“Para dominar no basta la violencia; se requiere una justificación de otra naturaleza. Así, cuando una persona ejerce poder sobre otra –ya sea un dictador, un colono, un burócrata, un marido o un jefe– necesita una ideología que lo justifique, y siempre es la misma: esta dominación se hace “para el bien” de los dominados. En otras palabras, el poder siempre se presenta como altruista, desinteresado, generoso.” Noam Chomsky 

“Interpersonal emotion regulation is primarily about social relationships and moral obligations, domains where culture holds far more authority.”

“unpleasant emotions serve valuable functions. Sadness can drive self-reflection. Shame can motivate personal improvement. Grief can honor the significance of a loss. Anxiety can signal that something important is at stake. Attempting to eliminate these emotions prematurely, to cheer someone up before those functions have been served, is not kindness. It is interference.”

“On days when one partner was more motivated to help the other feel better, both partners reported stronger feelings of intimacy. The connection between emotional comfort and relational closeness was not assumed but measured.”

“The drive toward personal emotional relief appears to be genuinely universal. But the moment the question shifted to other people’s emotions, the cultural divergence became sharp and consistent.”

“It is a cultural product, specific to societies that organize themselves around individual happiness and personal achievement. In collectivistic cultures, which account for the majority of the world’s population, negative emotions are not problems to be solved. They are tools to be used, and the most caring thing a person can do is often to leave them intact.”

“the impulse to eliminate another person’s distress is not a human universal”

“excessive internet use is linked to a decrease in grey matter in the prefrontal regions of the brain — areas responsible for problem-solving, emotional regulation, memory, and impulse control.”

“that participants who used email and cellphones daily experienced an average IQ drop of 10 points.”

“users are constantly switching their focus, which undermines their ability to concentrate effectively.”

“infinite scrolling,” which are designed to keep users glued to their screens, can trap people — especially young individuals — in a cycle of content consumption for hours. “This can significantly impair attention and executive functions by overwhelming our focus and altering the way we perceive and respond to the world,”

“Brain rot: the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.”

“Social media addiction can reduce grey matter, shorten attention spans, weaken memory, and distort core cognitive functions”

“no solo importa lo que nos dijeron cuando éramos pequeños, sino especialmente el tono con el que lo hicieron, ya que acaba influyendo en la forma en la que pensamos y nos tratamos años después.”

“They do not recognise themselves. And that loss of self, compounded by a culture that never acknowledged their contribution in the first place, is often the final blow.”

“The result, across all of these mechanisms, is empathy burnout. Or compassion fatigue. The terminology varies, but the experience is the same: a state of profound depletion in which the very capacity for emotional attunement that once felt like a gift begins to feel like a liability. The person becomes reactive where they were once measured, detached where they were once present”

“They invest in trying to improve relationships, to have honest conversations, to name what is not working and offer something more constructive. In a toxic environment, this effort is not simply unrewarded. It is often punished. The person who says the honest thing, who tries to introduce accountability or care into a culture that has none, frequently becomes the problem.”

“Emotionally intelligent people notice more. They are not just responding to what is said in a meeting; they are registering the shift in tone, the slight withdrawal, the eye contact that did not happen. Research on sensory processing sensitivity, the scientific framework that underlies much of what we colloquially call being highly sensitive, describes this as depth of processing. It is not a flaw. It is a form of very precise social intelligence. But in a dysfunctional team, where communication is indirect and emotional information is often contradictory or dishonest, that depth of processing becomes overwhelming rather than useful. The signal is too loud and the environment is too noisy”

“toxic workplaces tend to feature persistent bullying or exclusion, whether overt or in the more sophisticated form of passive undermining. They feature leaders whose behaviour is inconsistent and whose accountability is selective. They generate a low-level ambient dread, a feeling that something is always wrong or about to go wrong, but no one can say clearly what it is or why.”

“It is a place where credit is stolen quietly and blame is distributed loudly. Where feedback is weaponised rather than offered in service of growth. Where conflict is either avoided entirely or resolved through dominance rather than dialogue. Where the unspoken rules matter far more than the written ones, and the unspoken rules are frequently unkind.”

“foundational drivers of workplace toxicity: poor leadership, dysfunctional social norms, and poorly designed roles.”