Is Sandra Bullock your favorite actress? Maybe Penelope Cruz? Both are great, but perhaps your little heart is, like mine, inclined to less common places, to performers who may not make it to Hollywood, but whose performances excite us especially. The success of these actresses is undoubtedly due to a combination of talent and effort, but also to a certain touch of luck. This and the blows that life deals us have a lot of weight in our future, no matter how much American films insist on idealizing the self-made hero or heroine who emerges from the mud and ends up taking on the world.
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Not all that glitters is meritocracy
From a young age, we educate our children in this meritocracy. “Study more, work more, and this way you will succeed in life.” Ha. The reality is that there are many factors that contribute to personal and professional success, starting with the place of birth and the educational level of the parents. Not to mention gender, race or sexual orientation. Even in professions like mine, scientific research, where it might seem that intelligence and determination are the determining factors of success, there is a great effect of luck. Starting with the experiments themselves, which do not always work no matter how much effort one has invested. And for 'networking', the networks of mentors and collaborators that make it easier for these experiments to end up published in the most prestigious scientific journals. Let's not be fooled: meritocracy is a hoax of the system to squeeze us to the maximum until we break.
In the last decade, there has been a substantial increase in mental health problems, although this may in part be because they are now less stigmatized and more frequently reported. The most worrying thing is that these problems especially affect the youngest, to the point that suicide is the most prevalent cause of death in young people between 15 and 29 years old. In my professional environment, they greatly affect younger researchers, who have up to twice the risk of having mental health problems than other kids with the same educational level. They are the future and look how we treat them.
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Mental illnesses are not the fault of the sufferer
It is not easy to define what mental health is, but we are all clear about what it means not to have it: stress, anxiety, depression. Now we have normalized them, but for a long time they were stigmatized diseases, the 'fault' of the person who suffered them, who did not have the strength to face them. Now we know that they are no one's fault, just as having cancer is not. They are produced by imbalances in our body, and experimental animals have helped us a lot to understand what causes them and design drugs that cure them.
In laboratory mice, for example, the effect of new antidepressants is determined using the Porsolt test or learned helplessness, in which the mice are placed in a small pool from which they cannot leave. The time they spend swimming before giving up and floating around waiting to be rescued is a measure of the effectiveness of that antidepressant. At this point, you are probably wondering if animals get depressed and the answer is yes. We all know pets that become apathetic when their owner dies. And in the laboratory we can induce a mixture of stress, anxiety and depression if we immobilize rodents for a while.
When we do the latter, the alert system controlled by glucocorticoids (cortisol in humans) is activated in the animal, which circulate through the bloodstream to warn all its organs that it is in danger. They are the same ones that trigger us when we have an exam or a job interview. Released acutely, they increase our chances of success and survival, focusing our concentration and mobilizing energy reserves.
But there is a price to pay: if the alert system is chronically activated or deregulated, there are harmful consequences because glucocorticoids turn out to be inhibitors of the immune system that is responsible for defending us from external aggressions. This process, called immunosuppression, is responsible for people with poorer mental health having a higher risk or worse prognosis for other types of diseases, including cancer. The best advice for healthy aging is, without a doubt, avoiding stress.
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The flight of the starlings
In our society sick with meritocracy, having free time seems like a luxury we cannot afford. But it is precisely the opposite: we cannot afford not to have free time because that is when creativity emerges. The other day I was walking and stopped for a while to observe the murmurings of a large flock of starlings.
Just at that moment it occurred to me that the three-dimensional movement of those birds is very similar to a phenomenon that I study in my laboratory and that I have not known how to attack for some time. We work with the immune system cells that reside in the brain (microglia), and we do not fully understand how during embryonic development these cells invade brain tissue and colonize it. It is controlled by the same laws as the flight of starlings. We will study it.
This is not the first time something like this has happened to me: the time when I can think of the most and best experiments is during a warm shower. Creativity, necessary to find new solutions to old problems, needs space and time to develop. Perhaps your New Year's resolutions should include spending time doing nothing.
#myth #meritocracy #work #rest
