Category Archives: EN Psychology

Labor in the future: humans or robots?

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A fascinating question to reflect on is: who will work in the future, humans or robots?

Will robots take charge of almost all the jobs? And in this case, what else will humans do during the day, with all the free time available? Or the scenario will not change much: even if in a more robotized society, humans will continue to work most of the time anyway?

The two different scenarios correspond to the change, or the persistence, of the very concept of job that exists today, and of some structures, in particular the monetary system and the production of energy. Easy to understand that if the necessity to earn money vanishes, and if the necessity to pay the energy vanishes, more easily also the necessity to work vanishes.

I want to try to analyze the two possibilities. On the first one I can offer a personal point of view, considering that I’m living with it already: I don’t have a job and I have a lot of free time. In this case, it must be evaluated what will happen if the percentage of people that live like me, today a minority, will grow in the future. However I prefer to start from the scenario that is more familiar and therefore easy to imagine: the one in which humans will continue to work most of the time.

Humans will continue to work

It seems obvious to me that technology will keep on being developed, so inevitably the trend that has been going on for awhile now will continue: i.e. humans will continue to be gradually replaced by robots in their jobs, since the robots in most cases are more precise and efficient.

For many people that tried to predict the future, this argument meant automatically that will come the day when humanity will be freed from labor. But I’m not sure of sharing this optimism. To me instead, it seems better not to underestimate the possibility that, as human jobs will switch to robots, more and more fake jobs will be invented to keep the humans busy.

With fake jobs I mean unproductive jobs, that don’t generate concrete resources, or superfluous jobs, that generate resources in excess that later are thrown away. Actually many jobs of both types exist already now, and keep the humanity busy already now. So what I’m talking about is nothing else than a continuation of the phenomenon already in progress, that could survive and get amplified.

Today very evident examples of unproductive jobs are seen in the banking sector and in politics, while of the superflous jobs the evidence has become internet, that by now is definitely ultra-saturated, because it’s flooded every day with new contents created by armies of journalists and authors, contents that however reach an audience that is more and more microscopic. Even many of today’s schools are factories for superfluous jobs, dedicated to provide the students with a lot of knowledge that they will never use -so they’ll throw it away– in adult age.

It’s plausible that the future will present a picture in which, even if in the context of a great abundance of resources generated by robots even more advanced and efficient than the current ones, humans will continue to have very little free time, because they’ll be very busy with jobs invented… exactly with the purpose of keeping them busy.

Someone could ask: jobs invented by whom? A conspiracy theorist would probably answer “by the estabilishment”, and there’s definitely no doubt that the estabilishment gets benefits from having the majority of people busy working, with little free time. In this way there’s a more ignorant and tired mass, easy to manipulate. However I believe that in large part it’s people themselves that tend toward these useless jobs, with no much need of some “secret agenda” to push them.

To understand the reason it’s sufficient to observe how people behave when they have free time: the majority, actually, is not at all at ease with free time.

Free time is a trigger that can cause an increased level of consciousness, and a high level of consciousness often is hard to sustain: questions hard to be answered appear, a lot of uncertainties appear. It’s for this reason that often people, when they’re not working, do a systematic job to actually lower the level of consciousness: eating junk food, watching television, going shopping, drinking alcohol.

In addition to this spontanous tendency, as anticipated above, two determinant factors are money and energy. If a financial system similar to the current one persists, many humans will continue to find themselves in a situation with great abundance of resources (abundance that will probably become more extreme thanks to the robots), but they will be able to access those resources only through money, that they will try to earn by working. Similarly for energy: if it will not become abundant and easily accessible for everybody, humans will continue to work to pay for it.

Also, a whole series of new artificial needs could arise, to which many new artificial jobs would reply. Here a number of more or less distopyan scenarios can be imagined, for example a planet where despite robots will have solved the problem of producing the essential resources, humans will be absorbed anyway by a gigantic industry of entertainment, made of virtual realities and videogames, inside of which they will continue to work many hours per week.

The idea sounds rather disquieting, but actually it wouldn’t be anything else than the acutization of what happens today. In this sense we could say that the future is already now. The only difference would be that, if today the percentage real jobs vs artificial jobs is something like 30% vs 70%, in the future it could lean even more toward the artificial jobs, and become something like 5% vs 95%. Within the small percentage of real jobs that will survive in the future, probably there will only be jobs in which the “human factor” (imagination, creativity, emotions) is an advantage not challenge-able by robotic efficiency.

So as a quick recap, in this first scenario many humans would continue to work also in the future, either to escape from free time or because they would continue to believe that they have to work. This implies that they would continue to adopt the concept of job that exists now (it’s “job” if it’s compensated with money), and implies that they would continue not to realize that by working for money, in a financial system similar to the existing one, they basically play a poker game rigged to their disadvantage.

It’s the scenario I’m less attracted to, because it involves a very unaware future humanity, but it still holds some positive aspects, especially for that minority of people that will decide not to work. In fact, since everybody else will be busy with their jobs, for those who will have more free time there will be more opportunities available, less competition, less traffic, less lines, and so on.

Humans will stop working

The second possibility comes from a more radical transformation of consciousness, and I believe that it’s also the most likely scenario. In fact, I would tend to give for a fact that we will go toward this scenario in the future, if it wasn’t that the question “but then why it didn’t happen already?” makes me cautios. My impression is that a transformation will take place, but much more slowly than some people predict.

In this vision, people will abandon in mass the things that today are considered jobs. Willingly or not, unemployment will come for nearly everyone: some will abandon their jobs consciously and voluntarily, others instead will be pushed into unemployment by the robots, by profound changes in money (maybe from fiat to cryptocurrency), by entrepreneurs that will make energy abundant and accessible, by smaller and more efficient governments.

Those that will be pushed into unemployment, probably, will try more than the others to keep alive a market of fake jobs, that unlikely will disappear completely. The others however will have finally surrendered to the obviousness: in a world that is highly technological and abundant of goods and services, easily produced by the robots and accessible to everyone, the old concept of job doesn’t make sense anymore: its motivation to exist, simply, disappeared.

So all these people will find themselves in front of the same question that I faced already few years ago, when I quit my job: what do I do during the day? Until today, for many people this question would probably sound as threatening: they would associate it immediately to the question how would I avoid boredom? It’s from here, in fact, that begins the search for distractions, for activities that “keep us busy” (as many existing jobs are, at this point).

But what will happen in the future, if people will look inside this boredom, instead of trying to avoid it with entertainment? In fact, if fake jobs will have lost any credibility as option of partial time-fillers, extending the television fictions and the videogames to the whole time could feel as unsatisfactory for many people. Even traveling in the real world, an activity that many fantasize to do “if it wasn’t for the job”, if done constantly could not dissipate the feeling of a lack of purpose.

What do I do with my time? is a difficult question -even existential– since inevitably it originates other questions in chain: what do I do with my life? and so what is the meaning of life? In front of this last question a huge number of people could land in the future, a lot more than today. And from the great variety of answers that will come, the planet and the society could really be transformed in unpredictable ways.

It’s possible that, after several reflections, many people will reach a conclusion similar to the one that I reached: unless we decide to live life waiting for the manifestation of some “divinity” or “superior authority” to reveal to us a universal meaning of life, valid for the whole humanity (something that maybe, probably, will never happen) it makes sense that we assign it by ourselves, individually, a meaning to our life. The meaning we choose is exactly the meaning of life, the “right” one.

This choice will be crucial to decide if even in the future we humans will continue to do something during the day, rather than becoming an almost completely inactive species, fed by robots. Those who will take the time to decide how to use their life, will have the motivation to act.

But at this point, these actions will be part of a totally new concept of labor, profoundly different from the previous, just because the motivation that generates it will be profoundly different. The motivation will not be anymore obtaining the “old” goods and services, at this point redundant and not really interesting, but it will be an impulse coming mostly from the inside, and not anymore from the outside.

To such a substantial change in the motivation that will generate labor, probably a substantial change in the fields toward which labor will be addressed will follow. Hard to imagine, in fact, that in a scenario where labor will be highly optional and humans will decide to work following a process of introspection, the efforts will be employed to produce souvenirs or irrelevant education. Possibly those that will get a strong momentum will be new fields like genetic experimentation, space exploration, and in particular the research on how the mind works.

So, the one I’m describing here is a scenario in which humans would stop working -but for what is the old concept of work-. However many of them could stay active by adopting a new philosophy, and according to it they could more often start to feel to want to “work”.

My journey

I’ve been lucky enough to reach the question what do I do with my time? well prepared. Unemployment is something that I searched for and that I wanted strongly. The reason for my determination came in fact from having taken the time to decide what was the meaning of life, for what I wanted to use mine.

The answer that I found, that went through refinement with time anyway and that is still being refined, is that the meaning of life is love: the love that we give and the love that we receive. Secondly, the meaning of life consists also in exploring and understading better the universe, enjoying the beautiful things that exist, and producing new beautiful things.

This type of vision had effects in many areas of my life, and obviously also on my practical concept of job. The concept I had before became obsolete and not proposable anymore. Working has become adding something beautiful to the world, and having high quality. To me favoring quality over quantity seems necessary at this point, considering the degree of saturation reached by the human production in many many areas, both of material and immaterial products.

I find that for me it works well, to keep this general principle in mind: in fact whatever is the specific project I decide to work on (be it writing an article, producing a documentary, building a house…), it always reminds me why I’m doing it and how to do it. This doesn’t imply certainty of good results, but I find that it motivates me to act. It’s a principle that created and creates with ease activities to insert in my time, when I feel that I want to “work”. To be honest it’s difficult at this point to label it as working time or free time, as the boundary between the two has inevitably become very blurry.

Picking up a paper in the street is work? Taking care of the garden is work? Even when people ask me what is your job? I’m not really sure what to answer, even if lately I solve the doubt by using the quick and elegant answer “entrepreneur”.

About how much to work, in these latest years I felt like working on my projects just few hours per day, a small amount of time that anyway made me obtain several results that seem good to me. The reason why I didn’t work more are essentially two: the first one is that, actually, I don’t want to miss all the beautiful things “out there” in the universe (there are so many) working most of the time.

The second reason comes from one of my biggest internal conflicts, explained well by the famous allegory of the cave by Plato. In short, I have the impression that some of the most valuable things I have to give to the world (e.g. the useful information I found) often are not of any interest for the world, so spending many hours working on them maybe doesn’t make sense. At the same time, I’m not sure I want to work a lot on something for which there is more interest, but that I don’t “feel” is my strength. This is a doubt I haven’t solved yet, but anyway I believe that it belongs to many other people, so I don’t feel lonely in the conflict 🙂

Actually, I believe that is right through this type of internal “journeys” (introspection, as I wrote above) that the redefinition of labor could pass in the future. If jobs will survive taking a new form, abandoning the current one -often grotesque- of fake jobs, such form could be influenced by processes like the one of disidentification by humans with their job role. So here we’re talking of “reviewing” the relationship with the ego, a relationship not easy… at all.

Notes: While fascinating, this topic is to say the least theoretical and philosophical. The article could have some contradictions, however I believe that it contains several useful points.

Related: The function of labor, What is your work ethic?

Thoughts

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I find that vicarious is a very interesting word, especially because it describes the behavior of a huge number of people.

Living life vicariously means living it not in person, directly, but in a participatory way: through someone else. To the life experiences of this “someone else” the vicarious participates by staying few steps behind -at safety distance- but still close enough to be able to observe his adventures.

A very widespread example are the parents who live life vicariously through their children. It’s very easy to identify them on the social networks because often as profile picture they use -instead of a picture of themselves- a picture of themselves with their children, or worse, of their children only. They don’t see themselves as separate entities anymore: they identify completely with the children. If in a conversation you ask them “how are you doing” or “is there anything new”, they rapidly switch to telling you how their children are doing, or what their children are doing. The joys, the worries, the more meaningful experiences of life are about the children, from whom all the satisfactions and the unsatisfactions are derived.

This behavior of transferring every project on the children as soon as they are born, and at the same time ceasing to try to realize any own project, is so widespread that it’s almost considered “normal”. But unfortunately this concept of parenting, as parasitizing the life of children, is the perfect recipe for unhappiness: both of the children and of the parents.

A second example of vicarious behavior which is extremely relevant are those who watch a lot of movies and tv series. Creating interesting situations in real life often requires a certain amount of work, so they prefer to feel the excitement of a treasure hunt from the comfort of a movie theater, or participate to the flirt between two attractive actors from the sofa at home, maybe without having to care too much about staying in shape.

The approach and the motivation are exactly the same of the previous case: the vicarious parents send the children ahead so then they can be spectators, in this case the actors are sent ahead and of these, even more properly, people become spectators.

It took me awhile to have clear why many people who are into personal development -both the “gurus” and the “practitioners”- don not convince me, and this despite the ideas that they discuss often are actually very valuable.

The reason is that in my view they focus too much on the methods, for example “how to stay in shape” or “how to generate passive income”, so much that they lose sight that these methods are only useful to create the means to reach a goal, but they’re not the goal themselves.

