Social

Advertising makes the teenage years seem like the best years of life. However, adolescence is a time of great emotional turmoil for both children and their parents. It's a time when many important decisions are made, with life-changing consequences.

To err is human. “The only sure way to avoid making mistakes is to have no ideas”, Albert Einstein said.

Big chain stores know them and use them to make a profit. What is more, they are willing to pay a lot of money for studies on how to improve them. We're talking about the secrets of optimal product placement.

In 2016, I noticed advertising for a new quiz show called Hard Quiz coming to ABC TV in Australia.

What do a foul-mouthed, drug-abusing Canadian, a stately Frenchman from Bourg-en-Bresse and an American businesswoman whose prison nickname was “M Diddy”, all have in common?

We cannot sustain our motivation if we don't connect daily to its source and what generates it, or if we don't constantly strive to remind ourselves why we are moving in a certain direction and how to get there, willingly and unforced, exercising free will, despite the inevitable limitations.

These days we all need to hear good news—that life will soon return to normal and that we will be able to return to the troubles of yesterday, which now seem small to us. In the meantime, our lifestyle has seen changes that we could not have imagined just a few weeks ago.

Every day is an opportunity to ask ourselves how it is that human life has such little value in the eyes of some of our contemporaries—those contemporaries living in freedom and democracy (on paper, at least), who are educated and socialised within the same civilization as we are, often even in the same community, or under similar civil laws and generally having the...

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.

The appeal to ignorance (argumentum ad ignorantiam) is an error in thinking which argues that a conclusion is true because there is no evidence against it, or that a conclusion is false because there is no evidence in its favour.

The Japanese Okinawans have a peculiar way of eating that supposedly extends their lifespan. What can we learn from them?

This imaginary interview is intended to convey that life and its meaning is subject to a never-ending process of change and that we as humans have a sacred duty to decipher this dynamic puzzle, and to play our roles with all the joy and seriousness we can muster.

“...what matters is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment...” (Viktor E. Frankl)

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.

A lack of self confidence is like a stain that doesn't go away by itself. It is like oil dripping out of a machine, its drops collecting in the puddle of an inferiority complex. Such a problem is difficult to mitigate, even with motivational speeches or hopeful injections of fragile optimism.