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Santa Is an Emotional Abuser: On Modern Authority Structures

December 18, 2023

Society

children, emotional iq, ignorance, modernity, psychology, society

Yeah, OK, I know; Santa isn’t real (oops; spoiler alert?) but as Picasso ostensibly said, everything you can imagine is real. That is, Santa Claus might not be a real being, but the persona and the associated actions are. And Santa, as an emotional abuser, has some very real repercussions.

To be clear, emotional abuse doesn’t rely on Santa Claus alone. Parents have six ways to Sunday to emotionally abuse their children, threatening with repercussions, bribing them, gaslighting them, manipulating them. But Santa, besides a very efficient weapon of emotional abuse, is also a remarkably apt personification of the phenomenon itself.

Santa Emotional Abuser - AI render of an angry Santa sitting in a chair
Not quite the corporate Santa…
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Rosy Retrospection: Meaning and Repercussions

December 11, 2023

Society

experience, ignorance, nostalgia, society, time

“People were kinder when I was a kid!” “We could sleep with the doors unlocked back then!” “There was justice and respect for others!” You have surely heard something like that yourself. You have very likely seen people making such claims, usually followed by the response “OK, boomer!” This phenomenon is called rosy retrospection.

In social psychology, rosy retrospection is defined as the tendency to view the past in a disproportionately positive light, filtering out the negative aspects and highlighting the positives. It’s a confirmation bias expression. And as any confirmation bias, it can be extremely insidious, with far-reaching repercussions.

So, to figure all this out myself, in this post I’m taking a closer look at rosy retrospection: what it is, its connection with nostalgia, what is said (and what is not, which is as critical), and the repercussions it has for all of us.

rosy retrospection - color balloon against a gray city
Rosy retrospection is the idea that you remember how beautiful that balloon you saw was, and you all but forget the gray city behind it
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Individuality and Capitalism: Lessons From Remaking my Website

November 13, 2023

Home For Fiction, Programming, Society

capitalism, home for fiction, programming, society

For a long time I’ve been meaning to revamp Home for Fiction. When I put it together back in 2017, I was in the middle of defending my doctoral dissertation, and I had no time or energy for coding, so I simply picked a ready template. Recently, I finally decided to modify it, and the process was thoroughly revealing. From all things, it also taught me a thing or two about individuality, capitalism, and how society is becoming increasingly more dysfunctional.

Yeah, I know; all this from putting together some web pages?

But, in the end, that’s why we need to be experiencing the world around us before we write: in order to discover the connections that lie there unnoticed.

So, in this post, I’ll briefly explain my motivation in changing some things and, above all, what it taught me about individuality and capitalism. And we’ll begin precisely from this point.

individuality and capitalism – cartoon of Punning Walrus in front of computer
This image holds meta- value, because the inclusion of my Punning Walrus cartoon was one of the motivating factors behind modifying the Home for Fiction website
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