While many enthusiasts of personal development focus for ever on how to stay in shape, how to reach financial freedom, how to develop creativity, there are people that already apply in “autopilot” the methods for staying in shape, having financial freedom, developing creativity, without talking too much about it or almost without even remembering that they do, but then they also take the next step: they use the staying in shape, the financial freedom and the creativity to produce things in the job they do.

For example, browsing the Wikipedia page of many successful people, actors, athletes, musicians, entrepreneurs, often there is some recurrent information that comes out: they pay a lot of attention to the diet, they exercise regularly, they do yoga or meditation, they don’t spend 40 hours in an office for a salary but instead, even if they work in particular sectors (for example the actors), often they have entrepreneurial activities “beside”, and so on.

And yet in the interviews they rarely waste too much time discussing these practices, for them they only represent necessary routines, that they do to put themselves in the conditions to do a good job -in whatever sector they work-.

This to say that even if I appreciate a lot the attitude and the ideas of many people in the sector of personal development, more and more often I tend to take as reference not them, but directly those successful people who already channel the results of their personal development work in the job. So, not the guru who is expert of staying in shape, as much as the athlete who uses his shape in the sport. Not the guru who “talks” about creativity, as much as the director who puts the creativity in his movies. And so on.

I noticed that for many adult people learning insistently new things, without a precise project, represents an escape from doing.

I realized it for the first time at the end of the university, noticing among the other students -who like me just got their degree- the tendency to insist, of wanting to study more. PHD, MBA, various specialization courses. Some were even starting all over again, to take a second university degree. It seemed to me that only few of those guys were doing that following a precise strategy, to become academic teachers. The others simply seemed to want to maintain the status of “students” as long as possible, to delay the moment of doing.

Many years have passed, but I still see this tendency of wanting to stay “students” among many adults: same age as me (35), but even adults well over 40 and 50.

A very common case that I notice today, for example, is learning a foreign language. Several friends and acquaintances come to my mind who, in this period, are learning languages like french, spanish, chinese, german. Almost none of them has a concrete project related to that: “I study french because I want to export products in France”, but has the vague motivation “it’s a good additional knowledge” and “you never know it could be useful someday”.

This phylosophy doesn’t make any sense to me -since to study you spend resources (time and effort) why spending them on something that probably will never have practical effects on life?- but even more importantly it seems suspicious: I think that often people use the learning insistently new things, when adult, as an excuse to tell themselves that they’re making progress in life… while they’re actually stuck at the same place. Learning is an easy escape, because it’s an activity that has good reputation in the society, and it’s generally seen as important and commendable.

I think that there comes a moment in life, when we become adult, when it’s time to “reverse the flow”: to stop to focus on absorbing constantly new notions, decide what we want to do in life, and do it.

Doing it often means very different things that just having fun learning notions. It means to put in practice what we already know. It means finding the courage to leave the job we hate to start doing the other job we know is the right one. For a writer it can mean the discipline of staying every day at the computer writing for some hours, without being distracted by social networks. For an athlete it can mean the discipline of training in the gym every day, and repeat every day the choice of giving up the processed food in favor of the healthy food.

In fact maybe these are the only two things, that we should really learn when adult: courage and discipline.

It took me a long time to understand what meditation consist of, but finally I think I got it.

Actually I think that on this topic there is a lot of confusion, so many people “think” that they’re meditating, while they’re actually doing something else. After having made several unsuccessful attempts in the past myself, today I think I’ve understood enough to be able to provide my interpretation.

Meditating means being here and now, a concept that is rather famous today. The problem with the here and now is that it’s a damn difficult status to sustain. I used to see it in my attempts of meditation in the past. I used to free my mind from useless thoughts and finally I would start to absorb the reality around: the green of the plants, the buzz of the insect flying behind me, the noise of a distant car. But time few seconds and I was lost in thoughts again: what do I eat later for dinner? …tomorrow I have to write to the accountant… And so on.

Each time, when I returned to here and now realizing that I just got lost in my thoughts, I would take it as a defeat, and I would give up for the frustration. Until I realized that, instead, this is exactly the practical mechanism of meditation.

Getting lost in thoughts is inevitable for an untrained mind. And the mind is always at work projecting useless thoughts: ruminations of past events, anticipations of future events, putting labels to everything we see.

But the real game is, once we get lost in these thoughts, to awaken and return here and now. Get lost and return here and now. Get lost and return here and now. Get lost and return here and now. Many times, in a similar way to when we train our muscles at the gym. I heard the journalist Dan Harris make this comparison, and it seemed very appropriate to me.

At the gym we train the muscles, by doing several repetitions lifting weights. In meditation we train the mind, returning several times here and now after we get lost in thoughts. Today I see meditation this way, and this is how I practice it, with the same spirit I adopt when I go to the gym.

Again about the mind, some time ago I was discussing “spiritual” topics with a friend, and I asked him the following question: what do you think is the difference between consciousness and mind?

Even if in that period I was starting to be rather familiar with the two concepts, I had the tendency to confuse them, that’s why I asked his opinion. His answer was simple: he said that in his view the mind is a creation of consciousness. I reflected on these words several times later, and yes, now it seems obvious to me that this is exactly the difference.

So according to this view, consciousness is a “greater” concept and the mind a “smaller” concept. Consciousness created the mind as a tool and gave it us to use it, similarly to the physical body, but with the difference that the mind is impalpable.

Even if for many this revelation may be a banality, I think that for me it’s been very useful to see this triangular structure: cosciousness above, body and mind below as tools to be used.

It’s very useful especially in relation with the mind, since I’ve often forgot its presence in the past (and I still forget): for the fact that it’s impalpable, for the type of education I received, and for the type of society I live in.

Remembering that the mind is there made me want to study it and search for information about it, and this helped me reach interesting concepts, for example the idea that not only an individual mind exists, but also a collective mind. On a more practical level instead it made me want to train it, from here the interest in meditation.

Needless to say, after a certain amount of training, today my mind is still a mess (I suspect that it’s a mess for many people however), but I am confident that it will also get some abs sooner or later.

Notes: The book to read to understand the concept of here and now is The power of now by Eckhart Tolle. This article was originally published on July 7, 2016 in italian, this is its translation in english.

Important things I learned

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These are some of the most important things that (I think) I learned, or that I am in the process of learning, in these last years of my life.

Spirituality

● The enormous power of the words thank you.

● The concept of consciousness. That there are different levels of consciousness at which people can live. That also music, movies, art, objects have their level of consciousness.

● It’s not consciousness that is created by matter, but exactly the opposite: matter is created by consciousness.

● Atheism has a fixed point of view, rather sterile. After graduating from the religious non-sense, a further graduation from atheism is possible, and necessary, to progress in the path of spiritual evolution.

● Chronic skepticism is a very counterproductive attitude. I used to be a chronic skeptic before, not believing “in anything”. These days I prefer to keep chronic skeptics at distance.

● I learned some great lessons from Eckhart Tolle’s books, in particular these three:

  • what being present means, the idea of being here and now. And I realized that only a fraction of the thoughts that flow in my mind are useful. The rest are useless, repetitive, distracting noise.
  • what the ego is. I realized that I do have an ego, and a terribly difficult one to tame.
  • the mechanism of drama that drives many human relationships. Most people tend to create unnecessary and avoidable drama, to feed a little “beast” they have inside, a beast that feeds on negative emotions.

Of these three concepts, I think I understand well the theory behind the first two, but I still suck at turning the theory into practice. There are still more unobserved thoughts and more pretense in me than I would like to have. With drama, instead, I think I do well both with theory and practice. I’ve never been a big drama queen.

● The best rule to apply with people who are trying to start drama is: do not engage. Let them scream, gesticulate, cry, while staying absolutely calm, composed, in silence, just replying things like “yes, you’re right”, until they turn off.

● Life is about finding balance in the middle of two types of awareness:

  • that we, human beings, have an enormous power and control over our lives, and we are able to realize wonderful, huge, sensational things.
  • that there are things in our lives that we don’t control at all, and those things could destroy everything we built, in any moment.

The trick is to recognize that both are true, but then decide to have faith, and work hard to realize the wonderful things.

● Healing doesn’t correspond to feeling relaxed and comfortable all the time. Healing, usually, happens through pain and struggle.

● The law of attraction makes great sense, however it seems like many people don’t get the part attraction of it. After believing that something will happen, it is necessary to work -usually hard- to make it happen.

● Every person can be a hero. Even if most people today consider courage as a trait reserved for movie characters only, everyone can cultivate courage and apply it to real life, this life.

● Life tries to “talk” to us constantly, and tries to teach us lessons all of the time. The people we meet, the events that happen around us, they usually carry a message for us. We must stay receptive, like an antenna, to get the message.

● Dreams deserve much more attention than they’re commonly given: “normal” dreams that we have during sleep, lucid dreams in which we can manipulate the environment -they are a lot of fun-, and also daydreams. It is true that, as I read somewhere, dreams are not meant to make us sleep, but to make us wake up.

