One last riddle for the week (I promise)

I first saw L’appartement at the cinema in 1996. For the film to work, the protagonist needs to radiate charisma, and I suppose, given its success, he did. But I remember thinking how dead ugly he was, and wondering why these extraordinary women were falling, one after another, into his little web of self-interest. I was twenty-four, already singed by a couple of relationships and just emerging from two dry, reluctant years alone. I had no idea why I’d failed so miserably to find someone. Watching that man glide from one impossibly desirable woman to the next cracked something in me.

It’s the same story, I suppose, with money and work. I’m not stupid, but both have always slipped through my fingers. In my last job, I sat at the same desk for twelve years while younger, hungrier colleagues rocketed past, fuelled by a kind of cut-throat buoyancy I never possessed. Cars, houses, watches, and a carousel of beautiful but temporary lovers - these things zipped by as I trundled along behind, like an elephant watching flies perform their glittering acrobatics while it lumbers toward the waterhole.

They say nice boys finish last, and perhaps that’s true. The world doesn’t seem to prize decency anymore - if it ever did. It rewards performance, opportunism, and the ability to mimic sincerity just long enough to get what you want.

Now I sit watching congressional hearings with Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, and feel that same dull recognition. They’ll slip away unscathed, of course - these people who’ve likely committed treason in high office - because for them guilt is just another tactical inconvenience. They call it “playing the game.” The wreckage left behind - people dead, pardons granted, the moral fabric further eroded - is merely collateral. And I know this will go on, probably for the rest of my life.

They say if you can’t beat them, join them. But I couldn’t. It wouldn’t sit right. To live that way, you have to amputate some essential part of yourself. You have to be a psychopath, or at least learn to behave like one. And I can’t help wondering whether that’s what our society now trains us to become - polishing empathy out of existence, bending each generation a little further until self-interest is no longer corruption but simply the way things are. Perhaps that’s the riddle of our age: to remain human in a world that keeps rewarding those who aren’t.