The Disappointed Idealist

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: