The Disappointed Idealist

Some people have a difficult time saying no. It's either because they are kind people who are afraid to hurt you or because they are weak people who don't want to take responsibility for their own desires, or because they know that this no can lead to a cooling of your relationship, which is something they do not want. Whichever the reason, their own wish is to not go through with whatever it is that you are asking, but are afraid or do not want to say that out loud. If you are one of those people, even if you think you have very good reason to do what you do, think twice of it. The time spent not saying no is a time lost for you who cannot move on to the consequences of this choice (desire?) and a time lost for the one asking, who while waiting for you could ask someone else, someone who might actually say yes. If what motivates you towards not expressing the no is the desire to not hurt the person that's asking, think that long-term your indecision (or fear of spe...

The world, through movies and music, is telling you to hold on tight to your dreams, never give up and so on. As I already pointed out in this post , that depends a lot on your dreams. Dreaming too big can prevent you from reaching a level of happiness that is accessible to you. A pinch of realism is always good when you're dreaming. You have to try to evaluate yourself and your ability to reach those dreams constantly, before deciding whether or not to hold on to them. Still, sometimes even if you have this great voice you don't get to be a rock star. Sometimes whether or not dreams come true doesn't depend on you. But what you really have to realize is what is truly important to you. Why you really have that dream and what is the really important part, the one that will truly make you happy. And then, when the dream in itself seems unreachable, focus on that truly important part and figure out some other way to get it. Life can still surprise you. The saddest...

Because happy holidays and because I am being literally bombarded with all sorts of ads like "make your family happy, buy them this and that." As already pointed out in pretty much all my previous posts, companies don't care about you. They don't care about your holidays. They don't care about your family's happiness. Everything they care about is money. They want your money, they want you to buy their products, so they sell you something they think you might like. Oh, but wait. It's not even like that. They sell you something they convince you to like. Either by hiring a cool person for a shitload of money to tell you that what they're selling is cool. Or by making studies that say that you will respond positively to one stimulus or another (say... a naked chick in the rain. And then suddenly, behind her, a nice bottle of wine that suddenly you want to buy.) It doesn't even matter whether or not the product is good. Every company...

Image source: here Granted, some of us have never had to worry about what to eat or where to sleep. Some of us have been dealt better or worse hands. I will never deny that the simple fact that I have the possibility (the computer, the know-how) to write this blog makes me most likely more fortunate than about 60% of this planet's population. But never make the mistake in assuming that just because a person has something you have to work very hard for (maybe something you've dreamed of all your life and never got a hold of), that means that they don't have their own issues to mess them up. You may see money and a good job as a purpose in life and may envy people who have more money or better jobs than you do. But while being rich and well-employed is pretty fine, some people have other purposes in life and other desires on their to-do list. There are women who can't have children and want to. There are men who want to travel the world but don't have the...

I don't claim to be an expert in the field. I could not possibly write an article on the subject in technical terms. In my opinion, however, when talking to the ordinary person, that is an advantage. I've met a lot of people who completely disregard the issue of Internet Security. They use the same password everywhere. Sometimes it's a password like "1234". When I tell them to do something about it, they say "who's gonna want to hurt me? I'm just a nobody" Granted, if you are a public person, the likelihood of someone trying to hack into your accounts goes up. But that doesn't mean that if you aren't a public person that likelihood is zero. All you need is someone getting to you and starting to target you. And you don't need to do something extraordinary for them to start targeting you. Ways to get a hacker's attention on you: 1. Be friends or in the address book of someone they already hacked. There are cases when ...

We should be able to judge the quality of a cause, regardless who is supporting it. In fact, the best way to discredit a good cause is to find one dodgy guy/company supporting it. There's a whole PR tactic centered around it. The thing is like this: we live in a world of corporations and governments and other forces we may not be aware of, ruling covertly and influencing the events. They have interests. Their interests are theirs, and that is what they will be following. As already pointed out in this post , despite what they say, governments are not really preoccupied with your well-being. They are preoccupied with getting re-elected and maintaining an equilibrium with the corporations and rich people that sponsor them. Those corporations and rich people also have their own interests that are not yours. The public image of a company/public figure is a PR thing - when the public image is bad it means the PR did a bad job. The fact that the public image is good does not nece...

Fracking is a quite a controversial subject nowadays. People I know are taking different sides in this story, and both have arguments that could work. But here's where I stand: 1. It has not been proven 100% that fracking pollutes, or so say the ones that promote it or defend it. But has it been proven 100% that it doesn't? If not, don't we have the obligation to check that, BEFORE trying it? Because if it turns out that it does hurt people and if only just one person dies because of it - regardless of how much money is made over it - then it's just wrong. 2. Regardless of whether fracking is dangerous or not, the people who live in the area have the right to decide whether or not it happens. If they believe it's wrong, it shouldn't be done. If you really believe they're wrong, bring arguments, talk to them. Sending the army against a bunch of ordinary people who believe are defending their lives is just wrong. 3. We live in a world where everything ...

