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It is never personal, you're not the protagonist

It's so easy to become offended. It actually comes pretty natural. Someone says something.  You feel it's directed at you Strong reaction follows No need to react, it's got nothing to do with you as a person Imagine some remarks about academic work versus manual one, a bit dismissive about the latter. You don't have a degree and never wanted one. You know very well it takes years of experience and training to do what you're doing. Talent is involved too, as some people do have "two left hands".  You still feel you should add something to the conversation, but not sure if it is going to be well-received. No need to enlighten the other party right now Most people think in terms of opposites. If it's not this, it's that and it can't be anything else. Certainty of one's convictions is also a form of self-reassurance that everything is stable in one's world. Other points of view cannot be allowed because they are disruptive. Cognitive disrup

The 4th wall is down, we just don't know it (part 1)

Linguists, not in your sweetest dreams has such a golden opportunity come your way.  Owners of PhD in social sciences, rejoice. This is your time, so if you want to advance your research, stop procrastinating. If you have not done it already, sign up to as many social media platforms as possible and watch the world go by.  Up to now, if you wanted you investigate how people truly communicate when they are angry or upset, you'd have had to carry out an experiment, recruit volunteers, set-up the environment and then pray that they act genuinely. Otherwise, it's been listening to individual stories and trying to identify a version closer to truth. Trading insults between four walls has always been part of domestic life. Insults directed towards strangers, out in the open world, have been around for ages too, and at times there were some consequences.  Remember the Three Musketeers' famous duels?  Generally, the human mouth is not always emitting nice and pleasing s

Artificially emotional intelligence

       A blog post by Shelly Palmer,  I've Talked to the Future and it Talked back , set me thinking a couple of years ago, so I wrote a blog post. I am re-publishing it because nothing seems to have changed since.  His questions were not purely rhetorical. Indeed, how are we going to distinguish between human and machine? Will a new code of conduct be invented and become part of product instructions,  same as the ‘do not immerse in water’ one? Imagine how many future legal departments could be scratching their collective heads over a certain feature that may open the door to litigation. The anthropological aspect is a bit trickier, I agree, but has it ever been otherwise?  Children turn out well-behaved or not as a result of at least two factors: genetics and environment. From a certain age onward, peer pressure displaces parental influence. Add to this chance (yes, goddess Fortuna, that one) and the concoction is almost ready. I am not worried ab

A dog's life

This is going to outrage dog lovers, but I think that humans’ tyrannical nature is revealed not just when it enslaves other humans, but also when it enslaves dogs. We never say 'free as a dog", do we? Just 'free as a bird'. Dogs and humans, not all what it seems. We take a wolf at heart and spend lots of time and energy teaching it to obey and react to commands.  (To be more historically accurate, the 'taking' happened a long time ago, and it succeeded, so very different from cats.) We are prepared to downsize our vocabulary to a few words in order to achieve that.  We literally put up with shit.  All in the name of training, while the true purpose looks more like having a totally obedient living being under our control, one emitting apparent devotion.  In humans it’s called the Stockholm syndrome.  Even the basic freedoms of sniffing and running are restricted anywhere near human habitat. It takes a trip back to the wild

Trust, what’s that?

Prologue - This is the very first ever post written on a mobile phone. It feels like walking in very tight clothes while trying to be graceful and not miss the train at the same time. Squeezed between the rush of inspiration and the small screen, what a terrible situation.  Better get this out before an attack of RSI or an unwelcome interruption. The idea of trust and trustworthiness has been undermining the reality of human connections forever, or  so it seems. It is viewed as an essential element of any emotional architecture, something that could make the whole edifice of a relationship go down. The premise is that as soon as talking to someone goes beyond the shallow end of trivialities and into ‘soul’ territory, a new feeling is being born. If we did not trust someone, why would we share so much of the unseen self? I am not talking here about heartbreak stories. The unveiling is part of a ritual that new friends-in-the-making like going through. I tell you this and you recip

Inside the spreadsheet - the real time travel

Version 1.1. of this blog post, rewritten at  the suggestion of someone who keeps pushing me to write and knows a thing or two about good prose. Spreadsheets must have been around since Egyptian scribes started organising the pharaohs' worldly possessions. I somehow feel they inspired just as much awe to Upper Nile's neophytes as they do to today's untrained users of such tables. They certainly throw me into a very deep hole of despair. The more I look, the faster all those numbers in their tiny cages are whirling before my eyes. I never thought there was a name for it, but hey, there is one: dyscalculia. The weird thing is that mental arithmetic is piece of cake, but working with a spreadsheet just makes me nauseous. It's not a joke. I was so thrilled to discover that there is no such thing as ruining a spreadsheet forever and ever. There is always a way of going back one or two or three steps and start all over again moving the little numbe

