My Beirut Chronicles

Writer. Filmmaker. Communication Strategist. Content & Digital Creator. Former aspiring Comedian. Occasional Cartoonist. I write in English with a slight French accent and in French with a Lebanese inflection.

La Guerre Au Passé

There is a war happening as I write this. There are several, in fact. Borders contested, cities destroyed, lives ended over questions of territory, dominance, and power. The same questions humans have been killing each other over for centuries. And every one of these wars is fighting the wrong battle. Not because war is immoral — though it is. Not because the suffering is unjustifiable — though it is. But because whatever side wins, whatever map gets redrawn, whatever power emerges dominant, none of it will matter in the way the victors imagine. The world they are fighting to control is already disappearing beneath their feet. La guerre au passé . War in the past tense. Not just belonging to the past — but already conjugated there, already concluded, even as it rages. We are living the last spasms of the 20th century bleeding into the 21st. The conflicts tearing the world apart today are remnants — fought with 20th century logic, over 20th century stakes, by leaders whose en...

You're Wearing Masks You've Forgotten Are Masks

You don't truly know yourself. Not because you lack self-awareness, but because you've spent your entire life performing. One mask for work. Another for family. Different masks for friends, for strangers, for every social situation you navigate. You've become so skilled at shape-shifting your personality — to avoid conflict, to fit in, to meet expectations — that you've lost touch with who you actually are beneath all these performances. For generations, these masks were exhausting but functional. They helped us survive in relatively stable environments where fitting in was a viable strategy. But the world has changed. In this landscape of constant disruption — AI reshaping careers overnight, social structures fragmenting, everything accelerating — those masks aren't just exhausting anymore. They're lethal. Your authentic self is no longer a luxury. It's your survival tool. But here's where most advice fails: "Be yourself" sounds simple until y...

A New Direction

Some changes happen gradually, almost without you noticing. Others arrive with the force of an obvious truth you somehow hadn’t seen until now. This one was both. If you’ve been reading My Beirut Chronicles for a while, you know the blog has never followed a formula. No niche, no content calendar, no algorithm to please. Just one voice, sharing what felt worth sharing — analysis, opinion, observation, the occasional provocation. Over the years, that voice commented on politics, society, culture, and the particular madness of living in Lebanon. Six million of you read it. Some of you argued with it. A few of you changed my mind — sometimes because you were right, and I was wrong. Very wrong, occasionally. Then something shifted. It started quietly, almost as an experiment. In May 2025, I launched Visages on Instagram — an exploration of whether AI could create images that felt genuinely human. Not just realistic. Human. The experiment raised more questions than it answered. That felt l...

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