Misc.

Between Two Wor(l)ds: Schadenfreude and Mudita

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Reading Time: 8 minutes There are four possible ways in which we can combine our reactions when we observe another person’s happiness or unhappiness: we can feel pleasure at another’s unhappiness (schadenfreude), displeasure at another’s unhappiness (compassion), displeasure at another’s happiness (envy), or pleasure at their happiness (mudita). Schadenfreude is a word borrowed from German, composed by Schaden (“damage/harm”) and Freude (“joy”). Thus, schadenfreude means tingling or even waves of pleasure noticing another’s misfortunes. The critical difference between schadenfreude and sadism is that sadism gives pleasure by inflicting pain. In contrast, …

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Seeing the World through the Japanese Concept of Wabi-Sabi

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Reading Time: 6 minutes Wabi-sabi is a Japanese concept through which the world is accepted as beautifully imperfect with humble and subtle flaws as it naturally grows and decays. Etymologically, the noun wabi is better understood through its adjective form wabishii (wretched, dreadful). In time, a negative connotation of wabi transformed through the influence of Zen philosophy, with its core concepts of accepting and contemplating imperfection and impermanence, into the quiet simplicity of rustic beauty, for things created by nature or people.  Wabi is beauty coming from subtle imperfections.  The noun sabi is …

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When Incentives Fail. A Story about Rats, Cobras, Nails, and Atrocities. 

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Reading Time: 6 minutes Part 1: When Incentives Fail. A Story about Rats, Cobras, Nails, and Atrocities.  Part 2: Avoiding Perverse Incentives  More than a century ago, the French colonialists decided to modernize the French Indochina, especially its capital, Hanoi. Large areas of Hanoi were cleared to accommodate French-style districts with boulevards, bridges, palaces, villas and gardens. This major infrastructure project was supposed to transform Hanoi from a cramped and narrow city into a symbol of France’s “civilising” mission in Indochina.  A sign of cleanliness and civilization was …

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What Makes Finland a Happy Country

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Reading Time: 9 minutes A few weeks ago, the World Happiness Report published its yearly global survey results about how people from more than 150 countries worldwide evaluated their lives. The full report can be found here (page 22). What is the methodology for ranking countries based on their happiness? The polling company Gallup conducts interviews with hundreds of thousands of people across the nations included in the report. People assess their own happiness using a scale from 1 to 10, responding to questions such as if they smiled, laughed or experienced …

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Keeping Sane about Ukraine 

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Reading Time: 3 minutes A close friend told me about the Russia-Ukraine war: “now I ran out of being afraid, I don’t have any resources left to be constantly terrified”. Watching the news for the last two weeks was torture. And this is for the lucky ones who don’t have their houses shelled, children wounded, family fighting. So we started doomscrolling, obsessively checking feeds, starting and ending the days with war news. And the more we scrolled, the more we felt doom and gloom, as media sells fear, …

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Reliable Information Sources about the Russia-Ukraine War

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Reading Time: 2 minutes Drive for about fours hours from my Romanian hometown, and you are in Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Drive for about three hours, and you are in Chisinau, Moldova (another country I fear might be attacked). I never witnessed such grief beyond belief so close to my birthplace. And so, hypocritically, I admit, I am horrified by this war and its unmeasurable loss of human life, although there were and still are gruesome conflicts spread all across this messed up world. For the last few days, I …

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First Night of War

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Reading Time: < 1 minute Darfur. Iraq. Iran. Yemen. Georgia. Nigeria. Lybia. Syria. And the list goes on and on for wars that began from merely 2003 onwards.  But to see tanks and fights and bombs in the heart of Europe?   William Faulkner said it best in Requiem for a Nun: The past is never dead. In fact, it’s not even past. And this resonates profoundly with a quote from Svetlana Aleksievich’s book The Unwomanly Face of War that described how a Soviet woman soldier during WWII felt decades after the war: what …

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Remembering 2021

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Reading Time: 4 minutes So much has happened in 2021, so little has occurred.  Coups d’état, lockdowns, controversies, wars, destructive climate disasters, 2021 was a terrible year. There is no denying there were some sparks of hope. For example, we saw the massive collaboration effort that contributed to the delivery of almost nine billion Covid jabs. This endeavour was not without troubles along the way, such as uneven access to vaccines or variants that seem to evade the vaccine. 2021 also brought the world’s first 3d printed school, built in …

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