There is not so many success as it looks

Success is overrepresented in our imagination and, in the oposite way, failure is underrepresented and hidden from every conversation, post and picture. 

Does it means that the world is full of successful people and successful moments and that failures are extremely rare and anormal?

It is not like that. Failure is more frequent than we think and succes is less frequent than we heard about. But success always gets to be more visible than failure. 




And why is like that?


People need to value themselves and feel valued by others, desesperately  and constantly.

Everyone who we meet, who we treat to, who we watch in the media, all the companies and public people, such as politicians, always try to, as much as they can, show their strengths, that can assure to them positive opinions, even if they are exaggerated or they are a lie.

Instead, our weak points, those that we think will damage the view that the others have about us, are removed, forgotten or explained in low voice just to authorized people, who we have a great confidence to. 




No releasable stuff


Can you imagine a company communicating terrible feedbacks that clients are leaving about their products? Or admitting that they are practicing unfair labour politics? 

Can you imagine someone explaining in his CV that he has been fired from several jobs because he is uncompetent and he has an annoyable personality?

Can you imagine someone posting this awesome dinner on Facebook or Instagram?

It will be shocked to see this situations, but are not rare, althought their main characters explaining them are very rare.




Failure make us feel alone...althought we shouldn't feel like that


The consequence of all this is that we feel alone when things go bad. Failure is rare, and it is only happening to us, because only successful people and successful events are showed to us. 

But probably there are lots of people with the same problems, with the same lack of skills to overcome them, but we won't know about it on Facebook, Linkedin are a friend's dinner.

If people explained more frequently our problems or failures, maybe fail would be easier to assume. 

Humanities: our user manual

According to Wikipedia, Humanities are "a group of academic disciplines that study aspects of human culture". Basically, they study the human condition in all its aspects.

 Humanistic careers are not highly valued by society

 I have always understood in this way. Humanities comes from "human" and, therefore, it is the discipline that observes us, analyze and study us and seeks to understand us.

Thus, if Humanities are seeking to understand us and the way how we work and behave, and they try to explain it to us, we must define the "Humanities" as the "user manual" of ourselves. 




Why an User Manual about ourselves?


Why do some situations annoy me? Why do things work as they do? Why am I treated in this way by others? How should I react in consequence?

These are some questions that we would like to answer to, and we don't usually have them. A good user manual about ourselves (a good humanistic knowledge) must help us to find out these kind of answers and act properly according to them.  

And what do it happen if we don't have such a manual? The same as it happens when the TV is not working properly, the image goes and comes or there are pixels in the screen,  and why don't know what's wrong with it. We feel angry and desperate and we knock the TV several times to see if the image improves. 




Humanities as the main topic in our education


It is not normal buying a washing machine without its user manual. Living without a user manual about ourselves mustn't be considered normal too.

We need an education that mainly provides us with such a manual and teach us how to use it. We need an education with a humanistic base. 

The speecher and writer Jeremy Rifkin stated in an interview:

"I think that it is apropiated that the students went to the university to study Humanities, because they offer a current portrait of the human race. Afterwards, in the postgraduate degree, they can study an specific vocation, like Business Management, Law or Chemistry. If they start studying their vocation, they won't get any idea about the interconnected world that is emerging"  




First the User Manual, and then a profession.

 

Drawing money among the people to foster consumption?

After many years, we still talk about the economical crisis. Unemployment is still high and getting a job is still a challenge. People don't really trust the future and there is much talk about the effects of automation in the job market, with its consequent loss of jobs, about the lack of consumption and the excess of people offering products and services, and the sentence "we will live worse than our parents" is very extended. 

To emerge from this crisis and recover the trust in the economy, countries and economical institutions have tried to adjust their budget and reduce their debts, the process that has been called "austerity", and they have tried to adquire big amounts of debt and decrease the interest rates in order to allow the countries to keep their debts and keep a certain degree of consumption. 

It looks like neither of them are giving good results. Austerity decreases the economical activity because big amounts of money goes to pay back the debt intead of the adquisition of goods and services, but a stimulus package, consisting in buying debt and easing the access to money to the banks, doesn't improve the trust in the economy too, as there are no expectations that this new debt could be payed back.   




If we can't get more debt, but we can't stop consuming too, what can we do?


Many people says that our main problems is the transfer from employment income to capital income, that drives us to the lack of consumption and the excess of products and services, as employment income goes mainly to consumption, meanwhile capital income goes mainly to investment. But without consumption, investments aren't worthy. 

Some have said that money must be thrown from a helicopter in the peasants must take it and use it to consume and impulse the economy. That would originate an awful human stampede, as it happened in China when someone thrown flyers that looked like money and some people was killed. We can easily imagine what it would happen if that flyers were real money. 




What about a worldwide draw, with money took from rich people, to foster consumption?


The idea is raising money from rich people, those who have enough money to live and who are no finding good investments because of lack of consumption. The ones who give more money to the draw could be specially ackwonledged by the organization of the draw, and that would be a good stimulus to give more money.

After the money is raised, it can be divided by 100-dolars checks, that would be drawn among the world population.

The more money is raised, the more checks can be shared. Those checks couldn't be exchanged for money, but for products and services. This money shouldn't be saved.

That would be a way to foster consumption, because many products would be bought that otherwise had'nt been bought, and it wouldn't drive to a strong raise of inflation, as the quantity of money would be quite limited.