How many of the stories in your head did you actually choose?

"Contenitori Attivi" is Italian. It means something like active containers but I keep it untranslated because I named it in 2003 and some things should stay in their original language.

2003 is a long time to carry a name without a home. Back then I was studying cognitive science and philosophy, deep inside the work of people like Lakoff, Damasio, Žižek — thinkers who, from very different directions, all arrived at the same uncomfortable place: the stories we live inside are not the ones we chose. We narrate first. Then the narrative decides for us.

But real life comes first, and real life said: build something. So I spent thirteen years exploring the digital world, building products and businesses. The cognitive frameworks didn't go away. They just found different outlets: understanding what users need before they can say it, turning ambiguity into something a team can ship, reading the structure underneath a market. Product management, it turns out, is applied framing.

Every few years the name came back. Contenitori Attivi. The idea that the different things living inside my head — the product builder, the cognitive science reader, the one still underlining Lakoff at midnight — aren't separate compartments. They're active. They talk to each other. They've been talking this whole time, just without a place to do it in public.

Now they converge. AI has collapsed the distance between thinking and making — what once required institutional backing and academic time now requires clarity of thought and the willingness to publish it. The containers finally have a home.

What you'll find here is writing about the invisible structures that shape how we think, choose, and build — frames, narratives, the machinery underneath the stories we tell ourselves. Sometimes the lens is cognitive science, sometimes product, sometimes politics. The angle changes. The question stays.

How many of the stories in your head did you actually choose?