"Enjoy being discreet means to immediately accept that you cannot enjoy it forever. It means really giving up, happily, the eternal and homogeneous life, source of many deadly desires."

What it means to live discreetly in the present age, in the (social) media circus, in what Bauman would call “the liquid society”? The author – a French philosopher and professor at the University of Paris VII - Denis Diderot - proposes a mandatory reflection, for anyone who wants to train his critical spirit and not give up thinking the Zeitgeist, the spirit of time.

Orienting one’s thoughts about what is alive and beautiful, both socially and politically, means going in the opposite direction to that of the appearance. It means grasping the naked beauty of the gesture; not work’s, nor statute’s, but the whispered impersonality that produces a smile, a bit of joy and energy, the democratic beauty of ordinary life. An experience "that demands to depose all sovereignty and to open to the opportunities of an anonymous life, which are rightfully unlimited”.

This approach brings us closer to a particular kind of happiness, far from the one given by having or being for someone else: "... escape the emptiness of self-images and personal ambitions; shirk things that you possess as to those you do not possess; escape both the fear of losing and that of not having anything to lose: we might call it happiness by subtraction. "
Thank you my friend, you've read my heart.

Pierre Zaoui - La discrétion : Ou l'art de disparaître
Autrement, Paris, 2013