Where have our feelings gone today? This is not a rhetorical exercise, but a necessary question. We live in a world in which wars, epochal migrations and new emergencies contribute to a sense of precariousness that leads us to believe that the only plausible ways to survive are denial and fear. Only the former condemns us to indifference, the latter paralyses us. In both cases, we end up relegating ourselves to a loneliness that unites young and old, old and children. Are we in the age of ataraxia, of insensitivity? The risk is there and it is becoming more and more concrete. We are teaching our young people to postpone coming to terms with real life. We condemn them to grow up fragile and confused. We demand a school without grades, we rewrite fairy tales for them in the name of "political correctness", we deprive them of the chance to let their emotions mature. Because our emotions need to be trained, every day, but in order to grow and nurture them, we need to know how to challenge them, not deny them or give up on them. Instead, we prefer to fill this emotional void with cynicism and blindly rely on the new products of artificial intelligence that threaten to depower our physical, cognitive and emotional capacities, our wonderful unpredictability. Most of us are unaware of this widespread anaesthesia of the soul, each of us simply enjoying the privileges and material well-being locked up in our cocoon. Unaware that the whole of humanity is in danger of embarrassment. But for those who seek it, the antidote is there. It is empathy.

Through personal memories, encounters and reflections, Paolo Crepet passionately urges us to rebel against indifference, not to be afraid of our ideas or even of our stumbles. He invites us to boldly, almost shamelessly, reclaim our emotions in order to finally "bite the sky" again.