Life by a thousand cuts

If you were expecting some diet advice, sorry for disappointing you, this is not a dieting blog and advice is such a cheap commodity nowadays that it's practically worthless. Bitterness is a... almost wrote metaphysical... state, the result of being bashed around the head with other people's best intentions. One wants to relieve you from some innocuous agitation that has got nothing to do with them.  You start by telling them about some upset and end up defending your reaction. Moreover, you get some extra bashing disguised as genuine interest in your welfare. Resist, and the final blow will be administered as a suggestion to go and see a therapist. Another one assesses your moods with clinical precision. Variations get quickly pushed into generalized statements. "You're always so and so on Mondays". Really? Who could have thought that being as emotionally active as a corpse is the desired state. Everyone, apparently, everyone apart from you, the fick

New Year's Eve, using time to acquire free wisdom nuggets from the internet (no sarcasm implied, they are free and they are nuggets). What have I learnt so far? The last day of the year is apparently a good day to look back and write about nice and not so nice things that happened, about plans that went awry and targets that were hit. I think it's impossible to accomplish all of the above when there's still some cooking to be done and the house is not tidy enough. Better forget about one final frantic attempt to close that diary that has got some random pages scribblings next to huge swathes of blank space. It is a terrible proof of inconsistency. If there ever was a smoking gun of wasted time, my diary is the one. Should the new year bring new resolutions in its wake? Yeah, why not, but not until the roast is safely extracted from the oven.

Should we worry that there is a whole self-help industry out there, from blogs to books to downloads of digital products? I think we should, if only because self-love and looking after oneself were meant to be triggered (or so I thought) by the mere state of being alive. If this is no longer part of our survival instinct, what is then? A conscious and determined effort to protect ourselves? From what? From life? I am sure that one day someone will be able to record the sensations that course through a newborn's body and brain, as they enter the world. Maybe they are very pleasant. From outside, they certainly seem to be the opposite. The exit is slightly more documented. At least we got some witness accounts from people who say they've been at death's door, turned around (or were turned around)  and came back. Nothing at all from life's door, not yet though. In between these two, it looks like we need to be taught how to be kind to ourselves, eat well, sleep e

You've heard it before: master your emotions, keep the lid on random thoughts. Is it good advice? I think it is. The idea of thoughts and emotions being some kind of inimical entities under close supervision was at first dismissed as too New Age, liberal, self-indulging theory. After all, who has got any time to stop and think if they are doing something that requires total focus? This applies to both physical and mental labour, including the one needed for giving birth. Agreed, there is not much room left between this kind of real activity and the rest of the world, with all its distractions. Focus is the saving grace, provided nothing changes. As soon as there's a technological leap and things get easier, there would be less of the old type of focus, would it not? Washing or toiling the land was a day-long affair. When it stops being so, is a door being opened to emotions and thoughts that would have otherwise stayed silent? In ancient Greece, different schools o

The title of this blog post, it sounds a bit like marketing advice, doesn’t it?  It’s got nothing to do with marketing. If there was a form to fill, something along the line of “conflict of interests or disclosure”, it would contain a bold-faced and in capital letters 'NO'. Nothing to sell or flog, no book or method or suggestions. Just amazement at an ever-increasing number of people who have lived to tell the story of extricating themselves from some form of personal hell or making it in the bigger hostile world. Maybe finding the Holy Grail of human interactions. Before the internet, the number of people who had garnered enough authority to dispense recommendations was pretty limited. Dale Carnegie comes to mind, as a random name. John Grey is another one, of a more recent past. Nowadays, the vast marketplace called social media is full of new authors and there is a surge of passion to help 'the other ones" help themselves. It would not take a very pow

It's not all doom and gloom, after all. Or is it? Kids no longer play by themselves in the streets of most western cities, lovers spend time copious amounts of time looking at their phone instead of gazing at each other adoringly, emoticons and gifs have replaced emotional exchanges of words. Families and friends, united by devices. So what? Digital natives have not been left with a huge void in their lives and the non-digital generation should not fear their offspring is going to grow into some mutated half-VR creature. If anything, there is currently too much choice, a sure source of neurosis. Shall I do this or shall I do that? Go on Twitter or Reddit? Post something on Facebook or Instagram? Actually the latter dilemma has been solved, as you can post on both at the same time. It is true that parenting is now much harder than it used to be 30 years ago, when the framework of daily life was pretty fixed. There was no escape from the physical confines, so any venturing ou

Absence of writing makes the blogger go rusty. It dissolves whatever crystals of an idea were around in the first place and it turns the writer back into a reader. A reader only, must add. I don't know much about the origins of consumerism in the wider society, I can only bear witness to the straight path that leads to culture consumerism. Having intelligent, creative, funny or plain well-educated thoughts for breakfast, lunch and dinner is great. The problem is that they are always someone else's thoughts, in one format or another. If you don't like analogies, stop reading now. Reading and watching TV or videos is like eating other people's food, all the time, in select restaurants. Delicious food, combined with lack of effort, in preparing it, is almost impossible to resist.  It is a wonderful past time and it empowers anyone to have delightful conversations. The would-be writer can get tempted like everyone else. It's only human, after all, to go after p