They say it's better to regret something you did, rather than something you didn't do. I find that very debatable. It depends very much on what you're doing. The truth is that the size of the regret depends on its effects - how powerful and how long-term they are. Once you've done something, you can't take it back. You can just do what you can with the consequences of your actions. Does that mean that you should pull a Frank Sinatra and just say you did it your way? The purpose of regret is to make sure that you don't repeat a bad thing. That you learn from your mistakes and make sure they don't happen again. As long as you keep it at that, it's a positive thing in your life. The "No Regrets" mantra is a piece of crap: we all do bad things, but if we are not aware that we're doing them, we simply won't stop. But there's a limit to where you can go with regrets. When regrets start dominating your life and you can't stop...

There's a lot of focus on numbing down our pain. We drown ourselves in work, alcohol, cheap TV shows and movies, stupid music with stupid lyrics (because smart lyrics remind us of what's real and hurts), food... you name it. Don't cry, it makes you weak. Pain makes you weak. It's a self defense mechanism, but like all other self defense mechanisms, it works like a double edged sword. It doesn't just numb down your pain, it numbs YOU and your chance of happiness with it. If you don't open up to pain, you close the door on happiness just as much. Think about being on your deathbed and looking down your days. Imagine that you die tomorrow and all you've done in your life was drink, eat and work. How would that make you feel? If there's at least a small part of you that's scared of that possibility or creeped out by the thought, then there's something in you that needs changing. Don't drown down the thought with the common sentence ...

Louis XVI was not born to be king of France but became one anyway. He sucked at it, historians seem to agree - although he wasn't a bad person. He was just unfit for the role he was thrown into. Because of this, he was vulnerable to outside influences, people that had their own interests to consider, interests that weren't always the same as his. France had been an absolute monarchy for centuries - this means that in theory the power was 100% concentrated in the hands of the king. There were many issues  wrong with this, and the biggest one was that in the case of a king that was as ineffective as Louis, there was no measure of control from the people, other than rebellion. As usual, most people preferred not to go there for a long time. We might read a lot about heroes in the history books, but the truth is that in most cases heroes are made by circumstances. People fight for something when the situation becomes so serious that no other option is available. There are,...

George Orwell's 1984 is a book showing what happens when power is abused in such a way by the system, that it literally becomes impossible to fight it. The situation is presented as such that most people are kept quiet through terror and fear. You would think that that doesn't apply to western countries today, wouldn't you? After all, most people reading this are probably having nice jobs, plenty of food on the table, a nice time watching their soaps and browsing their Internet. Nothing like the cold, grey environment described in the book. But then you read something like this article and you realize it's not quite like that. What's happening today is a lot scarier than 1984, because it's considerably less obvious. Today you are being numbed down and pushed into submission exactly through those methods: you are encouraged to consume, so that you get in debts that you will later have to pay and therefore become dependent on the system. The Internet is a ...

There's this tendency nowadays to be very "politically correct". Also there's a tendency from rulers and governments for positive discrimination. But is that really a positive thing? Let's put it this way: you have the case of a white dude, applying for college. He has the right grades and the right recommendations and whatever else the college asks for. Normally he should get in there. But the college has a policy of having at least 40% women and at least (here I don't know exactly the numbers but let's assume we know) 50% ethnics (let's not discriminate and include them all in there). If this white dude is accepted, the percentages are not filled, so the dude gets rejected and an Asian woman is accepted instead - although her grades are lower (I randomly picked the ethnicity, I have nothing against Asians, don't sue) . What will this do? First of all, this woman is less prepared to follow the courses of this college - meaning that the co...

I cannot discuss places I haven't been into and educational systems I have not studied into. But I do see a trend around me of people being less and less educated. That could be a messed up statistic based on the fact that it is much easier now for a usual person to judge the overall educational level than it was, let's say, 20 years ago, when worldwide access to the Internet was still a fantasy. Maybe the educational levels are the same, but it's just more and more blatantly obvious how some people are true idiots, for the simple fact that you continuously bump into their comments on all websites. But let's go by the assumption that I am right and that educational levels are decreasing. What could be the cause? 1. Nowadays people do not read for fun. Students read for school, but fun means computer games, Facebook and other websites. This reduces access to educated language and increases access to words like "k", "ppl" and other Internet...

