Expat In Romania

It's incredibly easy to get sidetracked when you're trying to analyze the psyche, especially when you're talking about group psychology -in itself a loaded discussion where the lines between fact, generalization, and stereotype are as blurry as they get. Yet, this is what I have to work with, because with each page of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning I was able to find parallels between his arguments and the mentality pervasive in the life of Romanians. His concept, logotherapy , is aimed at individuals not at groups, and yet, much of its tenets are based on his observations of prisoner mentality in Nazi concentration camps, where he himself was imprisoned during the Second World War. Is it really fair to compare Romania and Romanians to Nazi death camps and their inmates? It depends if we're talking pre or post 1989. Even so I know it's dramatic, but without belittling what a concentration camp was, fifty years of imprisonment in one's own co...

There's this article I read a few days ago, and I just can't seem to shake it off. It weighs heavily on my mind because it's true and affects a large part of my life -work. Then I read this other article and thought, maybe all those bad things from the first article are actually good things in the long run . In truth, both of them make very valid points. In the first, the author dissects the ways in which Europe is bad for (new) business with almost surgical precision. I recommend it, it's a fine piece of analysis that also goes a long way towards explaining the mess in which Europe now finds herself. In the second article, we find a review about two books that basically say, 'Capitalism is bad, mmkay.' Well, not exactly, but it does discuss the negative impact on society by some of the by-products of capitalism, namely 'a love of money, markets and material things.'  If I may simplify the situation though, I'd put it like this: A love of mon...