Las bondades del trabajo (madurez)

Parece que lo que el trabajo nos enseña nos ayuda a crecer interiormente, de manera que podemos aplicarlo en la vida "personal".

 Work and Maturity | The Book of Life

Contrary to the Romantic view, it might be that we are quite often simply the better version of ourselves at work. We’re more dignified and more patient, more tolerant and more loveable.



Rather than leaving work in order to relax, it might be that we need to come to work in order to be a better person and lover.


Being a good employee shouldn’t be that different from being that truly important thing, a good person.





•How to Learn
Work is a place where we can learn the skills – and ultimately the maturity – that we might otherwise be very short of in the rest of our lives.
By contrast, the domestic sphere is opposed to learning. We’re meant to know it all already: how to be a good friend, lover and parent. Except we generally have no clue – and never make much progress.

•How to express truths without causing upset
Business life constantly gives us lessons in the art of how to tell someone a tricky bit of information without them panicking or being horrified. Home life finds us far less tactful.


•How to listen to strange views
Each of the six individuals around the table has a very distinct personality, and would have come at many issues from quite alternative perspectives and yet they are united by the task at hand.

•How to be patient with fiddly things
Almost all work is fiddly. It requires patience, it demands that we slow ourselves down and master hurdles.

El (nuevo) sentimentalismo… en el arte y en los negocios

‘We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for.’ - Oscar Wilde

…imagine that I want you to like me, but don’t want to pay the true price of friendship. I want to feel we’re friends (which is a very nice feeling). But I don’t want to back you up when you are in difficulties, I don’t want to hear about your problems or give you tricky bits of advice: I don’t want to actually have to do the things real friends do.

The sentimentalist is a cynic at heart. Indeed, sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism.’

- Oscar Wilde

Unconvincing, airbrushed representations of family life encourage an equal and opposite reaction. Exposure to sentimentality leads many people to suppose that a wholly dark view is likely to be true.

The basic thing that happens in sentimental art, is that the negative aspects of life or a situation are repressed; and something is instead presented as wholly nice and lovely.

In the middle – between maturity and cynicism – is the mature assessment, which usually means acknowledging that things have good and bad aspects that are unfortunately deeply intertwined. Maturity involves giving up on the attractions of a clearer, simpler (but actually unfair) assessment, whether totally negative or totally positive. Maturity means realising for instance that a single person might be both kindly and generous sometimes and quite greedy at other points. Or that a nation might be really quite admirable in some ways and rather horrific in others.

Sentimentality in Art – and Business | The Book of Life



Why would a corporation resort to sentimentality? What is sentimentality for in advertising? It’s partly an expression of deep anxiety: the anxiety that the audience is in no position to face reality. Sentimentality is a symptom of the sheer difficulty of ambivalence. Adverts don’t trust us enough to share a more complicated view of the world with us. They are – wrongly – afraid that we might run away completely if we were let in on the secret that their products can’t make us entirely happy, that they are good enough but not perfect and that corporations never really love their customers, they’re trying at best to make them a little happier in one or two areas of life.

Businesses are also tempted by sentimentality in their dealings with their own employees. When companies make general statements about how they approach their employees, the shadow side is typically missing.

There are two causes of sentimentality in business. The first is a fear of the fragility of the audience, a worry that it won’t be able to cope with the truth. You think the truth is actually OK. But you fear that other people will get excessively agitated and upset. For businesses the shadow side is this: companies have to make a profit. Businesses have to follow demand. Employees sometimes have to be pushed quite hard or fired to raise profits. They are always means, not ends. Many decision have to be based on the bottom line. Because these facts aren’t fantastic, companies get very nervous about being honest around them.

The second reason for business sentimentality is darker. People sometimes get very sentimental when they feel very guilty, when something pretty bad is going on just off-stage. It’s a kind of bubble wrap around brutish things.

Societies or businesses with a backdrop of pretty cynical attitudes are also often those where there’s a lot of overcompensatory moves. When the sugar coating has to be very thick, it’s often a sign of something pretty bitter underneath.
The solution to this sort of sentimentality is to relieve the pressure of a bad conscience by changing one’s ways.

In the Utopia, there would be less brutality, and therefore less cynicism and less sentimentality. We’d be able to discuss the truth – because the truth felt bearable.

Recuperando el placer de la lectura… ("libros", EN)

We are still learning how to live in this information ecosystem, and how to build the ecosystem for humans rather than for the information. 