Question of the morning

There is a lake of ink, both physical and digital, somewhere, filled by everything that has been written on mind, body and soul and their holistic union.  Empirical observation seems to show that each of the three varies in size as life unfolds. Question: is the sum of the parts kept the same by some inner mysterious workings or can it be influenced by a particular conscious action? An old sarcastic reply to someone boasting of having given up a bad habit was “Remember that the sum of our vices stays the same”. Does this apply to the sum of mind, body and soul?

On audiobooks

How were people able to survive in the past without audiobooks? It is a ridiculous question, I know. Just by looking around I can see that the human species is still thriving, so lack of audiobooks has not in any way endangered it Should I have rather expressed my total devotion towards audiobooks, tinged with a bit of sadness? Print copies of the same books anguish on dusty shelves. I no longer read them. Instead of listening to  the voice in my head while the eyes move from left to right again and again, I listen to a stranger's voice (the author or a professional reader) telling the story. Eyes get a rest, ears get a bit of a battering. Legs get exercised, as audiobooks are the ideal walking aid, the literary equivalent of a Zimmer frame. The only inconvenience is battery life. Still, in the great scheme of walking, it's really minor. After all, one has to return home at some point.

The pleasures of being judgemental

Come on, don't recoil in disgust, as if you have just been the victim of a selfish dog-owner. You know the type, walking the dog and not picking up the poo. We all like being judgemental. The more we deny it, the more we do it. The art of making grand pronouncements about our fellow human beings must have been born in the depths of the cave, where everyone was a rival, someone to compete with for the best place near the fire. Backbiting, I can only imagine, could become quite literal. It's so understandable, with few resources and a constant danger lurking as soon as you stepped outside. This is to say nothing of the dangers that sneaked inside, as everyone is hungry at some point, from fleas to lions. If you believe in epigenetics  (big word, I know, so big that the auto-correct puts many red dots under it, just through sheer ignorance), so if you do know a thing or two about epigenetics, you can only conclude that human temperament had to incorporate the 'judgement

Oppression? What’s that?

The sky can be oppressive. The atmosphere in a room is bound to turn tyrannical if too much time has gone after the door last closed. Winter clothes, ah, winter clothes, lead-heavy, turning shoulders and back into a shuddering mass of fatigued flesh. Who said it’s all political?  The strangest example of oppression is the kind born inside. What is called ‘the soul’, (in a rather cavalier manner, one must say), is a fugitive slave. Ready to die for a sliver of freedom, it will feel oppressed till the end.

Strength is not what is seems

It's heard everywhere, the call-to-arms type of appeal: "Be strong". Fortitude is praised, resilience is envied.  I could not agree more, they are all virtuous expressions of some kind of inner steely mechanism, the kind that triumphs over misfortune and does not recoil before blatant injustice. Stiff upper lip, a straight back, eyes never looking down, an assured step. You know the lot, romantic propaganda has been disseminating it for ages and philosophers have usually gone along with it. If the physical body is in any way a manifestation of our true essence. It has been a good recipe to save face when confronted with adversity. We could say at least that we got beaten down, but not vanquished. No one seems to care much about non-exceptional situations, when inner strength is not just a slogan, but a consumable, quickly exhausted by the continuous drip-drip of demands. Life is usually exacting a heavy price just by allowing us to experience it. We are not immortal,

Ode to ageing

I adore getting old. While most of my youthfulness was spent in a blur of emotions and irrational decisions, growing-up at last feels like real freedom. Once captivity is over, life appears as the real chance to see the choices clearly and then pick up something that does not harm either body or soul. Ageing is a luxury train if the right ticket has been bought. It's not the Titanic, definitely. I would rather arrive at the natural destination than end up on the bottom of a frozen sea. I admit the journey starts in a lush environment and ends up in the desert. It is called the cycle of life. To each camel, its own reserve of water. Sharing is for oasis stopovers. Sailing to Byzantium  should be compulsory reading of any mature education curriculum, be it humanities or civil engineering, let's say.