● Jesus Christ, probably, never existed as an historical figure. He is a fictional character that was invented by the ancient Romans, as a tool of propaganda to dominate the Jews of their times. I heard about this theory in the documentary “Caesar’s Messiah”, and I consider it not only very credible, but also a super huge revelation!

Love

● Love is much bigger than just romantic love, the “couple relationship” type of love that is extensively depicted in movies and books. That is just a part, but there’s also the love for friends, family, strangers, animals, plants, art, work, life.

● Jealousy doesn’t make sense. It’s basically a consequence of mistakenly assuming that the couple relationship type of love is all the love there is.

● If there is a meaning of life, it is love. At the end of the story, what really matters is the love we gave, and the love we received.

Myself

● The most important and difficult challenge in my life is learning to manage my emotions. I am aware now that if I want to succeed at achieving my biggest goals, this is a necessary skill to master. I have no other way.

● I won’t make meaningful progress in life by learning a lot of new notions. I will make it, instead, by learning some specific notions, and by cultivating virtues like courage, honesty and discipline.

● Practicing introspection, to discover what’s inside myself, is very difficult and painful. It’s also the most exciting adventure. And it’s sort of weird: I research, I study, I make efforts, all this without even knowing what it is that I am searching for. But I have a strong feeling that I have to continue digging.

● The inputs that I feed myself with (movies, books, music) impact directly the way I think, and the way I feel. As obvious as it seems now, I wasn’t aware about this connection some years ago. These days, I consciously avoid watching horror movies, or reading books about killers and psychopaths, for example. I prefer to feed my mind with happy topics.

● There are so many things that I don’t know. But the more new things I discover, the more grows in me a sense that there are others to discover…

People

● Having original thoughts is extremely rare. Most thoughts that circulate in people’s minds are someone else’s thoughts.

● A lot of people, when they talk, simply regurgitate what they have been taught as kids. They do this over and over, their entire life, without ever applying some critical thinking to decide if those teachings made sense or not.

● Just because someone speaks louder, or has a microphone in his hands, doesn’t mean that he deserves more attention.

● There’s a huge difference between education and wisdom. Many of the people I know are fairly well educated, but very few of them are wise.

● The world is full of corruption, hate, dishonesty, and still in the middle of this mess there are some people with super beautiful souls. They are so precious that they are worth the quest.

● It’s a great skill to be able to talk, and act, without being driven by emotions. And it’s important to recognize when other people, especially those who are close, like family and friends, give advice that is dictated by their fears and insecurities, so to discard it.

● Many people never change. As much as they’re exposed to clear, useful information that they could use to solve their problems, they will ignore that information and keep on struggling with the same problems, over and over, for their entire life. It’s better not to lose time insisting in helping them, but to focus instead on those who are ready to accept solutions.

● The best way to deal with depressed people is to stay away from them. Happiness is a choice, and most depressed people simply choose to be unhappy.

● There are things that the masses do, but no matter how many people do them: they still make absolutely no sense, so there’s no need to join them. Two great examples in this category are:

  • turning to politics to have the problems of the society fixed.
  • working at jobs where time is traded for money.

Money

● Money is an exciting topic, and not boring as I used to think. Money is very useful to understand people’s emotions, especially fear.

● Money is ultimately just a mental construct.

● Money favors those who produce and control it (banks and governments) and enslave those who have to use it (citizens).

● Having a regular job is not the only honest way to earn money, passive income systems are another option, and a much smarter one under many points of view.

● Economy and finance are two very different things. Economy is more about people, how they behave in the market to meet their desires. It’s a much more concrete, useful topic to study. Finance instead is about paper money, banks, graphs, titles: these things are part of a circus that adds no value to the life of people.

● Making the transition from employee to entrepreneur requires a huge shift in the mindset. An entrepreneur needs very different skills: for example it’s necessary to understand more the psychology of people.

● Understanding the law of supply and demand is super useful, and not just for an entrepreneur who runs a business, but for everybody, because it applies to many situations in daily life.

● You can’t do the right things, if you’re in the wrong place. For example, even if you work hard, diligently and efficiently, but you’re providing your labor to institutions that produce zero (or negative) value for the society -like banking corporations or cigarette producers- then you’re illuding yourself that you’re “doing a good job”.

● I think I understand money enough, now, to be able to become very wealthy if I want, in a honest way, and without even working too much. However, I haven’t decided yet if this is really what I want. Lots of money would allow me to develop some beautiful projects on a big scale (like building hospitals, schools, educational media), but on the other hand, it would inevitably attract the attention of the government. And I’m not sure I want to spend my time dealing with such a gigantic and predatory structure. I need to reflect more about this.