...but you can become it Every one of us is born with a set of quality and faults. There are no people who have more qualities than others, but there are people who are born with qualities that are more appropriate to the world they live in. In the words of Albert Einstein: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”   You cannot change what you are. At best you can polish it and take best advantage of it. You can learn to play well with the cards you have been given. But from that to automatically assume: "oh well, I am stupid, I might as well face the facts", there's a huge leap. There's a lot of quotes out there about how people judge you for what you are and not what you say. That is very correct. But what you do many times is influenced by what you think - and usually what you say comes from the same place. If you spend your life believing you are...

...it's funny there was no-one left to notice When they came for us. There's this movie . In it, a factory is closed down - replaced with another one. The factory has over 1000 employees - the manager has announced that he will keep about 300 for the new one. As a result of that, most employees did not protest the factory closure. Although there was only about 30% chance that they would be the ones that are kept, most of them went by the logic that if they play nice they will be kept. This is the logic based on which great masses of people are kept under control. They promise you a chance to not be affected by a bad change, if you don't protest. Based on this logic, in Nazi Germany people who were not antisemitic did not protest to persecution the regime was promoting - because they hoped that in that way they will not end up suffering a similar fate. The problem with adopting such an attitude is that it allows manipulative people to make changes that are agai...

I call it the Hollywood movie syndrome. An ordinary person becomes very determined into doing something, they follow it up, push and push, and it all turns into something extraordinary. Because we could all do anything we wanted, provided we want it bad enough and work for it. The movie is supposed to motivate you to work hard enough to reach your dreams. The problem with this is that there are dreams that don't come true no matter how hard you work for them. I read somewhere that you can measure happiness by comparing your expectations of what your life should be to what it actually is. Assuming that based on those movies you are expecting to be a rock star, while you're still serving tables in a dubious bar, you're going to be one miserable dude. There has already been an article detailing this: Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy . In case you haven't read it yet, please do. It's very good at showing why many of us are miserable. But let's not ...

We are bombarded with a constant message to live for today. The movies we see, the commercials, everyone is subliminally sending us the message: Carpe Diem. So let's say you're a very poor person and you have a cow. That cow is giving you milk every day and that milk is keeping you alive. And then a friend (or not so much) comes and says: "Hey, I've got this brilliant idea, man! Let's kill the cow! We will eat meat for an entire week! No more of that boring milk! Carpe Diem!" What will happen? You will eat beef for a week (or more, depending on how big your family is and how big the cow was), which will probably be a step up from milk and cheese. It will feel good for a short while. And then? Then you'll starve. I'm not saying re-think your every move every five seconds. But sometimes the consequences of what you do today are so obvious, it's not even necessary to think much to realize what will happen. There are many people who go ...

You know that friend of yours on Facebook that keeps posting pictures of skinny children from Somalia, ruining your mojo? I bet that annoys you real bad, doesn't it? Because the last thing you want to see on Facebook is some skinny kids who are probably going to die in two days without you being able to do anything about it. When you're doing well and have enough money to eat and have moved on to more elevated priorities, it disturbs you to see a picture that shows you that not everyone is as lucky as you, doesn't it? I don't disagree that there's some real weird people out there and some of them post some really creepy stuff on Facebook. I also don't disagree that most of the time, there truly is nothing you can do for that poor kid in Somalia. Does that mean that we should sit in our own little bubble, eating our food, drinking our beer and pretending that there's no-one starving in the world? Now think about it this way. Your weird Facebook friend h...

There is no such thing as good, fast and cheap. When someone's selling you a service or a product that's supposed to encompass all these three qualities, you have to wonder why and how. When a company is selling you the same food as the store next door at half the price, you have to wonder why and how. I know, I know, we live in times of crisis. Money is of essence and saving money is a very important priority these days. However, sometimes, saving money in short term leads to paying much much more in long-term costs. Think of it this way: the company that sells you a product or a service exists to make profit. Despite what marketing says, that is the only purpose of existence of ANY company. Not to serve you, not to be at your disposal, but to make money. A company that does not make money is a company that goes out of business. A company that can afford to sell you something at half the price of its competitors is a company that is cutting costs somewhere. And sometim...

...and yet our society is not built to believe in prevention. For example: Here's what's happening today. Inside cities, we cut trees because we want to make way for roads, buildings, statues, all that. In the mountains, we cut trees because (best case) we want to build cabins. Worst case, happening in many places - we simply cut trees to sell them and plant nothing else. We know, deep down, that we're not right, but we don't care. Each and every one of us hopes that when shit hits the fan, it won't hit us. We will be either long dead (so we won't care) or we'll be rich enough to escape it. But remember this, people: