Italy is the oldest country in Europe. I know that sounds like a trivia fact. It isn't. The median age is 47.1. One in four people you see on the bus, in the piazza, at the Conad checkout, is over 65. The number of people who can actually work — pay taxes, staff hospitals, drive buses — is going to drop by seven million by 2050. And that's the optimistic scenario, where more women work and people retire later. Last year, 370,000 babies were born in Italy. That's it. The lowest since Italy became Italy in 1861. Sixteen years straight of fewer births than the year before. Pensions will eat 17% of everything the country produces by 2040. Right now there are about 39 retired people for every 100 workers. By 2050, it's going to be almost one to one. One person working. One person retired. Everyone knows these numbers. They've been in every budget speech for twenty years. And still, nobody wants to say the next number out loud. 473.5 billion euros. A year. That's what...
The number that stopped me wasn't the one about toddlers. It was the one about us. I was reading the La Santé en action dossier — this thick public health journal that France actually takes seriously, not a think-tank PDF that gets tweeted and forgotten — and there it was, in plain language: one in two people in France now checks their phone or watches videos at bedtime. One in three does it during meals. Not teenagers. People. Adults. Parents. Grandparents. Us. And then the follow-up question: Do you feel like you spend too much time on your phone? Half said yes. Half. You ask that about almost anything else — do you drink too much, do you eat too much sugar, do you watch too much TV — you never get 50%. You get 20, 30 if you're really hitting a nerve. But with phones, it's half. Half the country is looking at its own behavior and saying, quietly, "I think I have a problem." That's the part of the French debate that keeps getting edited out of the headlines....