● One of the craziest things of the modern world is that most people spend an entire life working for money, without even understanding what the working is for. They never take some time to learn how money is produced, by who, how it works.

● Few things will put you in an uncommon position as becoming financially free. While everyone around talks, acts and moves driven by the desire of making money, you’re part of a very tiny minority that focuses on other topics.

Health

● Having a healthy diet requires essentially two things:

  • developing a knowledge about nutrition (in particular understanding the concept of density of nutrients of foods).
  • discipline.

● Products based on refined flour (like pasta and bread) are almost as unhealthy as white sugar. It doens’t make sense, as I was doing until some years ago, to avoid sugar as a fundamentalist, but then splurge on pasta and bread everyday.

● If there is one food that I always have to stay alert not to eat, it’s burnt food. The black spots under the pizza, toasted bread, and grilled meat are loaded with a disastrous amount of toxins.

● Most of the honey sold in the stores is as bad as white sugar, because it’s pastorized, heated at high temperature, that’s what makes it as transparent and fluid as syrup. Raw honey is the way to go.

● Dairy products with reduced amounts of fat, or completely fat-free, are actually less healthy than their whole counterparts. The fat in milk, yogurt and cheese is useful to digest fat-soluble vitamins. So it’s better to eat these foods whole.

● Diet impacts the overall health, and also the body figure, more than exercise does.

● Exercise is useful, but too much of it can stress the body and worn it out. I used to go to the gym 3/4 times per week, these days I prefer to go a couple times and pay more attention to the way I eat, instead.

● Despite being super popular, jogging is actually not so healthy. When a person jogs, tissues and organs of the body jump up and down, up and down, up and down, and that’s quite stressing, and pro-aging, for the organism. It’s much healthier in the long run to prefer activities like moderate weight lifting, yoga, gymnastics.

Notes: I expect that these insights will be valid for many years to come, so I wrote this post as a reminder for myself, with some useful indications to follow in the future. It will also be interesting to see if I’ll change my mind about some of them, and if I will feel like adding more.

Inseparable emotions

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anna-marchesini-interviewI watched an interview to Anna Marchesini recently, who made me think a lot. Anna is a famous italian comedian, who had a long and successful career in my country. She made an entire generation laugh, with her funny parodies and weird characters. She is really loved here, and I love her too. I have a big respect for comedy as art. In fact, I hope to become a successful comedian too, one day.

But Anna Marchesini is not only laughs and fun, she went through, and is going through, difficult moments in her life. She has been hit by a severe form of rheumatoid arthritis that really shows in her appearance today. She still has a heartwarming smile and a special light in her eyes, but her face looks hollow and bony. She has deformed hands that she elegantly hides with gloves when she’s on tv. It’s not difficult to guess that this disease gives her severe limitations. More than once she said that she’s fighting to stay alive.

In the interview, while chatting humorously and talking about the first book she published, the interviewer pointed out how she was mixing together comedy and tragedy in the same novel, without a defined point where one was starting and the other was ending. He said that almost using a surprised tone, because most people would only expect lightness and humour from Anna. After all, these are the only parts of her they have seen for a lifetime.

magma-emotionsWithout ceasing to radiate energy for a moment, she replied: “I think that somewhere emotions stand all together, like in a magma.” She said that rolling her hands in the gloves, suggesting the image of a magma made of emotions, one rolling over the other in a continuous movement. Joy rolling over despair on top of the fluid, and then down again to switch positions, and then up again.

Emotions are inseparable

Anna’s words resonated with me. I have a lot in common with her situation, and I developed a similar concept in my mind about the fact that emotions are packed all together, inseparable.

With her situation, because I also have a strong humorous component in my personality, which I’m really proud of. It made me have countless moments of hilarity and pure joy in my life. So many times I laughed until my cheeks were hurting! I love to laugh and to make people laugh. And I agree with Anna when she says that comicality is not superficiality, but the contrary: it’s the highest form of expression.

But like her, I also went through events that caused me enormous pain, and I suspect that most people around me never experienced pain with such magnitude. I write this hoping that it doesn’t come from my ego (who always likes to think in terms of “I feel more than the others”), and also with the awareness, anyway, that in absolute terms I’ve grown in a wonderful environment (a rich country in a period of peace, where everyone easily meets his basic needs).

