If everyone in the world was to awaken to their life purpose and pursue it, would we have anyone left to perform tasks such as child care, lawn mowing, being a cashier, etc.?

Earlier today, Steve Pavlina wrote a blog entry on whether we would all starve if everyone were to awaken to their life purpose. He concludes that should mass awareness happen, some combination of automation of menial tasks, the ditching of unnecessary tasks, and self-production (such as growing vegetables in your own garden) would avert any serious consequences and give more people more time and energy to become aware.

A few weeks ago, I was engaged in a lively debate with a friend over whether or not it was possible for everyone in the world to be like Steve Pavlina. Clearly, not everyone can be a blogger, writer or philosopher, pondering full-time about the ways in which we can improve our lives. Someone needs to be out there planting the wheat, shovelling the snow, and fixing the power lines. Someone… or something?

Few people would choose to do menial labour given the choice. But there are plenty of janitors, fast-food workers, maids, cashiers, etc. in the world, and the work they perform is valuable to our society as we know it. It may not be the most valuable work these people could be performing, however.

It is probably safe to say that it is nobody’s life purpose to clean someone else’s living room as an occupation. And even if it was someone’s life purpose, there aren’t enough of those people to perform all the cleaning services we need in this world. It IS someone’s life purpose, however, to invent new machines and technologies that CAN clean someone’s living room. In the last few years, we’ve seen things like automatic lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners on our local Costco store shelves. They may not yet perform the job as well as a human, but over time, they will improve, and if you don’t feel mowing your own lawn is worth your time and effort, such an investment may be worthwhile.

Cleaning a house, mowing a lawn, reparing a power line are all things that, given present technology, require a human being to perform, or at least to be present. It is not enough to program a machine on how to dust a fireplate mantel. Whatever is doing the job needs to use discretion. You can dust around some objects. Other items are more fragile, and you need to pick them up, and dust under them. You also need to dust with a certain technique so as to minimise the amount of dust going into the air, or falling to the floor. At present, a machine simply cannot handle all these technicalities. It doesn’t have that kind of discretion that only a human possesses. But given time, humans will start building machines capable of dusting, vacuuming and lawnmowing as well as humans can, if not better.

You might find it difficult to accept that machines can come anywhere close to possessing human-like intelligence. Maybe you find it scary, but more importantly, doesn’t seem feasible. Well, think about word processors. They’re always had spell-checkers built in, but they weren’t a fool-proof way to make sure your documents were up to scartch. For example, phrases like “I went threw it yesterday” would totally slip under the spell-checker’s radar. Later, grammar checkers appeared on the scene. Then, spell-checkers and grammar checkers became automatic, checking your spelling and grammar on the fly, as you typed (you used to have to finish your document, then manually start the spell checker, and go through every spelling mistake one-by-one). With each version of word processor, these spell and grammar checkers got better, so that now, they catch nearly all the mistakes. They are by no means perfect yet, but just imagine how much farther this technology might go in another 10 years.

Language translation technology is another example of how machines can embody certain aspects of human intelligence. Babelfish can translate most webpages into a whole assortment of languages. The translation isn’t close to being perfect, but it’s good enough that you can get the gist of what a website is about, even though it was written in Russian. Any task that a human can perform can generally be broken down into a system of rules and competencies. To clean a house, you need to know when you should vacuum, or dust, mop or wipe, what cleaning products to use, and what technique to use on different surfaces. You also need to know when to stop - when it’s clean enough. While it appears complicated, given enough time and effort, we can build machines that can embody many, if not most or all of the aspects of human judgement, technique, and competency required to clean a house. It’s just a matter of time (and how much people hate cleaning their houses) before you don’t even have to think about maintaining your house, because a machine gets to it well before it even enters your thoughts.
In fact, nearly every one of our menial tasks can likely one day be automated to such an extent. Our inventions are becoming increasingly intelligent, and their capabilities are ever expanding. There are plenty of people out there with the talent needed to invent and create these machines. Last night, I was at a pizza party where one of the people in attendance was a full-time lawn care professional in the summer, but he invents machines in the winter. He showed me numerous pictures of a small Caterpillar-like crane he invented. It is about the size of a compact car, with a large lever-like arm that can lift loads of up to 2000 pounds, and yet is just the right size that it fits on the back of a pick-up truck. He built it with parts he amassed himself. He also runs a business digging the trenches in which coffins are laid to rest. He invented a machine that does the digging, and yet can manoever gracefully in and around the tombstones at a graveyard, and inflicts minimal damage on the grass.

