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What is this new trend of file sharing compulsion? Why do we suddenly feel the need to share via a status update or a re-post on our Superwall what we are doing at the moment? Who cares if your purse got stolen in a crowded bus, if the weather in the part of your world sucks, or if a plane just crashed into a building near you? Moreover, why do we feel to necessarily share with others what we read, see, listen or hear? Well, the answer is simple: as we need sympathy, approval, acceptance and kinship support. It is only human.

Peter Senge thought that “Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes”.

Like him, I thought that the road to knowledge is via sharing and trying to obtain the others interest and make them resonate with you. This is how we affiliate, based on likeness, and not on variety. I will never make friends with a person who belongs to a Facebook group that “Impales Golden Retrievers in their spare time” or thinks “Hitler was an amazing person”. However, I will try to make friends with someone who has an interest in psychology, journalism, social quantum change, and thinks Burroughs’ Naked Lunch should be studied in school.

Each time we click on a “share” button (which now is a mandatory technical presence all over the internet media) we require the others to give us their attention, to stop what they are doing and for the next few minutes to read or listen what we are writing/reading or listen. Surely, there is always the option not to do that, but how many real life relations have not been broken over virtual misunderstandings?

My real question is how mentally healthy it is when we come across internet buttons at the end of each piece and compulsion is just one click away? Can the share impulse be defined as “compulsion”? Does it have all attributes? According to the textbooks, the compulsion is a repetitive, excessive, meaningless activity or mental exercise that a person performs in an attempt to avoid distress or worry. How stress relieving is when I repeatedly share articles from Scientific American Mind or Psychology Today? If sharing becomes a compulsion, its performance will relieve distress but only temporarily and on the long term the sharing obsessed person will have to seek some other relievers like compulsively checking their email account or cell phone inbox every other minute.

Sigmund Freud used the German word Zwang to describe compulsion, a word which derived from the Latin compulsio, and originally meant "constraint”. Yet, are we constrained to share? Does the internet condition us? Is Facebook or Twitter sharing act dominated by inevitable destiny or hopeless determinism? No, it isn’t, as the internet or social networks are not insurmountable in the drive, and we can certainly avoid that.

If you were my (Facebook) friend

OK, let’s take this real life conversation: “I have mentioned this issue in my last blog post and I have shared it on Facebook. If you paid attention, you knew what I was talking about. I won’t repeat it again now”. What is wrong with this particular (let alone absurd) reproach?

Oh, well, a new feeling of guilt is created as if you cared about your friends, you would have taken the time to read their posts- so they claim. Obviously, this last statement is not true. None of your friends are obliged to read your creations and none should feel guilty if they don’t. When you took the decision to advertise your product (be it a piece of literature, a song you wrote, some design you came up with) you should have taken into consideration the potential market response: some want it, some don’t. You need to assume the responsibility and emotional maturity of potential rejection. This is how we grow and develop, forged by failures and basking in success. If non-acceptance makes you feel sad, rejected, misunderstood, lonely, it is entirely up to you and solely your issue, not the others.

Similarly, the whole idea of friendship got a new dimension over social network sites. We affiliate with people we don’t know and yet we consider friends. I myself have asked people to accept my friend request hoping they are Facebook active and they regularly post interesting and new things (mostly pieces on psychology) on their “walls”. Those who failed to do that were deleted after a trial period, either being well-known names in the field or not. I hoped that my action would go unnoticed or worse case scenario, forgiven.

However, a few Facebook acquaintances decided to do the same. They have deleted me off their buddies list, without prior mishap. And that was fine. Facebook is just a virtual agora and we are not exactly friends. So no feelings were seriously hurt in the process. One of them told me he felt assaulted not necessarily by my frequent psychology articles sharing compulsion, which he found somehow interesting, but by the numerous comments my other friends posted on my wall.

He asked to be re-added. I will not however tell you what I did. Virtual deletion, as any action we perform, has a deeper meaning. We want to become oblivious of something, we want to delete, remove, and wipe out something or someone. Needless to say, such virtual act has real consequences. A deletion is a deletion. Like a word you said, it cannot be taken back. Some relationships are meant to subside. Others will flourish.

Social networking anxiety disorder

People who are more sensitive or unstable even get a sort of anxiety which started to have been recognized lately as a serious and real disorder: a social networking anxiety disorder.

