Ulysses, the ideal LinkedIn profile?

I went to see The Odyssey, the film conceived by British director Christopher Nolan. The next day, reading Hélène Monsacré’s article in Philosophie Magazine prompted me to write these lines. She describes Ulysses as an ‘adventurer in reverse’: he leaves only to return, enriched by all he has been through. What he brings back from the journey, and his own transformation, are worth more than the journey itself.

It took nerve to tackle such a myth: Dante placed Ulysses in Hell for pushing human curiosity too far; Joyce compressed the epic into a single, ordinary day in the streets of Dublin. Now Nolan takes up the myth in turn: his Odyssey, released last July, casts Matt Damon as a weary Ulysses, more human than heroic.

Like Homer, Nolan gives us a Ulysses who endures as much as he triumphs. Yet every port of call forces him to let go of part of himself, or at least of the man he believed himself to be. After twenty years of trials and cunning, his one constant is his longing to return to Ithaca.

In today’s world of work, constant movement is prized: changing company, country, sector or role. Mobility has become a virtue in its own right. Ulysses offers another reading: every trial shapes him, turning his resilience into a strength and his grasp of the situation into a very modern asset. In the age of AI, as repetitive and analytical tasks are handed over to algorithms, practical intelligence (what the Greeks called mētis) is once again a major asset: the kind that adapts and finds a way out where force alone fails.