We all know someone who loves to work with their hands and build machines. A lot of these people are currently tied up doing work that is significantly less valuable than their greatest talent - envisioning and building the machines that, in the future, can automate nearly all the menial tasks we now perform, from cooking, to doing the laundry, to cleaning out the eavestroughs after every winter. So while it is nobody’s life purpose to perform menial labour, it IS someone’s life purpose to invent a machine to automate that menial labour. Our fully automated world might not come into being in the next 10 years, but it’s a definite possibility if more of us woke up to our true life purpose.

Today, while shopping at my local convenience store, I was reminded of how ordinary people like myself can change for the better when we want to. This afternoon, I was making meatballs at home, when I suddenly realized I had forgotten to get tomato soup from the grocery store. Tomato soup gives the meatballs a lot of flavor and keeps them from drying out during baking.

I donned my jacket, and walked to the convenience store, grabbed a couple of cans of tomato soup, and placed them on the checkout counter. The cashier and co-owner, a pleasant Korean woman who looked like she was in her forties, entered the prices into the register (99 cents each, for a total of $1.98), and then hit the “TAX” button. Since the sales tax where I live is 14% (6% federal tax, 8% provincial tax), my two cans of soup now cost $2.26, which is 28 cents more than I had planned

Now, being a student of economics, and having read the Canadian and Ontario sales tax codes (hey, I find it interesting), I know that nearly all grocery items, except sweets, chips and pop, are tax exempt. “Is there… tax on tomato soup?” I asked the cashier, my eyebrow raised in a high arch. She peered down at the cans and mumbled “Yes… groceries have tax, except milk and eggs”.

If this was a year ago, I probably would have argued with her on the spot, and if she didn’t relent, I maybe would have called the sales tax offices to report her and get my money back (I needed the soup badly enough to buy them anyways). But sometimes you have to consider what’s at stake, which in this case, is 28 cents. Sure, it’s not right of the cashier to charge tax on something that isn’t taxable, but there are only two reasons I can think of for her doing so:

• She honestly doesn’t know all the tax rules, which are overly complicated anyways. If she’s ever been audited, she knows how stingy the tax people are, so better to overcharge customers slightly than to be dinged for extra taxes by the auditors because she wasn’t careful.

• She needs the money, and I didn’t look like I’d miss 28 cents.

I can’t really blame her for either reason. In reality, I really wouldn’t miss 28 cents. I don’t shop at that convenience store everyday, and even if she ripped me off 28 cents every week, that would hardly add up to $5 by the end of the school year. I’ve definitely blown $5 on things far less worthy than helping out a struggling convenience store.

Earlier this week, I was handed back an assignment on which I should have received a mark 6% higher than I had, because the grader misread what I wrote - which I know for certain was correct, because the professor went over the assignment in class. But before I entertained any thought of appealing it, I reminded myself that this assignment was worth 2.5% of my total term mark, and 6% was a small fraction of a small fraction of my year end average. Besides, you don’t win or lose life based on miniscule margins (and when you do, it’s not a big victory). But I would regret it if at the end of my life, I spent far too much time chasing unimportant causes (like getting back my 28 cents in taxes I shouldn’t have paid), and too little time on what really mattered - my friends, a fulfilling relationship, and work that excited me. The true cost of anything is how much life you give up while pursuing it.

College student or not, food is a significant expense, especially if you like to keep yourself well fed all throughout the day (as a single guy with a whole fridge to myself, I have plenty of supplies…)

My parents, being Chinese, have always instructed me never to save money on food. That doesn’t mean they want to see me buying caviar every week, but they do want me to be well fed and eating foods that I like. Depending on your circumstances, you may or may not need to keep your grocery bills down, but there’s a good reason to trim your grocery costs regardless of your financial situation - a lot of food that you buy probably sits languishing in the back of your fridge, the bottom of the crisper, or in an obscure corner of a cupboard. Eventually, it might go to the food bank if it’s non-perishable, but a lot of it is simply wasted.