While social anxiety disorder implies fear of being closely watched, judged, and criticized by others, the social networking anxiety disorder might actually combat the SAD by allowing its users to present themselves in a more favorable light: pictures that make the person look better than in reality; selected profile info; creamed up internet postings that make the others think that the re-poster is smarter than he actually is; name dropping or name affiliation by re-posting some articles that “buddies” on the friend list write. All in all, social networks make us look and seem better, prettier, and smarter.

Worse case scenario, if you have any social network weaknesses, you can simply “remove” an impulsive status update which might embarrass you later on, which is definitely not something you could do in real life without counting on collective oblivion.

Some even go further and re-post mass media clippings that they do not even read themselves but have interesting, funny, outrageous or intellectually posh titles enough to transmit to the others “hey, I am an interesting, funny, outrageous and intellectually posh person since I am reading this”. Thus, we collect a handful of first impressions, never getting to the bottom of second or third ones. Our virtual acquaintances are perfect and meet our natural necessity to socialize. We are accepted and admired. What else do we need? Well, for starters, a reality check. See how many people you can delete without them noticing this. Try to see how close the ones remaining are to you. Try to contact them and know them better, they are, after all, “your friends”. See how many accept and share your views on life. Or death. Not many, are there? Ideally, the number should be below 150. And that is a good thing.

Is euthanasia an extreme act of love?

How far would you go to take the life of a dear one? Undoubtedly, people are ready to go incredible lengths to preserve the lives of their kin or dear ones. Sometimes, they would even kill some to save some. Wars have been always justified in a similar way for thousands of years. My tribe's safety justifies me murdering you. Is crime, even in self-defense, justifiable? A crime is a crime. But, can we honestly be strict about it? What if your child was in danger? Would you not pull the trigger? Are you absolutely sure you would not eat the weakest member of a group if that would be the sole alternative to survive on some deserted island? Are you ready to say "no" to euthanasia if you find out you or a dear one have a degenerative fatal illness? Isn’t euthanasia a type of extreme love, after all?

An article written by self-titled scientific fundamentalist Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist, claims that “Dropping atomic bombs on Japan was an act of utmost compassion” and that “100 million people killed by bullets, one at a time, over weeks and months, is much, much worse, by any account, than 200,000 people killed in a flash of a second by atomic bombs”. I know, it sounds shocking to claim that Hiroshima was an act of mercy and some of the sensitive readers are appalled by this daring statement. If we can justify and excuse Hiroshima as an act of mass euthanasia, can we justify the Holocaust? If we create the precedent and come up with some decent retroactive reasoning, why not? But, is there any decent reasoning for mass murder? No, it is not.

However, Kanazawa justifies his reasoning “They would never have surrendered had we not dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That would have necessitated ground invasion of mainland Japan by the American forces, which would have led to many, many more Japanese to be killed, up to 100 million. You are equally dead whether you are killed by a bullet or an atomic bomb.” From this standpoint, Kanazawa, an utilitarian, used effortless calculus to justify a military action which killed, in the end, a quarter million people. Stalin was definitely not an idiot when he said that when one person dies is a tragedy, when millions die is just statistics. Kanazawa (whom I actually like in general) relies his argumentation on historic context and mentality of Japanese (very stereotyping and generalizing), claiming they would have died anyway in the name of the emperor and actually the US army just cut their tragedy short. Well, maybe the Jews exterminated during Holocaust would have died of cancer anyway, so Hitler just curbed their sufferance. Maybe Palestinians are meant to blow themselves up anyway, so why not bomb them? Maybe women have a tendency towards depression and suicide so why not put them on medication anyway? Maybe Blacks are meant to become gangsters and thieves so why not imprison them from early childhood? Maybe Italians will become drug dealers anyway, so why not ostracize them?

"What if" retroactive clauses are highly speculative and do not serve as a pretext for past actions. Moreover, human lives are not commensurable. We need to go down to the individual when dealing with lives. From a social perspective they are just collateral victims and we can find soothing words for each act: collateral victims, friendly-fire etc. Whatever keeps us psychologically comfortable. Justifying the H-Bomb by saying they would have committed suicide anyway is not an excuse. Not to mention the H-Bomb did not only kill 200,000 people, it killed them on a long term, created malformations, and made out of Hiroshima a spot of shame for the US. So much for excusing mass euthanasia.

