Believe in Personal Progress

When we are young, we are usually highly motivated to study new things. This may be applicable to purely scientific knowledge, languages, soft skills, physical performance, power and endurance. When you get somewhat older, say +50 years, you might be tempted to think that such high investment in personal progress makes less sense. Why is that? Because the ROI, the Return on Investment seems to go down with age. The investment tends to go up, as the required effort seems to increase with age. At the same time, the direct benefit tends to go down, as the remaining time to benefit from the acquired skills goes down as well. We tend to think: this is not going to work and if it does, it will not bring anything.

Recently, we had the pleasure of receiving training from a Shaolin monk. At some point in time, we stood in awe for the exceptional skills he had acquired in his life through physical exercise. He pointed out: even if you don’t believe it, if you practice, you will increase in strength, whether you like it or not and whether you believe it or not. Practising increases your strength, independent of your belief whether your strength will finally increase. This is an interesting thought.

So it could be worthwhile to abandon all cynicism and worrying and acquire new capabilities altogether. We will benefit from it, even if we don’t notice at the beginning. We may notice after a month or a year, that we have increased our capabilities, whether we believed we could do it or not.

I refer to my earlier blog: “Belief creates the actual Fact”, “The Virtue of Patience and the 10 000 hour Rule” and "Mens Sana in Corpore Sano".

Picture: Seneca statue in Cordoba, Spain

Hygge or hyperactivity?

The word Hygge became popular in Denmark to indicate a Danish flavour of cosiness and relaxing lifestyle. It can be a social sense of togetherness -spending time together-, or it can be a more solitary version with books, sofas, fireplaces, cats and cups of tea. Hygge expresses a kind of well-being, of harmony with other people without looking at the clock. Hygge may well be the opposite of hastening and hyperactivity.

Hygge was originally a Norwegian word, which meant something like consoling or comforting. It is related to an English word we all like: to hug: to embrace, literally: to build a fence or form a hedge ('haga') around someone. (The word Hygge is therefore etymologically related to my family name Lahaye.)

It is clear that there is a growing market for Hygge. We have all become restless and hyperactive. The reason may be the earlier discussed Beschleunigung of life. Hyperactivity brings us in a vicious circle. It creates restlessness and stress. We long so much for rest that we become restless in trying to achieve it. We can’t even wait for anything anymore. As soon as we are kept waiting, we take our smartphone and make other people wait for us.

Let us be restless in fighting hyperactivity and let us leave no opportunity unused to bring more Hygge in our daily life, be it with colleagues or with family members. Let us get rid of the smartphone and let us hug our dearest and nearest a little more. I refer to my earlier blog Lifestyle.

Crony Capitalism and Comrade Communism

In 1992, Francis Fukayama wrote about the end of history and the last man. His thesis was that liberal democracies and free market capitalism finally proved to be superior to other economic systems like communism and socialism. The background in which his essay was written, was the Fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, after President Gorbashev had conducted a policy of Glasnost and Perestroika in the moribund communist Soviet Union. Francis Fukayama could be considered the ultimate counterpart of another famous intellectual, Karl Marx, born 200 years ago in the town of Trier.

Francis Fukayama was not all wrong. In Europe, all countries have moved to some form of liberal democracy and free market capitalism, although not all problems are solved. China, which was originally a communist regime, has successfully introduced capitalist principles, but doesn’t embrace democracy yet. In fact, the current Chinese model is so successful, a Chinese man told me, that the people are anxious to embrace democracy.

On the other hand, Francis Fukayama could not be right either. One reason is cultural. We live in an age of postmodernism. Therefore, if someone claims to have found the ultimate economic and political system, he must be wrong. Postmodernism, born from the disappointments of the 20^th century, denies any of us the right to proclaim a superior system. A pessimistic postmodernism resides deeply in all intellectual thinking of our time. In a certain way, postmodernism proved its correctness by noting the American capitalism, the purest of all capitalist systems, has gone astray as well.

On the one hand, the USA suffered a lot from the major financial crises in the economy. On the other hand, now that its economy is slowly recovering, the country is paradoxically opting for a more protectionist policy. But there is much more reason to be concerned about capitalism. Capitalism often evolves in a direction of crony capitalism, with a lot of government involvement and with similar tendencies towards corruption as in the comrade communism, which was so well described in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Capitalism also tends to graze all green pastures, leaving nothing but deserts behind. Capitalism is very bad at protecting general interests like the environment. But this can also be said from communism.

It seems like postmodernism may have some truth in it. All economic systems seem to bite themselves in the tail after a while and for all economic systems,  some form of ‘reset’ is required, usually preceded by social revolt. This is well described in Tomas Sedlacek’s book the Economics of Good and Evil. Other essays about economy  can be found by clicking the economy label below.

Picture: House where Karl Marx was born, exactly 200 years ago, in Trier, Germany.