Avoiding waste is a perfectly good reason to try to save some money on your groceries - and so is saving money because you’re simply cash-strapped. Let’s examine how you might go about saving money on food without starving or eating clearance-bin potatoes every night of the week.

First, make sure you’re shopping in the right place for your situation. If you’re buying a lot of food from variety/convenience stores, consider getting the same foods from grocery stores instead whenever possible. I once had a roommate who was worrying everyday about his money situation, yet he made frequent trips to the corner variety store for chips, pop and frozen convenience foods, all of which were available at the grocery store for 30% cheaper.

So imagine you’re shopping at your local grocery store, supermarket, or farmer’s market. You’re finished, and about to go checkout. Your bill might be, say $80 if you checked out. Now, try this: make one quick trip around the store, and lop $5 off your bill without making yourself feel shortchanged.

That might involve putting some things back on the shelf that you wouldn’t miss a whole lot, like a six-pack of pop, the gum or magazine you grabbed near the checkout, or the English muffins you know you won’t eat. But sometimes all you need to do is swap a name-brand jar of pickles for a store brand, or exchange the 3-ply box of tissues for a 2-ply box (do you really need 3 plies of tissue?)

The items that you put back tend to be ones that you only marginally want anyways. It may be nice to have them, but you may not even notice they’re missing. Likewise, if you exchange a name brand item or a generic one, you’re probably indifferent to any variations in quality between the items, if there is one at all.

It helps, when you’re buying groceries, to use the Equimarginal Rule, which comes from Economics. All the Equimarginal Rule says is this: Make sure that the benefit you get from the last dollar you spend on each item is equal. WHAT THE DICKENS DOES THAT MEAN!?

Kindly permit me to foray into Economic Theory for a moment. There is no math, and no graphs are involved. Take a deep breath, and let me explain. Economic Theory suggests that the typical, rational person, let’s call him Jim Bob, spends his money this way: he will spend his income such that he is as well off as possible. Obvious, right? What it also implies, however, is that the last dollar he spends on one item brings him the same amount of well-being as the last dollar he spends on any other item. In other words, if Jim Bob spends $100 on chocolate, and $10 on gum, he enjoys the last dollar’s worth of chocolate exactly as much as he enjoys the last dollar’s worth of gum. Why does it have to be this way? Because if Jim Bob enjoyed the last dollar’s worth of gum more than the last dollar’s worth of chocolate, he should buy more gum and less chocolate, until he enjoys equally the last dollar spent on either one. You might now know why economists call it the “Equimarginal” rule. That’s because at the margin, that is, at the very last dollar you spend on a product, the benefit you get from the last dollar spent on any product should be equal.

Jim Bob should be examining every item that he buys using the same criteria. If the last dollar he spent on concerts didn’t make him as happy as the last dollar he spent on beer, he should buy more beer, and attend less concerts, until he is just as happy spending his last dollar of income on either item. At the point where he has spent all of his income, and enjoys equally the last dollar spent on every item he’s bought, he is as well off as possible, and can’t possibly do any better, unless he increases his income, there are changes in the prices of the products he buys, or he pulls off a jewellery store heist. That’s it for Economic Theory - see, that wasn’t so painful, was it?

Now consider the following example: If you spend $8 on a package of 3-ply tissues, but you could get a 2-ply package for just $6, and you’re indifferent between 2 or 3-ply tissues, then the last dollar (in fact, the last 2 dollars) that you spent on 3-ply tissues didn’t bring you much benefit at all. On the other hand, $2 might buy a pound or two of your favourite fruit. In that case, the last dollar spent on fruit brought you lots of benefit.

Using this principle, you can evaluate your purchases from the point of view of how much benefit the last you spend on each grocery item brings you. If you wouldn’t miss a $1 package of gum, or a $3 six-pack of pop, you’re really not getting all that much benefit from them,