What about individual euthanasia? Ramon Sampedro was a Spaniard who fought to be allowed to die for almost 28 years. He was quadriplegic, meaning he was paralyzed from his neck down, “a living head in a dead body”, as he said. He was immobilized in bed and was fed, washed, and tended by another adult. For any responsible person, emotionally and physically developed, being taken care of like that might lead to a feeling of discomfort, if not desperation, as it reminds us of childhood helplessness residues. While some might enjoy their regression state, most of us do not. Ramon was such a person. He wanted to be an adult and he thought that living a life where he depended entirely of someone else was humiliating. Moreover, a life where he could watch the nature just from the angle of his bed, was not a life (he had previously been a sea diver).

Yet, the society interfered with his choice of living his life with dignity and banned him not only to die, but banned him from living it with dignity. His basic rights of living with dignity were denied under some higher purpose and the feeble excuse that “god has given, god will take it away”. What if there is no God? Shall we deny the right of someone very palpable in the name of something indefinable? Can we deny people their basic right of owning their own life or the right to die? If it is our life, we are entitled to do whatever we please with it, live it or end it whenever we decide. This is about pro-freedom above all. And this freedom includes the liberty to end our lives, not only to live it with dignity or pay taxes or move freely. Assisted-suicide (and suicide in general) is a personal choice and we need to respect that. Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which most countries (including those which deny the right to die) subscribed to, decrees: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Obviously, those deciding on other people’s behalf (doctors, relatives) face a moral dilemma which leads to a psychological discomfort and, in time, if left unattended, to a certain imbalance. By definition, a dilemma implies two equally conclusive alternatives and most of the times equally unfavorable or mutually exclusive. A dilemma is what we wish we had in theory and never face. Yet, most of us, struggle with various ethical concepts (Philippa Foot’s “shall we save five people but kill one?” trolley problem) for which we have no definite answers, just speculations. Morals and ethics are not precise and exact sciences, unfortunately.

So, what makes a crime abominable? The number of victims? The lack of consent? Is a self-defense crime less of a crime? Is euthanasia a crime? Then what is life? Is breathing through machines a sufficient condition to be considered alive? Does consent make it morally correct? If not, why not, if we are equals in rights and dignity?

Ultimately, morality is not situated only in the upshot of a deed (death in this case) but also in rights. And it is our basic fundamental right to live with dignity. Or die with it.

The catharsis of naked truth

Pretty much like you, I regress and re-live my teen era through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ecademy and alike. The reasons for which we do that are many: some have a personal interest to promote their product (books, articles, websites, research etc), others are trying to connect romantically or unromantically, while others just regress to the point of teenage pick-up techniques or gossip. Relationships are formed, marriages are broken, friendships are tied, luv is in the air. For some, it works wonders, for others it creates a tragedy. The Divorce-Online website scanned its divorce petition database for the use of the word 'Facebook' - and found 989 instances of the word in the 5,000 divorce petitions sampled. Some go further and claim Facebook is to be blamed for 20% of divorces in the UK. Some ardent fans updated their status from "single" to "married" right in front of the altar, while saying "I do".

For a short time, I was dubiously cautious myself: why disclose so much information? Why show my education, work info or emotions plain in the open? Oh well, because truth is cathartic, so why not? Nowadays, everybody seems to know everything about everybody. But how much do the others want to know? We always tend to over rate the opinion we have about ourselves or the interest the other might have in us. The naked truth number one is : no one really cares that much. Firstly, you are important to yourself.

OK, so how much is enough? Shall we give personal info? Shall we be emotionally earnest? Somehow, our out in the open emotional ease became a reproach and not an aptitude. For a while, we didn't seem to get a clear idea whether we are to express our emotions plain in the open or not. Some modern societies consider that a reduced level of emotions equals to high level of civilization. After a while of tribulation, we conclude that in fact, emotional honesty varies cross cultures. At an individual level, emotional honesty bias might lead to cognitive dissonance, hence a feeling of psychological discomfort, but that of course, won’t last long, once you align your thoughts in order.

Now, deep emotions are laudable, but the problem is no one needs or wants that kind of intensity. Why should they take your heat? Remember that Confucian cultures considered expression of emotions as a possible threat to the social order. Hence, the norms were of not-showing personal emotions. Emotional freedom, however, is not bound to emotional honesty. One may feel as one pleases, as long as one doesn’t express it.