How Making Time for Books Made Me Feel Less Busy

Understanding Our Brains, Part 1: Dopamine, pleasure, and learning bad habits

…Humans brains, it turns out, are built to privilege new information over just about anything else (including, some suggest, food and sex). The promise of that new information…triggers the release of a neurotransmitter—dopamine—in the brain. Dopamine makes us more alert to the promise of potential pleasure, and our brains are wired to seek out things that generate dopamine.

There is a learning loop to this process—new information + dopamine = pleasure—that lays down neural pathways that “teach” your brain that there is a reward for pressing the email refresh button…

Understanding Our Brains, Part 2: The energy costs of flitting around

While the addictive attraction of new information is one side of the problem, the other side is the cost of jumping from one thing to the next and back again.

The typical human brain is about 2% of the body’s weight, but it consumes in the range of 20% of the energy… when you are relaxing or staring out the window, your brain is “at rest,” and uses around 11 calories per hour. Focused reading for an hour will use up around 42 calories. But processing lots of new information takes around 65 calories per hour. …

Every time you pop out of your work to read an email, it costs you not just time, but energy too. …

So what do we do?

Keep on reading…

10 consejos del Papa Francisco para vivir feliz ;-)

Las religiones no me convencen, más concretamente las organizaciones religiosas no me convencen nada…

Aún así, se basan en personas y con todo lo que pueda haber de "marketing"… este Papa Francisco sólo puede caerme bien (de momento).



10 consejos del Papa Francisco para vivir feliz - Pijamasurf

1. Vive y deja vivir
2. Sé generoso con los demás
3. Procede con calma
4. El sentido de ocio saludable
5. Los domingos son días de asueto
6. Encontrar formas innovadoras de crear trabajos dignos para los jóvenes
7. Respeto y cuidado con la naturaleza
8. Deja de ser negativo
9. No hagas proselitismo, respeta las creencias de los demás
10. Trabaja por la paz

La complejidad de educar (ideas de Donald Winnicott, EN)

La educación, en su más amplio sentido, es esencial para el futuro:

How do you build a better world? There are so many well-known, urgent places you might start: malaria, carbon emissions, tax evasion, the drug trade, soil erosion, water pollution…Donald Winnicott deserves his place in history because of the dramatic simplicity of his approach. He proposed that the happiness and future satisfaction of the human race depended ultimately not so much on external political issues, but on something far closer to home: the way parents bring up their children. All the sicknesses of humanity were, in his view, in essence consequences of a failure of parental provision. Fascism, delinquency, rage, misogyny, alcoholism, these were only the symptoms of poor childhoods that the collective would have to pay for. The road to a better society begins in the nursery.

Love in Winnicott's writings: 

It’s about a surrender of the ego, a putting aside of one’s own needs and assumptions, for the sake of close, attentive listening to another, whose mystery one respects, along with a commitment not to get offended, not to retaliate, when something ‘bad’ emerges, as it often does when one is close to someone, child or adult.

