In the subdued theater of economy, the numbers march with a melancholy cadence: inflation at 2.0 percent year on year, unchanged from June, while core inflation clings to 2.6 percent, a stubborn shadow that neither policy catechisms nor market bravado can exorcise. The food aisle mutters its own dissonance—prices up 2.2 percent, with coffee nearly twenty percent dearer than a year ago and chocolate close to eighteen; beef and veal gain about eleven. Yet sweetness flees elsewhere in the pantry: sugar plunges 29.4 percent, olive oil 22.5, potatoes 16.1, as if appetite itself trembles between scarcity and relief.

The energy ledger sighs a contrary note, declining 3.4 percent overall: wood pellets and fuels for heating down about 5.3 percent, heating oil down 5.0, electricity down 2.0, and district heating down 1.8; natural gas, however, barely budges, up 0.3 percent. A paradox of comfort: the flames that warmed us wane, even as the price of warmth remains precariously tethered to some unknown equilibrium.

Services rise by 3.0 percent, a procession of costs that remind us of a civilization's drift toward maintenance rather than meaning. Among the most marked increases: combined passenger transport about 11.3 percent, mail and parcel services 9.0, social care services 8.2, with insurance 5.8 and vehicle maintenance 5.7. The realm of things we do for one another mounts in price, while memory hovers over the old rituals of cohesion.

Overall consumer prices stand 2.0 percent higher than a year before, a figure unchanged from June after a steadier 2.1 percent pace in April and May. Economists had expected 1.9 percent, and the forecast for 2025 keeps to a whisper of about 2.0 percent. The ECB sets a liturgy at 2.0 percent for price stability; core inflation—excluding food and energy—remains at 2.6 percent, stubbornly above the goal, a siren song of permanence in a world craving relief.

And yet within these digits lies a gnawing allegory. The modern polis measures virtue by index and rate; the old gods—of beauty, restraint, and transcendence—are eclipsed by the arithmetic of stability. Nietzsche would call it the nihilism of a culture grown polite: the abyss of meaning dressed in a suit and tie, the eternal recurrence recoded as a quarterly report. We watch a contemporary tragicomedy unfold, where the chorus is composed not of poets but of economists, policy boards, and the last men who mistake steadiness for salvation. The decay is not only of price but of purpose, the decline of a civilization that once believed in greatness and now settles for a well-managed equilibrium.

So we endure, like Oedipus or Prometheus in a modernized dusk: the world tilts toward comfort, yet the soul grows thinner; the price of living well becomes the cost of bearing the emptiness of it all. In this age, the Western ethos markets its soul in percentages, praying that the next quarter brings a gentler rise of hope, even as the deeper questions grow fainter under the glow of screens and spreadsheets.