Consequently, we learnt how to hide ourselves pretty well although, on a long term, this self imposed behavior affected how we deal with the highs and lows of life. Some still prefer to keep a mysterious aura, thinking it is emotionally classy and fashionable sensitive to disguise how they feel. But to what detriment? Would you rather take emotional class over emotional health?

So why not be honest about it and say it with a Facebook status? The naked truth number two is that status updates are as cathartic as blogging. Or confessing. Sure, it could be just technology trend, and five years from now, we might as well revert to keeping our statuses shut. Until then…we feel angry, sad, outraged, disappointed, disgusted, euphoric or critical and we will express it. Show me a monkey which can cry or laugh and also say it with a status update, and I will eat a live toad on an empty stomach every morning. I am sure, nothing worse can happen to me afterwards. I might have to rephrase that.

Although blamed by some, mocked by others, the social networking websites which allow their users to have status updates manage to create a vent for people’s surfacing emotions. You might think this statement is a bit over rated. However, think about the very definition of the word “status”. Mother Wiki (I can't believe am quoting Wikipedia) says that a “status refers to the relative rank that an individual holds; this includes attendant rights, duties, and lifestyle, in a social hierarchy based upon honor or prestige and refers to social stratification on a vertical scale”.

Facebook and alike managed to homogenize our social differences of our statuses by offering a new dimension to the word. By extension a status lost its kudos aura and became “what you are doing at the moment”.

Either ascribed or achieved, a status is who you are and what you are doing that very moment, someone who:

…is overwhelmed by an “unbearable lightness of being”;

…is running with scissors so don’t make her trip;

…is trying a zingy feeling of euphoria but has no idea why;

…is waiting for the ship to come in when she didn’t send out one yet;

…can't stand, it's intolerance;

…hates all countries and wants one for himself;

…doesn’t suffer from insanity, he enjoys every minute of it;

…is tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?

…doesn't sweat the petty things, and doesn't pet the sweaty things.

…is writing about status updates.

Membership number 1,607,525

Herbert von Karajan, a prominent orchestra conductor, and son of an upper-bourgeois Salzburg family, originally Aromanian, was undoubtedly a musical genius. At the age of only 27 he was appointed Germany's youngest Generalmusikdirektor and was a guest conductor in Bucharest (that would be Romania, not Hungary), Brussels, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Paris. He was known as the most popular orchestra conductor of all times, and he sold over 200 million copies.

Yet in this wunderkinder’s perfect biography there is a glitch. Karajan was a member of the Nazi Party. He joined the party on 8 April 1933; his membership number was 1,607,525.

Should his political appurtenance and youth credo in Sozialismus shade his creative talent? Does it say anything about his character as a human being? About his morality? It certainly does. Can we have double standards and separate our enjoyment for music, art and literature from the man that created it? Isn't this hypocrisy and indirect endorsement of their personal life choices?

Pope Benedict XVI was also a member of Hitler Youth party. At the time it was mandatory. It is no secret about the coercive methods of authoritarian regimes: if you were not with them, you were against them.

Some however joined out of sheer belief in a new era. They believed in change, even if the course of history got out of hand and change proved to be atrocious. They thought that evolution meant revolution. I do, too.

“I put men to death in war, I fought duels to slay others. I lost at cards, wasted the substance wrung from the sweat of peasants, punished the latter cruelly, rioted with loose women, and deceived men. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, and murder, all were committed by me, not one crime omitted, and yet I was not the less considered by my equals to be a comparatively moral man. Such was my life for ten years”. These were the words of Tolstoy.

Like so many others, Tolstoy remained in the collective conscience as a great writer and philosopher. His private life and the allegations of rape of an underage girl remain forgotten, just brought up any now and then by some exasperate literature teacher to awake the interest of vexed 15 year olds who are busy sending text messages about 50 Cent and Pittbull. Like this teacher totally sucks, y’all, but that Tolstoy dude was like totally awesome. I am like totally floored. Word, sweet!

Michael Jackson has died. Like all obituaries, such hearsay makes us reflect about what immortality really is.

Because one of our contemporary brilliant minds (Milan Kundera that is) has a novel with a similar name, I tried to look up for synonyms of endless life and I came across this one: athanasia, a lovely female name, of Greek origin, also meaning immortal, deathless. As opposed to its twin, euthanasia, which implies a good death, athanasia gave birth to a Christian creed in the 15th century and claims, in spite of all church’s documents and decrees, that thanatos can be conquered and incarnation, recte immortality, is possible.

