A Spiritual View

"Ta-da! We've also quit tobacco and successfully stopped smoking with the help of TABAC!" Photo: Tatiana Vychegzhanina, Ukraine, on Colourbox. For hundreds of years – almost back to the discovery of America – tobacco has been used as a soothing remedy for nervousness, anxiety, and inner turmoil, allowing those afflicted to experience a moment of 15 minutes of tranquility – before they need to take another cigarette and repeat the treatment. For centuries, the tobacco industry has been the supplier of this short-term soothing product for this ailment. But alas, the remedy has never had a permanent effect. The patient has had to continuously consume this medicine to feel well once they started – it is a remedy that creates addiction without solving the real problem, as the patient have to continue taking this remedy hour after hour, day after day, year after year. Researchers within the tobacco industry have been aware of this for decades. In the long run, it becomes expens...

Child Without Diagnosis, CWD . We live in a time when many – especially children – are given diagnoses. Previously, we didn't think of them as sick. Doctors are doing that now, and they are trying to develop and give them medicine, some kind of alternative therapy, or offer them lifestyle changes that enable them to do better. Some people are downright afraid that we are moving towards a future where everyone will have a diagnosis. Some may even be at risk of having the strange, rare and indeterminate diagnosis of CWD ( C hild W ithout D iagnosis ) or MDS ( M issing D iagnosis S yndrome ) attached to them with the uncertainty this may entail . Doctors and therapists will then be left at a loss and powerless, without options or offers for medical treatment for these unusual children. There is a great risk that health professionals and caregivers will have to give up on them, leaving them to their own devices without professional supervision or provision of any kind of treatment. ...

Photo: Colourbox. Why do we work at all? Once I was at a job interview at the furniture sale Ikea. On that occasion, a young woman in a blue T-shirt interviewed me. "Why do you want to work at Ikea?"  she asked. "I've found that Ikea pays its employees more than other chain stores,"  I replied. She then said that  “Salary is a matter of course. What can you offer us that will make us an even better company?” I was not prepared for that question. Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's a question that is only asked in societies where basic needs are being met. We have, so to speak, already moved up from a state where life is about mere personal or family survival, as it is known from Maslow's pyramid of needs. It gives reason to also consider how money is made in business. In certain parts of the business world, the black numbers on the bottom line are given an almost absolute importance.  The greater profit, the better – and that even when a person watchin...