Life & Wisdom Quote by Antonio Tabucchi

Doubt, for Tabucchi, is less a personal flaw than a metabolic condition: it burns fuel. The line turns a familiar complaint (indecision is tiring) into a pointed moral distinction. Yes, people who question themselves can experience life as “oppressive and exhausting” - a word pair that suggests not just mental strain but the weight of systems, expectations, and history pressing down. But then he flips the valence: the doubters are “more energetic.” Not happier. Not calmer. More alive.

The trick is in the last clause, “they aren’t robots,” which reads like a small jab at the modern fantasy of smooth-functioning humans: optimized, certain, unbothered. Tabucchi’s subtext is that certainty is often purchased by outsourcing your thinking - to ideology, routine, authority, or convenience. Doubt, by contrast, keeps the engine running because it refuses to let the world become automatic. It’s exhausting precisely because it’s ethical: you keep re-checking your premises, your complicity, your desires.

Context matters: Tabucchi’s fiction is steeped in Portugal’s authoritarian past and in the slippery boundaries between identity, memory, and political responsibility. In a landscape where regimes demand compliance and narratives demand clean endings, doubt becomes a form of resistance. The quote isn’t romanticizing anxiety; it’s defending inner friction as proof of agency. The “robot” isn’t just a metaphor for emotional numbness - it’s a warning about what happens when we trade ambiguity for obedience.