The fact that I went through a lot of pain in my life is ignored by most people in my social circles, and this is because I’ve never been able to talk about it openly, or even just show it. As for everyone, it’s always been easier to project only the happy side of me, hiding the sad side (or sometimes confining it in a corner and not caring about it, using a lot of talent).

I admit that I feel a bit coward for not showing that I feel bad, when I do. But I also forgive myself, knowing that some of the causes of my negative emotions are still so much beyond my comfort-zone that they are definitely in my panic-zone. When I try to talk about some things, I start to sob so strongly and uninterruptedly that basically I can’t speak anymore, despite having clear in my mind what I want to say. Only my sister accessing-emotionsand few friends have seen me this way.

But back to the interview, I like Anna’s idea of emotions. I may also think to them as packed in a turbulent cloud, frantically moving around in a room, that I can access through a door. Since they’re all packed together, I can’t just open the door and extract one emotion I like, because all the others will also come out. The more I open the door, the more happiness pounces on me, the more the other emotions will do the same.

Then there’s also the spectrum diagram. I can say this is my favorite type of representation, since I’ve been visualizing emotions in this way for long time in my mind.

Spectrum of emotions

If you are not familiar with it, a spectrum is a diagram representing the range of something, for example the range of electromagnetic waves our eyes can perceive (visible spectrum). Or the range of sound frequencies our ears can perceive (audible spectrum). Or the range of notes our voice can hit (vocal spectrum).

emotional-spectrumA spectrum-like diagram seems perfect to me to represent human emotions with a range of colors. On the left, the colors represent the negative emotions, like fear, sadness, nervousness. Then moving gradually to the right, the colors represent the positive emotions, like calmness, happiness, joy.

As it happens with the other types of spectrum (for example our vocal spectrum, which ranges from the lowest notes we can hit to the highest notes we can hit) it makes sense to consider that also our emotional spectrum has a finite width, which varies from person to person. Some people have it narrower, some people have it wider. Some people are able to reach places far on the left of the spectrum and feel very intense negative emotions. Some people are able to reach places more on the right in the spectrum and feel very intense positive emotions.

For other people instead, those places are completely unknown. They’ve always been hanging around the center of the spectrum with their emotions, and they’ve never known what deep sadness or deep happiness are.

matrix-limited-emotionsI have a feeling that most people I know fit in the second description. And this is no surprise if I consider that emotions are consequencies of the events that happen in the daily life. Since most people still live in the Matrix today (working at corporate jobs, watching mainstream media, practicing religions), they can only experience emotions that are consequencies of repetitive, uninspiring events. After all… how “joyful” is one allowed to be in a corporate environment? How real can be the sadness caused by watching the “drama of cheating” in a soap opera?

Another factor is the diet. Most people eat nutritionally deficient foods daily, that reduce the vividness and strength with which they perceive the events around them. They miss part of the world’s beauty, and therefore don’t feel the consequent happiness that would arise from that part. They miss part of the world’s horror, and therefore don’t feel the consequent unhappiness that would arise from that part.

Is the spectrum symmetric?

Even more interesting of the consideration that the spectrum’s width varies from person to person, is how a person moves along that width. If that white bar I drew in the middle of the spectrum corresponds to a “middle” position between negative emotions and positive emotions, can someone be able to stretch far on the right, if he’s not able to strecht as far on the left? Can someone be able to feel deep positive emotions, if he’s not able to feel deep negative emotions?

emotions-spanI’ve been considering this question for quite some time, and it popped up again in my mind as I heard Anna talking. For example, in the case of comedians, I’ve always perceived that those who were the funniest were also very intelligent people, the kind of people who not only would be able to laugh about stupid little things, but who would also be able to see and understand the most tragic sides of life.

I don’t think that, necessarily, all the people who are able feel strong positive emotions, and in the case of comedians convey them to others, have experienced pain, like it was for Anna. But I do think that if difficulties or tragedy appeared in their path, they would have the sensibility to see and understand those difficulties and tragedy, and have an emotional response to it.

I do think that some people feel emotions more intensely than others, and since I think that it’s true what Anna said, that emotions stand all together somewhere as an inseparable mass, I think that people who have the ability to enter in a state of profound happiness have also the ability to enter in a state of profound unhappiness. Once the spectrum expands, both are within reach.

This doesn’t mean that one cannot decide to polarize himself towards positivity and happiness. It is possible to go through adversities and still decide -consciously- to keep our level of vibration high, to polarize our emotions towards the right side of the spectrum. It’s a very brave thing to do, and it’s very difficult. And for those who succeed in this, like Anna, I have a huge respect.