Social

Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. – Rainer Maria Rilke

Most of us have been urged since we were little to not give up, to carry on, and to “go our own way”. The idea that giving up is a negative choice, a synonym for failure, or a sign of cowardice or inability, is deeply embedded in our minds.

I remember a question I was asked a long time ago that puzzled me more than other really difficult ones. I had to describe a happy day and, rummaging through my bag of happy, interesting or downright glorious days, it wasn't very clear to me what criteria I should use to choose one.

An experimenter is like a hunter who, instead of waiting quietly for game, tries to make it rise, by beating up the locality where he assumes it is. – Francis Bacon, 17th-century English philosopher

I spoke very little in my early years and my mother says that my silence scared her. She never knew what was going through my mind. She was afraid I was hiding something.

When confronted with someone else’s strong emotions—intense joy or heartbreaking pain—we often do not know how to react. In the case of joy, the other person usually doesn't mind, because his feelings console him. But in the case of pain, things are completely different. Misunderstood suffering can make the sufferer isolate himself from the very people who could help him. So, how can...

In front of the camera, the woman smiles calmly. The dimple on her right cheek, among the wrinkles, shows that Annie has repeated this smile many times in her 81 years of life. Today, however, only her lips are smiling. A strange tension weighs on her eyebrows. Today is the day Annie has decided to die.

The love of money may be the root of all evil, but the need for money cannot be subjected to a harsh moral judgment.

While most of us have been staying inside for several weeks, many leave the safety of their homes every day to help us live our lives as normally as possible.

The American Economic Review recently published the results of the largest randomized study ever conducted to measure the impact on the quality of life that deactivation ones Facebook account might have.

Over the last decade and a half, various legal disputes have brought to the attention of the public the issue of the social responsibility of Big Tech companies to control the flow of information on their channels. But in mid-January 2021, people of all ideological colours had indisputable proof that the decisions of technology giants have ramifications that go far beyond the commercial...

The possibility of completely rewriting the rules by which we organise our lives has always captured people's imagination. However, such a reorganisation has materialised, at best, in the pages of a philosophical book and has remained, for the most part, a utopia. But there are exceptions, of course.

In a society that is more concerned with form than substance, character ranks second. It is the power of the image that dictates things.

"Did you hear what he did?" "Guess what we found out about our new colleague!" In spite of their apparent enthusiasm, gossips—people who laugh loudly and try to capture the attention of others through the tantalising information they have to share—are often not as happy as they seem.

Just two and a half decades ago, depression and other mental health disorders were virtually unknown among children and were often ignored.