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.
 

Climate change

The first step is recognize it


The opinion that the climate change is happening, that we are causing it, that it will bring terrible consequences during the next decades and that we have to do something to prevent it is increasing.

But, as it happens in Alcoholics Anonymous, recognizing the problem is just the first step to solve the problem. 

 Climate Change Summit





During the last years, many summits and agreements about the Climate Change have been proposed, like the famous Kyoto Protocol, where many countries agreed to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, but these agreements are not very ambitious and important countries like the United States have not ratified them. 

There are other iniciatives, like the Earth Hour, where we are encouraged to turn off our non-essential lights for one hour, that are basically symbolic and quite irrelevant if we want to concern about energy consumption reduction. 




Why aren't we doing anything to prevent the climate change?


Because it is not a priority. Still today, our priorities are earning more money and acquiring more products. If preventing the climate change endangers these priorities, we would stop any important iniciative against the climate change. 

And probably, the climate change will affect seriously our life-style. 

Anyone of us driving our car? Oups, not anymore. 

Taking a flight to the other side of the world to expend our holidays? Just a dream. 

Food of all around the world in the closest supermarket? That was before we had to concern in the future of the Mankind. 


Who will suggest this actions to the population? 

Who will refrain from keeping a confortable life-style to prevent climate change? specially if we can't expect others to do the same. 




And then, what will it happen with the climate change?


As usual, we won't assume the problem until we suffer its terrible consequences, not before. 

Indeed, nowadays our lifes are quite normal. The main problems we are concerned about are those economical, political or personal ones. 

At least it looks like this. During the years 2006-2010 there was a severe drought in the Middle East region. And then, the Arab spring, the Syrian Civil war and the refugees crisis. Was it the fault of the climate change? Maybe, as it is stated that it will bring periods of severe droughts in that regions. 

In the futur, if the climate change threat becomes real, many heavily populated regions will suffer lack of drink water and the production of food can be affected too, and many coastal regions can be flooded. 

As we are not good at managing the decreasing of our life standards, these situation could bring instability, conflicts and huge migrations around. 

In small amounts, maybe this is already happening.

In good company, we wouldn't need so much money

I think that we could be fine just living slightly above the subsistence level, having enough to eat, drink and having a roof that we could call "our place". 

And I think that all that is not really expensive. We wouldn't need to struggle so much to get money as we just to do nowadays, we wouldn't need to ask for loans and we wouldn't need to work so many hours. 

Simple house to live in

But we don't have enough being slightly above the subsistance level. The reason is simple: This level don't ensure us that we will be appreciated by others. 




Our social life depends highly on our purchase power


Our relationships and our plans depend highly on our purchase power, because to join some people you have to imitate their life style, and to make some plans you have to be able to afford their expenses. 

We would like to join these people and these plans and be appreciated for that. but if we don't get the needed money, we can't and we feel bad, rejected. Thats's why we sometimes feel so bad if we don't reach an specific purchase power. 




Our problem is not the purchase power, but our relationships


It looks like the problem is not getting enough money, but the real problem is not being appreciated by people. 

My idea is that, if we could be appreciated regardless of how much money we have, we could be happy with a low purchase power. 

If we could be more carefree about money. we could be happier. We wouldn't have to accept jobs that make us terribly unhappy, we wouldn't have to ask for loans and have debts to give back, and we wouldn't be strugging with workmates and other people for money or job position matters. 

We just have to try to be appreciated regardless our money.

Public budget is hard to value

New line of tramway in the city: 200 million

Reform of the city's main square: 600 million 

One kilometer of High-speed train line: 15 million

This article: priceless

 Tramway line in Barcelona

Is that expensive or is that cheap?


Seemingly, all this things are very expensive, because we are talking about millions of euros, but this is not a personal budget, but a public one, and the amount of money that has to be invested in regular public things is very different than the money that we invest in our personal lives. 

A new train line, a new school and a new motorway is not cheap, but necessary, and that's why public administrations build them for us but, if we are not managing this budget, how can we know that the prices are right?


 


How to have an opinion about public expenses?


If my major says that the new tramway costs 200 million euros, honestly I don't know if this is expensive or cheap. Why? Because it is a budget that I am not used to with and I don't know about tramway lines cost.

First of all, we don't how much money is available to be expended by public administration. Do you know how much money your country collect from taxes every year? I don't

Second, unlike our personal budget, we don't manage this budget, so we are not familiar with it. If we go to the supermarket, we know what is cheap and what is not, because know how much we can expend and we are constantly comparing prices. 

If we want to know if the tramway line is cheap, expensive or simply affordable or not, we need to learn what is the amount of money that public administration collects, which are the main areas to be invested in (health, education, security, facilities, etc) and the money generally invested. 

We may get familiar with the public budget as we are with our personal budget, and we could improve our opinion about public expenses. 

Summarize it to me, please

Nowadays, we have a so huge amount of information at our disposal that we can't afford it, we get unfocused searching and reading different stuff from thousands of websides. 

I can spend several afternoons just searching and reading stuff online; list of search results, social media publications, digital newspapers, tutorials for any kind of question, online forums or Wikipedia articles, those where you can go from link to link until the end of the world. 

Usually, I start reading these things but I leave them because they are too long and I am not finding the information that I need. Browsing on Internet can be a quite frustrating action. 

This couple needs a summary of all this information

Why summarizing is so important?

Nowadays, there is a huge amount of information, products and suggestions to pay attention to. If we want others to pay attention to us, we need to be impressive in just few seconds, the seconds they will take before get bored or uninterested in us. 

If we want to get the attention of others, we have to learn how to summarize our message. Make short and, at the same time, impressive. If we are not able to do it, probably we will be ignored. 

If you publish contents, search the shortest and most impressive way to explain what you want to explain.