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How Do You Define “Success” anyway?

December 6, 2017

The big question: How do you define success? But of course, by measuring it, right?

You might think that the need to quantify everything is innate in humans. After all, when our ancestors lived in caves and had to hunt every day for their survival, 4 wild boars versus 3 could make the difference between life and death.

Fast-forward to the present day (Space Odyssey style) and the obsession with counting is more intense than ever. We live in the digital revolution era (with all its problems). Is your camera 12 or 24 megapixels? How many GB of RAM is your computer, your phone, your tablet? How tall are you? What’s your shoe size? Will it be a small, medium, or large coke?

You could argue – and you wouldn’t be wrong – that there is nothing sinister with measuring in that way. We need to be able to organize our life, after all.

The problems begin when you begin to overexpand measuring in adjacent areas. How many megapixels soon becomes “my camera is better than yours”, and, worse still, “I can take better photos than you”. The size of your clothes becomes a synonym of your value as a person. The size of your breasts a way to define you as a sexual being.

Sooner or later, we reach to the most absurd measurement of them all: the size of your bank account as a sign of your success.

It will take far more than looking at your bank account to define success. Good morning lemmings

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The Age of Treason

November 22, 2017

Writing

creativity, education, reason

I am a writer – a writer in the age of treason. That’s the word I would choose if I had to pick only one to best describe me professionally (whatever that means nowadays). I write novels of all kinds or genres, from speculative science fiction to supernatural horror and from soul-searching literary fiction to (yes, once even that) romantic dramas.

I am also an academic, specializing in Gothic and horror fiction (parenthetically, it is incredible how much more effortless it is to write 250 pages of fiction compared to the same number of a doctoral dissertation; don’t try this at home, kids). So, writing has “always” been something I’ve been drawn to.

Hence, writing here is really nothing different than what I am already doing, but perhaps in a more stream-of-consciousness, flexible kind of way. To a certain extent, fictional writing can be free (particularly if we’re talking about literary fiction). But it also has certain constraints which I am trying to bypass here. There is more, however.

The Age of Treason: Stupid Loudmouths and Intelligent Sufferers

The title of this first post is The Age of Treason. Forgive the shamelessly obvious pun, but sometimes I can’t help but feel that something is rotten in our world, now, in the year 2017.

No, no, I’m not talking about the usual aspects – there have always been wars, suffering, injustice, and pain. Furthermore, there have always been stupid loudmouths and intelligent but, alas, silent sufferers. What bothers me the most is how the stupid have become even louder and the wise even more marginalized. How is that connected to writing, you will ask.

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