15 October 2009
What is the difference between living and existing? The former involves going through life with open eyes.Do you go through life blindly? As a mere face in the crowd? As a dead fish floating down the river? No! We disagree fiercely. We are actively in control of our lives, making autonomous decisions at every instant to chart the course of our destiny.
But are these decisions sound? Are they made carelessly or after much contemplation? It is paramount to stay myself for a moment before rushing into a decision concerning several years - if not the rest - of your life. Without this period of reflection, how would I know if I am being true to my self while making the choice? The undeniable fact is that I can easily be mistaken due to my ignorance, my fantasies or my guilt.
If you want to live, never choose out of ignorance, fantasies or guilt.
When we were young, we naively decided that we would act on our parents' advice when in doubt, because we did not know better. Which school to go to, what clothes to wear, what food to eat, what friends to keep. In due time, we may realise that either this was what we always wanted, or that we found ourselves at odds with the now imposed lifestyle dictated to us.
If I wanted to be rich, famous, good looking and eloquent, then I started a successful business, went for a plastic surgery and completed a public speaking course. What if, at the end of the day, I still find my life empty and hollow? Are these fantasies of mine what I really want out of life, or are they just delusions of what I think I want?
How about times when, out of guilt, you decided to succumb to the pressure and allowed others to manipulate you? Sure, sometimes you feel that their demands are reasonable and so you willingly comply. That is not acting out of guilt. Acting from guilt is when you transgress against your own nature in order to appease someone else. When all is said and done, what is left is only a bitter taste in your mouth.
By recognising these trappings, we can make precautions to avoid them. Never rush into decisions that matter. I have to take time to understand my nature and self. I have to consciously choose a path that agrees with me, and my life would be richer and deeper. I would live, not exist.
04 October 2009
The central problem of economics is scarcity. Scarcity arises from two fundamental assumptions. First, the resources are limited. Second, that man has unlimited wants. It is easy to understand the former premise, that resources are limited. We have have finite amounts of people, of natural resources on Earth, of time. Even the sun will deplete its fuel for nuclear fusion in the distant future. As for the latter, is that assumption really valid?The study of economics by so many educated in the world today has led us to believe that man is greedy. Man does not stop at one, or two, or three. Furthermore, the capitalist system promotes and encourages this sort of behavior. Only with great ambition can one get to the top of the financial ladder. Long before we come out of our adolescence, we already hold the notion that it is only "natural" to have infinite wants.
Is it abnormal for one to choose the simple over the extravagant? Is the lack of ambition just plain laziness or an individual's refusal to conform to the greedy ways of society? Or is it a little of both?
While one can always indicate and point out the presence of charity and philanthropy, these ideas are not widespread. The philosophy that reigns supreme in the economy though is profit, profit and profit. Is the cost of advertising worth the earnings from the extra customers? Will the returns from this investment be worth the risk? How much dividends am I paid this quarter? Will decreasing the price increase my revenue supposing the price elasticity of the good is very elastic? Should I work longer for the extra overtime pay? People want to maximize their earnings. They want to increase their surplus. Most people find nothing wrong with this, since it is the "rational" thing to do.
Consider this.
Though there is sufficient food for everyone, 500 million people are still suffering from hunger and disease and even die because they are too poor to buy the food that is already there.... The obese are seeking new cures and the malnourished are offered no remedies. Many pets are pampered while hungry children are forgotten. Is this not a strange phenomenon that historians and economists of future times will undoubtedly consider mysterious and inexplicable?
- Edouard Saouma, 2nd World Food Day, 1982
I do not expect you to believe the statistics above, after all, this statement was made more than twenty years ago. But the situation we all know fairly well enough to be true. Our present theory of economics will never allow us to solve these problems. The present theory wills us to believe that scarcity unavoidable and inevitable.
I want to believe otherwise.
01 October 2009
Today is Childrens' Day celebration. In my school, we do not celebrate this day anymore. I reason that this is due to us students growing older into young adults, and not being considered children anymore.When does a child become a teenager, or even an adult?
A 5 year old is a child. A 15 year old is a teenager. A 25 year old is an adult. When do these changes happen? Does a child become a teenager at 13 years old? Does he change into a teenager the moment the clock points to midnight on his birthday? When does one become an adult? At the exact time and date he was born, 21 years down the road?
If you pour a bottle of table salt onto the floor, we say that there is a pile of salt on the floor. What if I take away one grain of salt? Is there a pile of salt on the table? If I take away another grain is the pile of salt still remaining? Suppose I continue to remove the salt grain by grain until there is only one grain left. Do I call that a pile of salt on the floor? At what point did the pile become a sprinkle?
It is impossible to choose any single point to distinguish between a pile and sprinkle. Any point chosen would be purely arbitrary and not absolute. Similarly, there is no clear line between child, teenager or adult. The transition between these categories is fuzzy and continuous. It is not a discrete change from one form to another. As we grow older, we become less and less like a child and more and more like an adult in a gradual process.
That being said, I see yearly birthdays as an arbitrary choice. One could celebrate their birth on any other day and any other time. Why celebrate our birth yearly? Why not monthly or biennially? Why at midnight and not at the exact time we were born?
Like a pile of salt, and like our status as children or adults, many other things cannot be clearly distinguished and are merely arbitrary decisions made by other people. For example, the metre was historically defined by the French Academy of Sciences as the length between two marks on a platinum-iridium bar, which was designed to represent one ten-millionth of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole through Paris. A second is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. How about the number of hours in a day? Why are there 24 hours? Why not 10? Why not 20? All these distinctions are results of other peoples' judgments.
Most of us live in this world abiding by standards and rules other people have set and defined for us without us even realising it.