One way to know how much we have forgotten about the past is to see how many monuments were erected to remember important events for those was who lived at that time. For example, with the exception of small monuments in Colorado and Australia, practically nothing was built to remember the pandemic …
Blog posts : "General"
We are back inside the cave, too soon and to overconfident in ourselves
We already returned to the cave, too fast and too confident that this was the only and best option. Or, if you prefer, we returned to Egypt because we prefer what is already known (even if it was bad) to the responsibility of building our own future. The hope for a virus to teach us something about …
Every piece of a puzzle not yet finished is still valuable
Let's do this thought experiment: Suppose for some reason every day we get a piece of a puzzle. We don’t know how many pieces the puzzle has. and we don’t know how the final image looks like. So, the question arises: what do we do with the pieces of the puzzle that we already have?
There are …
If we are no longer evolving, who or what is still evolving?
One of the theories that, although certainly not new, is repeated quite frequently in the context of the current pandemic is the idea that human evolution stopped, not in a positive sense (believing we reached the peak of evolution) or in a hopeful sense (believing transhumans are about to arrive), …
We can know the future, but nobody taught us how to recognize it
I am tired of being told that the future doesn’t exist or can’t be known, or that, because it is unknown, we shouldn’t think about it. The fact that we have become addicted to the past and that we confuse the present with “normality” and, therefore, that we have become blind to the future, doesn’t m…
The opposite of education is not ignorance, but poverty
It has been said, and quite rightly, that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. The reason is clear: both love and hate are in a relationship, be it positive (love) or negative (hate). But in the case of indifference, there is no relationship, and there is no attempt to connect, even n…
There is no going back to normal if the Damocles’ sword hangs over our heads
Over and over again I heard these days the phrase "I hope this will soon be over so we can return to our normal lives." Although that phrase reflects a well-intentioned feeling, it seems to forget something important: there is no normality or return to normality when Damocles' sword hangs from a hai…
Refusing to see reality does not transform reality: it just hides it
"This is not happening," a friend told me emphatically and full of confidence a few days ago. "This" obviously refers to the global crisis that now affects humanity. But what is not so obvious is what does that mean of "…is not happening", because all the evidence indicates that the crisis, whatever…
The real crisis is a crisis of personal and collective maturity
Let's be honest: we live in an immature society. It is nothing new: Milan Kundera already proclaimed it decades ago in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Heraclitus already lamented it more than two millennia ago, as his fragmentary writings attest.
To the immaturity typical of a relatively ne…
A reduced world of sophisticated science and devalued magic
That little “black mirror” that we have almost constantly in our hands, in front of our eyes, or close to our ears, far from being just an innocent smartphone is, in fact, a world reducer. Every time we use it our world becomes smaller and smaller and, because the reduction is associated with forget…
How many absurdities can we tolerate in a single day?
Recently an update was made on my computer and soon after a message appeared on the screen: "You have a new notification." Then, I opened the message and read it: "Your computer is not configured to receive notifications." And I literally didn't know what to do.
Let's analyze the issue step by st…
Clinging to the "present" does little to build a new, different future
Too often through social networks I get messages inviting me to no longer talk so much about the future and to concentrate on the “present”, the “now”, since, according to those who send me those messages, the “now” is what really exists and, therefore, dealing with the past or the future is, at bes…
Somebody wrote an academic paper and quoted me
For several years now, I have subscribed to a site of academic publications and every time a new study is published on a subject of my interest, I receive a notification. But the notification I received last week was different because it was not a specific subject, but a name: mine.
According to …
What can we sow today that could be successfully harvested in 2000 years?
In a recent report in the specialized journal Science Advances, it indicates that seeds that remained in the soil of Judea 2000 years ago were successfully cultivated, growing and bearing fruit. Although this is not the first experiment of its kind, the result leads to the question: what are we sowi…
Just because you don’t see the road you can’t assume the road is not there
A few years ago, driving back home on a local road, a truck traveling in the same direction caused such a splash that my windshield was filled with mud, preventing me from seeing the road. The incident was resolved immediately. Nothing bad happended. But those few seconds seemed longer than they rea…
When we stop confusing "being" with "having", self-deception dissipates
In his book The Song of the Bird (which should be mandatory reading), Anthony De Mello tells the very short and beautiful story of the dialogue between a young husband and his wife. He says: "Someday we will be rich." And she replies: “We are rich already, dear. Someday we may have money.”
I …
We can’t escape the past, but we can still see the future
When we look at the starry sky, which caused so much admiration to Kant, we don’t see its present but its past and, in some cases, even if we don’t know it, we contemplate a distant past, billions of years ago. Even that the sun we "see" is already eight minutes in the past and the moon we see is th…
Can we still keep our dialogue with ourselves in the age of social networks?
It has been known for decades that intelligence is not one, but that there are different types of intelligence and one of the most interesting is intrapersonal intelligence, that internal dialogue that everyone has with himself/herself and that, well practiced, takes us away from self-deception. But…
Sometimes an unexpected void forms that we cannot fill
During the recent holiday season, I received a puzzle as a gift. It is not one of my favorite activities because putting together a puzzle requires patience, which, in turn, is not one of the highest points of my character. But the festive occasion and the collaboration of the family led me to parti…
Be careful when crossing the threshold of the New Year!
If we could stop seeing ancient Greeks and Romans myths as if they were baseless legends and we could see them for what they really were, that is, narrations of psychological reflections on important moments of life, we would then see that these stories have much to teach us about the beginning of a…
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