“Magic Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” asks the Evil Queen in Snow White in Disney’s 1937 film. Well, it seems that, throughout the centuries, the need to find wisdom from several types of wells has remained constant. For women especially, issues related to beauty and the eternal question of admired beauty have tested men and their skills in very appropriate, but also very dangerous, ways.

I truly believe that our social interaction exists only for us to receive confirmation of our need to exist. If we did not need the approval of others, money would not be around. Well, well, at this moment in our history, wisdom is everywhere to be found, in case one needs it. Especially when it comes to holidays.

My feeling is that almost the entire world is constantly getting ready for the next holiday. When one is over, preparation for the next one begins. If I remember correctly, that is the thing I have been asked most often in my personal history: where am I going on holiday? We live in a world trying to create almost perfect holidays. Cities, resorts, clubs, and hotels compete, in the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, to create the perfect holiday. Never before has the world seen such pressure placed on vacation. So, the concept has degraded because, due to too much pressure to have the perfect vacation, the result is no longer as expected.

If one is peaceful only during holidays, it is clear that a call from work is a huge holiday wrecker. I lived a holiday-based adult life, only to realize that I was making a mistake by not trying to be successful at having a holiday at home. And I noticed that most people do not look better when they come back from holiday; some even look worse. And unhappy travelers cannot stand ordinary people on holiday who dare to come back in better shape than they left.

In a nutshell, we love our holidays, but we hate everybody else’s vacations. In the summer, if it rains at the beach, it is a catastrophe because it ruins expectations. If too much snow falls during wintertime, people who go to work every day are devastated. Somehow, in a mysterious way, holidays to recover one’s health and the presence of too much snow around are to be avoided. Rain ruins any pleasure and has become a source of fear. The number of rain lovers has diminished by 90% across the globe. We have become lovers of heat.

Animals now interact regularly with humans because forests and seas have also become hiding places for humans. We are in competition with animals for proper hiding spaces. For animals, it is their territory, but humans hide from the fear of other humans. The chances of having more dogs or cats than friends are pretty high. And everybody is trying to live a different life from everyone else’s.

We find relief in technology, and the concept of age has been erased. People at the age of 70 can look and behave the same as those in their 40s. That creates an unending competition around the world for fame and glory. The interesting fact is that some people aged 70 and above are trying to live what they missed when they were young, while teenagers nowadays express themselves as if retirement were around the corner. A melting pot, in a nutshell.

The answers are all around, but where is a true well of wisdom to be found? Who is the bearer of wisdom currently? The holiday away from home, the holiday at home, or work? It seems that there are no answers within ourselves, only outside us. We have lost our ability to trust our instincts. The instinct of beauty, the instinct of dating, the instinct of love — we need proper guidance for anything. A world missing its functioning rules.

The overuse of technology makes us forget why we actually started the call. We talk and interact so much that we no longer know what it feels like to miss one another. The mystery of reappearance is long gone. The mystery of love has vanished. If we separate mind from body for health reasons and to lose weight, how is that going to affect love? Do we actually still have love around, or is it enough to have the love coming from your mirror?

Holidays promote love and test love, and we are heading into a new summer season. Well, well, it seems that we just have to wait for an answer. Or, wait, there is no correct answer without proper guidance. If there is more intelligence after the holidays than before, that means there has not been enough fun. Quite a dilemma. And we go back to the eternal question of the perfect vacation. There are energizers all around, and the deepest well in the area is dry.

I will choose to sing in the rain. It works for me every time.

A series that made me believe that it is possible to mix work, love, and fun is Emily in Paris. I have to admit that I enjoy Emily’s working style. An American woman in Paris is always an interesting subject, especially if she is active in the marketing field.

When I stayed in New York, my feeling was that it was the city with the longest working hours anywhere on the globe. A city for those who do not want to waste a single minute. The rhythm of New York is career-centred. It is a place to stay and work hard for absolute glory. It sounds fancy, but my view is still that only those who are young at heart and high in spirit and ambition have their place there. New York has a focus within itself that makes one want to enjoy, and keep for as long as possible the feeling of unlimited possibilities.

Contrary to what one might think, I feel that New York has a combined motion of Elvis, Michael Jackson, Ella Fitzgerald and the Beatles. Something edgy, something fast, with a high degree of blues and thriller. But I am moving away from Emily, who comes from Chicago and wants to prove that the US has the best experts in marketing in the world.

Her encounters with Europe, across several countries, are seen very much in connection with the men she falls in love with. They are all funny and attractive, but besides Alfie, who is a little edgy, it is very difficult for me to see her eventually married to either the French chef or the Italian businessman. Emily is career-driven, and her ambition to succeed in Europe gave me the feeling that she would rather fall for a competitor than for a nice guy. That is why I have the feeling that she will want to go back to the States at the end of the series.

Europe loves her very much; she has already conquered everybody. What more could she do on our continent? The feeling is somehow that Europe is waiting for the US to change continents and move here. Funny, isn’t it?

Related to boyfriends, I believe Alfie is the absolute winner because everybody needs him. He is the best, he learns French, and he can solve some of the financial problems in France; that is something extraordinary. In other words, a US marketing expert meets a British finance connoisseur, and they are able to solve a lot of EU problems. The US leads in terms of business, the UK in financial matters, France is about love, good food, high fashion, and work-fun balance, and Italy is highly artistic and family-oriented.

I am curious about what is going to happen with Mindy. It seems as if Europe does not have any baddie honey badgers anymore. At least it is better than in Romania, where one gets the feeling that married people do not stand a chance of growing unless they are somehow forced to divorce in an ugly manner. To have a normal family, in the sense of a marriage with children, you have to leave the country. The way forward is for a local to marry a foreigner.

What are the parameters of the modern ideal partner? Nowadays, it seems that staying for an entire life with just one partner is obsolete and adverse to career. It is simply a social failure not to experiment in a globalized world. I could take a risk and say that today’s world is defined by the concept of experiment. It is somehow quantity-oriented because it takes less work and less risk to succeed, and we want more and more safety for ourselves and for the next generations.

In other words, there is a huge fear of change. This is why the pandemics created such a divisive situation related to the vaccine and its effects. The way forward is hard to tell, but one thing seems certain: happiness still makes people jealous, and Romeo and Juliet need to hide their love even more in modern times because marriages are the most fragile love connections in the world. It seems that marriage needs higher protection than money.

We need new rules for love, that is for sure!