My Philosophy of the Time Traveler
(And therefore, my philosophy of life)
Crossing One’s Era with Curiosity
I believe neither in biological immortality nor in technological eternity.
Organisms age.
Civilizations evolve.
Even stars come to an end.
Entropy governs matter.
Impermanence governs history.
And I stand somewhere within that movement.
I was born at a time when color television was still a novelty, when telephones had wires, when computing belonged to large institutions.
Today, I converse with artificial intelligence through a device that fits in my pocket.
I live in the future my teenage self imagined — without truly believing it would exist.
This realization could provoke anxiety.
The world changes quickly. Landmarks shift. Certainties crack.
But I have chosen a different posture.
I consider myself a time traveler.
Not because I walk through futuristic portals,
but because I consciously inhabit my era.
I control neither the trajectory of the world nor the duration of my own existence.
But I can choose how I pass through this chapter.
In the face of transformation, two attitudes are possible:
anxiety or curiosity.
Anxiety sees change as a threat.
Curiosity sees it as a sequence in history.
Curiosity is not naïveté.
It is a form of quiet courage.
It says:
Observe.
Understand.
Learn.
Adapt.
I do not deny the crises or the fragilities of our civilization.
I know that even our most advanced technologies exist within a finite universe.
I know that everything that exists is destined to transform.
But precisely because everything is impermanent, the journey becomes precious.
I do not seek to stop time.
I seek to cross it lucidly.
And above all, I wish to transmit this posture.
To my children.
To those I meet along this temporal road.
To those navigating their own seasons of uncertainty.
I do not want to pass on fear of the world.
I want to pass on the desire to understand it.
If one day one of them can say:
“My life is not perfect, but it is interesting,”
then my role will have had meaning.
We do not choose the era in which we are born.
But we can choose how we inhabit it.
I choose to cross my time with curiosity rather than anxiety.
Fear is unnecessary when death is inevitable — and even beyond death, each person is free to believe in continuity.
And ultimately, even if we are finite,
we can still live expansively.
Serge Thiebautgeorges 02-12-26
