense, quoting Dostoevsky: “The bee knows the formula of its hive, the ant knows the shape of its anthill, but man does not know his own formula.”

“Why?” continues Don Giussani, “because man's formula is a free relationship with the infinite. And therefore it doesn't fit into any measure; it breaks through the walls of any dwelling in which one wants to arrest it.” The questions and evidence that constitute the heart, or elementary experience, are the trace of this free relationship with the infinite.

If we don't understand this, nor that the measure in which we live brings out more and more what we are and what the difference is with any other being, we can't understand why we experience discomfort, why nothing is enough for us, or why we grope around looking for something that then disappoints us.

And that's why those who have had the audacity to take risks, such as Marracash or others, ask themselves: “Okay, I started from nothing, now I have everything I need, but I can't find peace because I feel the urgent need to understand who I am.”

This is why we are together and propose this: because, without understanding, as he says, who I am and what I want, life won't find peace. And we, like young people, encounter all the difficulties we see. But what does this disproportion document? This expression of Dostoevsky, that man, unlike the bee or the ant, doesn't know his own formula, which is a relationship with the infinite. That this relationship with the infinite that is man says something about the origin of this man.

Don Giussani starts from the assumption that nature makes it easy for man to perceive the things necessary for life, that among all the necessary things, the most necessary for existence, for reason and meaning, is the existence of God. In his Apologia pro vita sua, the great Newman says that at the age of fifteen, while walking down the street, he was struck by the intuition that there were only two self-evident beings: the self and God. The supreme ease of grasping the existence of God, that is, of not feeling alone with this disproportion, of understanding what the origin is, why he made us this way, is identified with the immediacy of perceiving one's own existence. Because we are not bees, we are not ants. Ants are content; connected ants don't get bored. But we are not satisfied. Why? Because this documents who made us, and why he made us. For this reason, the supreme ease of grasping existence comes from realizing something we take for granted: that we feel this disproportion, that we feel this emptiness. Because God, for those who are aware of this disproportion, is the immediate implication of self-awareness.

How is it possible that we feel this disproportion, even though we are so limited? Because we are made by another; we are made for a relationship with the infinite; that is, we have been launched because the one who made us made us in a certain way, so that he could fill the life of each of us. This is why St. Augustine, with his genius, says, addressing God: “You show quite clearly the greatness you wanted to attribute to the rational creature, that is, to you, to me.” You show clearly how great we are, because nothing less than you is enough for his blissful peace, his fullness. For this reason, when one realizes that this need for fullness, this irreducibility, is not a condemnation but that we are made for the infinite, one begins to realize that one can escape from this nightmare of seeking what cannot fill one's life and begin to decide, to ask oneself the question: “Am I open to this possibility, or do I prefer to continue groping around, knowing that nothing less than You is enough?”

For this reason, the more this comes to the surface in our consciousness, the more we understand why this is “the time of the person.” Because the harder times are, the more life challenges us, the more the subject, what matters, the person, is what matters, the decision that the person makes.

Faced with this question, what matters is the self; there are no saints. Because this is the greatest resource we have to avoid succumbing to the dictatorship of those who want to make fun of us, trying to respond with attempts that have already failed. So, to conclude, what is the person and what is the consistency for living life, in this historical situation that we are experiencing with more vigor, less turmoil, less confusion? What is urgently needed for the person to be, for the human subject to have vigor in this situation where everything is torn from the trunk to make dry leaves, is self-awareness.

What is self-awareness? It is a clear and loving perception of oneself. How we would like to have this clear and loving perception of ourselves, this ability to embrace ourselves, charged with the awareness of our own destiny (why are we made? why are we made this way?) and therefore capable of true affection for ourselves, which is difficult to find in someone who has this affection for themselves, freed from the instinctive dullness of self-love. If we lose this identity, nothing benefits us. This is confirmed by the daily experience of those who are capable of true affection for themselves. Self-awareness, therefore, represents the novelty of life. 

One feels life anew when one realizes who one is. And this is documented by some of us who, precisely by accepting what we constantly focus on in the religious center, agree to follow this path.

Unrevised notes and translation by the author. Julián Carrón's speech at the Works Convention, titled "The Self in Works. It's the Time of the Person," held on August 28, 2025, at the Ikaros headquarters in Calcio, attended by 300 Foundation employees.