You might honestly wonder how I can mix up Karajan, the Pope, Michael Jackson, Tolstoy and Church in the same literary pot. It is rather easy, believe me, as the main theme here is immortality and ways to achieve it.

Like Tolstoy, Michael Jackson was accused and acquitted of child sexual abuse, although at the time the media were unfriendly to him and tended to give moral credit to the child, whose name will, as well, remain immortal. We are not here to judge whether Karajan was a Nazi, Jackson was a pedophile, Tolstoy was a rapist, Schopenhauer a violent manic-depressive with his oddities and anxieties and his gun hidden under the pillow, and his lawsuits for battering older women, Nietzsche was a drug addict, whose writings were heavily chloral hydrated or Rimbaud an alcoholic addicted to absinthe.

We should not judge the men, but their legacy. But can we separate them?

What is immortality? Does being morally virtuous insure one a place in the history book? No, it certainly doesn’t. Lee Harvey Oswald, Robert Oppenheimer, Adolf Hitler and Jack the Ripper are spending their eternity in the same room with Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Jesus or Prophet Mohammad. For those who are dying to believe in a postmortem justice, such as heaven and hell, things are quite obvious: to the right go Gandhi, Jesus & co., and to the left go Adolf, Oswald and Jack.

Where do Michael Jackson and Karajan go? They won fair and square their right to immortality and their moral innocence wasn’t proven to have been defiled. Their admirers’ blind and unconditional love saved them a place in the Book of the Dead. Is the love of others the answer for our absolution? Wasn’t self redemption that did that?

No matter how dubious their personal lives were, in the end what stays with us, the ordinary populace, is their legacy, and the emotions they created.

For it is true, we will forget what they said and will forget what they did, but we will never forget how they made us feel: happy, angry, sad, scared, surprised, disgusted or just disappointed.

Résumé

A Curriculum Vitae deprecatingly represents a “course of life”, thinly spread on an A4 page, which emphasizes experiences we consider germane when we introduce ourselves to the world, vaguely summarized by previous jobs and education.

Some CVs nonchalantly require more details such as marital status, number of dependents (yes, children and parents are coldly and legally defined as “dependents”), number of citizenships or religious and sexual orientation. Some even push their inquisitiveness and ask for political appurtenance (how obnoxious!) or place of birth (fancy, that!). When did we start becoming statistics and stopped being individuals? Are our lives mere data under the excuse of research and ultimately social acceptance?

Our LIFE is a FILE. We choose what we think is pertinent and might be relevant, but we leave aside truly important moments that marked our lives, and that should actually be written in any “course of life” (like births and deaths). Our past will decide our future. No matter how dramatic it sounds, it is nevertheless true. We will never be what we can become, because we can never get rid of who we were.

There is no present. Just past and future. By the time we are using the present continuous “I am feeling” this has already become a continuous past of “I was feeling”.
Present is a utopia, past is memory, future is unknown.

What is irrational and painfully personal is that we never write in a CV what our genuine course of life is, as if our lives reduce exclusively to a few exams and a handful of jobs. Is that all we want to know? What about the happiest or saddest moments of our lives? Were not those a chief part of our course of life?

All of a sudden, what lingers is work. When was the turning point when our children stopped being more important than our production activity?

Why don’t we write in our résumés what we really consider important? Why my previous seven jobs and studies are more important than the moment I gave birth to my child? Why should I claim that the most important achievement in life was a job and not when I fell in love? Or when I sniffed my baby’s hair for the first time and she had the scent of vanilla, chamomile, warm milk and cookies? This is what we should write in our CVs.

If a CV represents relevant moments and gatherings of life experiences which say something about us, then it should tell all these things, even if chronologically reversed.

Moreover, we realize one’s importance in the collective conscience when their lives can be resumed with one word. Perhaps a lengthily CV should, in fact, raise a few personal questions about the necessity of writing down each activity we think is relevant to secure and back our authority and legitimacy on a matter. Isn’t a single worded CV more relevant than a 20 pages one? Shouldn’t we all aspire towards single worded CVs?

If you take a look at the CVs of the most important characters of the world - I mean really significant- not ephemerally focal-, they hardly put down a few words next to their names. Some only have one name. No, I do not have Madonna on mind, but Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven, Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, JFK, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and Einstein. How many single named people come to your mind when you think world’s cultural growth? Not many, true? How many pages do you think their CVs would have, one or 20?