Donald Winnicott | The Book of Life

And yet Winnicott’s brand of psychoanalysis was, on closer inspection, peculiarly English. He wrote pragmatic, homespun prose, expressing the deepest ideas in plain, unadorned language. There was no German incomprehensibility or abstraction here. There was also a characteristic English modesty about what he saw as the point of child psychoanalysis. He wanted to help people to be, in his famous formulation, ‘good enough’ parents; not brilliant or perfect ones (as other nations might have wished), but just OK. And that was because he displayed, to a high degree, the downbeat, modest, realistic, temperament which is the particular glory of the English mind.
…Winnicott begins by impressing on his audience how psychologically fragile an infant is. It doesn’t understand itself, it doesn’t know where it is, it is struggling to stay alive, it has no way of grasping when the next feed will come, it can’t communicate with itself or others. It is an undifferentiated, unindividuated mass of competing drives. It isn’t a person. The early months are hence an immense struggle. Winnicott’s work never loses sight of this, and he therefore repeatedly insists that it is those around the infant who have to ‘adapt’, adapt so as to do everything to interpret the child’s needs and not impose demands for which the child is not ready.A child who has adapted to the world too early, or who has had inappropriate demands made upon it, will be a prime candidate for mental problems, just as health is the result of an environment that can respond appropriately to the child, which can keep elements of reality at bay, until the small creature is ready.…But though the infant might sometimes want to kill and destroy, it is vital for the parents to allow rage to expend itself, and for them not in any way to be threatened or moralistic about ‘bad’ behaviour: ‘If a baby cries in a state of rage and feels as if he has destroyed everyone and everything, and yet the people round him remain calm and unhurt, this experience greatly strengthens his ability to see that what he feels to be true is not necessarily real, that fantasy and fact, both important, are nevertheless different from each other.’Winnicott interpreted violent feelings against parents as a natural aspect of the maturational process: ‘For a child to be brought up so that he can discover the deepest part of his nature, someone has to be defied, and even at times hated, without there being a danger of a complete break in the relationship.’…However, there might be parents who could not tolerate too much bad behaviour and would demand compliance too early and too strictly. This would lead, in Winnicott’s formulation, to the emergence of a ‘False Self’ – a persona that would be outwardly compliant, outwardly good, but was suppressing its vital instincts; who was not able to properly balance up its social with its destructive sides and that couldn’t be capable of real generosity or love, because it hadn’t been allowed fully to explore selfishness and hate. Only through proper, attentive nurture would a child be able to generate a ‘True Self’.…Winnicott had a special hatred for ‘people who are always jogging babies up and down on their knees trying to produce a giggle.’ This was merely their way of warding off their own sadness, by demanding laughter from a baby who might have very different things on its mind.The primordial act of parental health for Winnicott is simply to be able to tune out of oneself for a time in the name of empathising with the ways and needs of a small, mysterious, beautiful fragile person whose unique otherness must be acknowledged and respected in full measure.…Winnicott called parenting: ‘the only real basis for a healthy society, and the only factory for the democratic tendency in a country’s social system.’Of course, there will be errors. Things go wrong in childhood. And that’s what psychoanalysis is for. In Winnicott’s eyes, the analyst in later years acts as a substitute parent, a proxy ‘good enough’ figure who ‘is in a position of the mother of an infant’. Good analysis has things in common with those early years. Here too, the analyst should listen without forcing the patient to get ‘better’ ahead of time. She shouldn’t force a cure down his or her throat, she should provide a safe place where bits of childhood that weren’t completed or went awry can be recreated and rehearsed. Analysis is a chance to fill in the missing steps.…Since Winnicott’s death, we’ve collectively grown a little better at parenting. But only a little. We may spend more time with our children, we know in theory that they matter a lot, but we’re arguably still failing at the part Winnicott focused on: adaptation. We still routinely fail to suppress our own needs or stifle our own demands when we’re with a child. We’re still learning how to love our children – and that, Winnicott would argue, is why the world is still full of the walking-wounded, people of outward ‘success’ and respectability who are nevertheless not quite ‘real’ inside and inflict their wounds on others. We’ve a way to go until we get to be ‘good enough.’

11 libros a leer si quieres hacer política

Los 11 libros que deben leer los que pretenden hacer política - Pijamasurf

nidad). Esta lista está basada en esta otra, con unos aditamentos.

1. El príncipe, Nicolás Maquiavelo

2. Aristóteles, Política 

3. San Agustín de Hipona, La ciudad de Dios (426. d. C.)

4. Tomás de Aquino, ­Suma teológica (1596)

5. Montesquieu, Del espíritu de las leyes (1747)

6.  Tomás Moro, Utopía (1516)

7. John Locke, ­ Ensayo sobre el entendimiento humano (1690)

8. Thomas Hobbes, Leviatán (1651)

9. Jean-Jaques Rousseau, El contrato social

10. Adam Smith, La riqueza de las naciones (1776)

11. Denis Diderot, ­La Enciclopedia (1751)

4 películas que han marcado este verano (2015)

…viendo las fechas no parece que esté muy a la última ;-)


La claustrofóbica Locke




La deliciosa y divertida "Niñera Moderna", Sitting Pretty




La comedia romántica de enredo "Medianoche", Midnight




La vibrante Whiplash

Como ser feliz en el trabajo… 10 ideas sencillas (infografía, EN)

How to Be Happy At Work: 10 Simple Tips That Work



 This infographic was crafted with love by Officevibe, the engagement software showing you how to be happy at work.

