The Twentieth-Largest Economy and Other Lines We Learn to Wear

Driving through Milan in the back of an old but comforting cab, I’m struck by how strangely familiar the streets feel. There’s something in their slightly chaotic rhythm, in the way the spring light catches on the buildings, and in that lone brutalist structure peering out beside the Duomo. I find myself wondering who would dare put such a stark, block-like presence within sight of such a grand and intricate cathedral.

Yet the absurdity of that contrast feels almost natural to someone who grew up in a city whose focal point is a relic of socialist realist architecture—a strangely perverse echo of the past, planted squarely in the middle of everything. And as the city evolves, its skyline filling with glass towers and increasingly complex structures, the contrast only sharpens: a reminder that, little by little, we are learning to move on.

I’m still quietly laughing at the scenery when the driver, unprompted and seemingly undeterred by my silence, launches into a story about the Madonnina (how I wish I had selected “quiet mode” on Uber at that moment). Still, I listen—partly out of politeness, partly because the story turns out to be unexpectedly interesting.

The golden Madonnina, he explains, once stood atop the Duomo, only to be relocated to the highest point in the city each time Milan stretched upward. It’s a strangely symbolic gesture—one that captures something deeply human: the impulse to build higher and higher, not in pursuit of closeness to God, but in search of accomplishment, a striving that feels incomplete without some small bow to the past. I’ve made a habit of collecting facts like these—not entirely for the love of knowledge, if I’m honest, more often for the mild social currency of deploying them in random conversations.

As I listened, I couldn’t help but notice that his accent felt familiar, yet distinctly melodic—a blend of his Polish roots, Italian life, and English learned out of professional necessity to get people from place to place and to entertain them with his expertly relentless taxi-driver storytelling. As he switched to Polish, the Italian sing-song cadence he imposed on native words rendered them grotesquely joyful. It’s strange how accents can both anchor and undo you at once. I find myself returning to this thought often: how my own accent has become an eccentric blend of places and people I’ve encountered along the way, to the point that others can no longer place it—and, lately, neither can I.

As he launched into the clearly revised and compact version of his life story—tailored, no doubt, for 25-minute drives like this—I found myself genuinely enchanted, drawn into every detail of it. The serendipitous chain of events that led him to settle in Milan was, in fact, a tale of instant, albeit complicated, romance—the kind most of us, idly scrolling through yet another dating app, can only dream of. But beyond the illusion of a happily-ever-after lay a far more demanding reality: the blunt disapproval of the families— both his and hers—that he likened to Romeo and Juliet not because they were enemies, but because the union felt just as foreign and difficult to accept. The perpetual miscommunication stemmed from the fact that he couldn’t just build a Duolingo streak but rather had to learn the language the hard way. It was a story of resilience and commitment, one that made sense only in the long run. He reminisced about the definitive moment of his triumph—when his wife’s sister, aunt, and mother helped him shop for a new suit for his first job—more than a gesture of kindness, it was a moment of genuine embrace of his place in this new world.

And suddenly, unbothered by the nostalgia of that meaningful moment in his story, he took a sharp left, passing through the yellow light with effortless ease—a testament to his full integration, both in spirit and in his mastery of the Italian roads.

Incidentally, I find myself in Milan at a conference of Polish students abroad, and as I sit through keynote speeches, distinguished speakers, and matters of unquestioned importance, I’m struck by how curiously devoid they are of our positionality as human beings—not merely as students or future contributors to an ever more complex economy. Frankly speaking, conferences like these are interesting not only for the sanctioned task of thinking about the future of Poland or its social, economic, and geopolitical entanglements, but because they unfold as a distinct, almost theatrical spectacle of temperaments.

Performances of CEOs and thought leaders (some more convincing than others) attempting to borrow and embrace the voice of a new generation. And alongside them, performances of ordinariness and exceptionality, deployed with careful timing. At times, the performance slips. Watching one of the more prominent voices in Polish politics tease her ex-boyfriend (seated quietly in the audience) about his chronic inability to commit to anything is not only disarming, but quietly one of the most memorable moments of the fortnight. A timely reminder that revenge is patient, and particularly ruthless when you’ve climbed high enough to be in a position to call someone out from a stage in a room of 500 people.

But this performance extends to ourselves as well. Even when hidden beneath the glamour of well-tailored suits and dresses, we still wear them a little too deliberately, as if rehearsing a version of ourselves not yet fully convincing, in the hope that soon they might feel like a second skin, and that we might learn to wear them rather than let them wear us. A modest triumph, perhaps, but not unlike the one the taxi driver found in the act of choosing his first proper suit. In essence, it is less about style than about being.

On a collective level, occasions like these can make the future of Poland feel almost like a corporate affair—a tightly wound organization convening annually to assess its position, quantify its progress, and rehearse its successes. This year’s theme? “Poland as the twentieth-largest economy in the world”, a line deployed in almost every discussion, repeated with the faith of a corporate tagline as though Poland’s rank were itself a product to be sold. I would argue, however, that it is also an attempt to construct a collective identity for the post-Polish plumber generation—a bold, and necessary, undertaking for a generation that speaks in near-accentless English, finds itself overqualified relative to its counterparts, and moves with ease across vast cultural repertoires and yet remains acutely aware of the complexities of being Polish out in the world. Occasions like these, then, are not merely performative; they are part of a deeper process of self-definition- of asking what we, as Poles, are good at, where our comparative advantage lies, and what it is we might have to offer to the outside world. The answer is not mine to give—if only to avoid the folly of speaking for an entire generation or reducing a complex set of experiences to a single line—but ours to figure out together.

And as we do, it can be tempting to paint over the cultural imaginations of Polish migrants, so deeply inscribed in past generations—to reject the pejorative habits that Polishness has long been associated with. Yet in that very total rejection, in our effort to present a new, “polished” version of Polishness, we risk losing something meaningful. Thinking about that, I keep returning to the renowned line from Lampedusa’s “Il Gattopardo”:

There’s something quietly cautionary in that insistence—each generation convinced of its own centrality, its own superiority. For us, no matter what conclusion we come to—whether we are hyenas, leopards or some entirely different beast altogether—what we will need to make sense of is as much about how we relate to the outside world as it is about how we relate to our own.

by Aleksandra Warda