El encanto del lujo…

Despite the widespread availability of good quality cheap products (watches, handbags, cars…), there remains a remarkable appetite for extremely expensive versions of them…

Why We Continue to Love Expensive Things | The Book of Life

So the immediate question is: why would someone spend two hundred times more on a watch? The standard response at this point is to get rather severe, judgmental and censorious; and to assume that the only reason one might buy the expensive item is the desire to show off, to parade one’s affluence and to try to humiliate others. In short, buying it is a piece of aggressive self-assertion. This sort of analysis derives from our society’s folk memory of a stock character in fiction – the mean rich idiot –

This issue needs to be addressed urgently because it’s remarkably stressful to live in a society where luxury seems like a necessary route to a good life. The implicit philosophy of luxury goods is that the ingredients of fulfilment lie considerably outside an ordinary salary; which condemns a huge section of society to feelings of incompleteness. By definition ‘luxury’ is what 95% of the population either cannot, or can only just (with huge effort) afford. So there’s a genuine need to attack the brilliance with which luxury has managed to position itself as both central to life – yet unavailable. Luxury has a menacing, baffling position in relation to our ambitions. 

But we can suggest that the impulse to buy luxury goods doesn’t come from greed or the desire to humiliate others. … The love of luxury breeds in societies where it feels very dangerous to be average… It isn’t coincidental that the love of luxury has been particularly in evidence in societies where the average existence is a properly painful place to be. 

…certain places are rather inimical to luxury, that Rolex and Louis Vuitton, Prada and Aston Martin have done spectacularly badly in Denmark, a country which boasts the third highest level per capita income in the world and one of the most equal distributions of wealth anywhere.

The Danish case illustrates one large possible solution to the social problem of luxury. The desire for luxury is inversely related to the level of dignity of an average life; as dignity goes up, so the desire for luxury comes down. It was never really about greed, the love of luxury was an individual response to a political failure: the inability of governments to ensure that an average life could be a flourishing life. 

… 

…luxury isn’t just a fear of the average, it’s also a symptom of trust in authority, driven to a potentially excessive degree. 

But this trust can be usurped by the less deserving characters from ad agencies, who act a little like a malevolent supply teacher who work on a student’s credulity, exploiting his trust in authority, built up over years by a series of benign teachers. Our willingness to do what we’re assured is the right thing gets us into trouble when it’s hijacked by people who don’t really have our best interests at heart. 

…

Our love of luxury goods isn’t freakish or vainglorious. It is attuned to some genuine needs: the need not to be drawn into a degraded average existence and to follow the prestigious voices of authority, speaking to us from billboards and magazines.

Why We Hate Cheap Things | The Book of Life

El problema del “no fork available”

El problem del “no fork available” | Canal #Mac del Chat Hispano

La gestión de memoria de OSX era buena. Como buen Unix que es, se lleva pensando y programando desde 1978, con lo que, si algo funciona bien, lo mejor es que no lo toques, sobre todo cuando es eficiente y hace su trabajo estupendamente. Pero llego Apple y su mania de “tocar” a ver si así se puede llevar el gato a su agua, mover el problema a su terreno, crear “su estándar” y que, a ser posible sea incompatible con el resto.…Por suerte, esto se puede cambiar, aunque, desde Yosemite, no se puede hacer desde el propio comando ulimit. Si intentamos cambiar los parámetros desde el ulimit, aunque parece que funciona, veremos que no varian (curiosamente). Apple reinventando la rueda y la forma para no permitir al usuario que toque y modifique su propio sistema, gra-cias.
Curiosamente, si nos aburrimos y ponemos el siguiente comando:

launchctl limit

Veremos que… oh sorpresa, nos aparece lo mismo pero desde otra perspectiva:… 

Es decir, Apple ha pasado del demonio de toda la vida que siempre ha funcionado bien y va como la seda para pasar a su propio sistema de demonios (de ahí el launchctl). Lo que nos da un olor a donde hay que tocar para modificarlo ya que el fichero del /etc/limit.conf pues curiosamente, ya no existe y no vale… ni siquiera si lo ponemos en /private/etc nuevo sitio para las configuraciones.

Pero, si vamos a la carpeta /Library/LaunchDaemons nos encontraremos con un fichero llamado limit.maxfiles.plist que justamente es un XML de configuración el cual ejecuta el demonio del launchctl y que… sorpresa sorpresa, los números corresponden a lo que el ulimit y el limit nos escupen. Yo, desde aquí, os recomiendo dejar un valor de 524288, quedando el fichero tal que así. 

…