There are many things that people say we should do if we want to be a person who others like to be around. Be kind, generous, loving, caring, compassionate, and in general just prick yourself up and pretend you’re happy, and soon you will be.

Doing so, however, can be a little harder than it sounds. First of all, if you’re not used to being a tender, loving person, it’s not going to come very easily, at least not in my experience. Second, being a generous person means more than simply dropping a dollar into a panhandler’s hat, holding doors for people, or letting a pedestrian cross when you’re driving down the street, although it certainly may involve doing those things.

This is because being kind to others must be accompanied by more than just good deeds. I’ve read from numerous self-help sources that you just have to be generous, and others will return your favors. But I’m finding that’s not always the case. Like a little kid dropping a quarter into a machine hoping to get a candy, I’m finding that the candy gets stuck somewhere and never makes it out of the machine. What is it that I’m missing?

Popular self-help books these days talk about intention-manifestation, and the Law of Attraction. They say that you create every aspect of your life experience with your thoughts, beliefs and expectations. If you expect others to be rude to you, they will be. If you expect the service to suck, it will. And bad things happen to you because on some level, you attracted them with your thoughts.

I’ve seen a lot of evidence from my own life, and from following the lives of people I know, that the Law of Attraction actually works. Like a young child experimenting with the Law of Gravity or the Law of Hot-stoves-will-burn-you, I haven’t played around with this law enough that I no longer question it. But I’m going to see if, in my quest to be a happier person, it might apply.

So, if I had full faith in the Law of Attraction, I would say that I’m not held in high esteem by others because deep down I’m afraid of them. I’m afraid that others won’t like me. I’m afraid that they won’t treat me well, that they may even try to harm me. And while I may perform generous acts, and things that on the surface appear to be considerate, I’m not doing them because I’m a genuinely kind, caring and loving person, but because I’m trying to manipulate others into admiring me and treating me with respect.

Being afraid of others has a number of implications. First, you can’t have a healthy relationship with something you’re afraid of. Any relationship that I have with anyone else is going to be tainted by fear - of ultimate abandonment and rejection. Second, you can’t respect other people if you’re afraid of them, because you don’t trust their intentions and expect them to eventually do something that harms you. Third, a fear of people can make virtually any kind of accomplishment or activity virtually pointless and it can really sap your zest for life. If people admire me, I see it as a threat and think it’s for the wrong reasons - so I fear success. At the same time, I fear failure, because nothing is worse than the thought of drawing the ire of people.

And that, surprisingly, sums up much of my life experience. I have been very much afraid and mistrustful of people, and that has kept me from becoming close to people. I’m not sure I have truly respected many people in my life, nor have I generally felt much of a zest for it. But on the bright side, I’m starting to see evidence that my fear is unfounded.

I’m beginning to realize that in most respects, other people are just like me. We think similar kinds of thoughts, and we all want the same things - to be held in esteem by others, and to generally be happy. Nobody really wants to be dysfunctional, rude, hurtful and unhappy. Everyone wants to be happy and everyone is capable of happiness, and happiness is somewhere inside everyone.

So from this point forth, I’m going to think differently. I’m not going to think that others are out to get me, or that their actions are harmful to me unless I take measures to protect myself from them. That doesn’t mean I’m going make myself a target for anyone wishing to vent their frustration, but it does mean I’m now thinking that the people in my life are polite, caring and generous. And my guess is that generosity is what I’m going to see, and the more generosity I see, the easier it will be for me to be generous.

Dear Friends,

I seem to be suffering from an ailment. A terrible ailment. Of the most puzzling variety. I would like to call it a “Time-Inconsistency Problem” (the term actually is sometimes used by economists) but such a name wouldn’t capture just how frustrating it is. Instead, I think I’ll go with the label “Alex-always-gets-himself-into-things-that-look-good-at-the-time-but-later-he-realises-he-didn’t-really-want-to-in-the-first-place-and-is-only-fooling-himself-by-thinking-he-does-but-he-doesn’t-know-how-to-get-out-of-them-because-it-would-be-messy”.

A recent example would be graduate school. It looks, on one hand, like I’m really into economics and want to go on in it and make a career in it. Back in the fall I applied to the best places in the country for economics grad school - Western, Toronto, UBC and Calgary (the last one I applied to mainly because it’s home). And a few months later, voila, I get into all of them, and with the exception of Toronto, all gave me funding to boot. A few days after having all these offers sitting on my desk, I get a big government envelope in the mail telling me I’ve got a $17,500 scholarship to do a Master’s program in economics next year.

So, feeling excited, I leap ahead and pick the school with the toughest program and best funding offer - Western - with, on the one hand, a great reputation for having good young profs, great graduate placement record with government and top American schools, and did I mention a total funding package (including the government grant) of over >$30K for what is basically a 10 month program? Well, this is just great, I’m doing something I love and here’s enough money to live comfortably while I’m at it. I’ve been getting around by bus for the last 4 years, so wouldn’t this be a great chance to get a car, a new desk and chair, and… isn’t this going to be wonderful!? I’m being paid to study!

Well, it was a great feeling for a few days until it gradually dawned on me that while I could accept studying for another year, I by no means “loved” it, and had no real intention to launch into an academic career unless I had no other options. Economics is interesting, logical, mathematical, but also very tedious, detailed and mind-numbing. I’m finding it increasingly difficult to pay attention in class, and my interest (and amount of effort I’m willing to exert to study) in the subject has been waning since the end of last school year. My “success” in getting into grad school and getting funding is in large part based on past performance, and not something that I may still be willing to keep up indefintely.

So where does that leave me? If I’m not sure I’m going to be happy going to graduate school, should I just fold my hand right now, throw my cards into the middle of the table and say “I’m out”, or do I continue on into something I probably won’t find enjoyable at all? If I jump ship now, my future becomes a lot less certain, whereas there’s some degree of security if I stay on board, even if the swaying of the ship is making me a little queasy.

I suspect I find myself in dilemmas like these because I’m not sure what I really want in the first place. Plus, (being honest) I tend to be very good at a lot of things, so many things I pick up, whether that be Music, or Science or Economics, I could potentially carry it forward into a successful career. The question generally isn’t IF I could be successful doing it, but would I be happy, and am I willing to exert the effort and make the sacrifices to do it?

A lot of times I feel like I’m leading people on. I act like I’m really interested in something when deep down I’d like to be anywhere else but there. Maybe it’s an addiction to needing someone else’s approval, not wanting to make them unhappy or disappointing them. But along the way, I just haven’t been honest enough, almost been afraid, to find out what I actually want. I don’t even know what I want right now… other than to avoid another dilemma like the one now sitting on my lap.

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.

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, and it makes sense to expel them from your cart. That magazine on the rack beside the cashier might look interesting while you’re waiting in line, but if you’re going to throw it onto the backseat of your car and forget about it, don’t bother buying it. If the quality difference between name brand and generic label laundry detergent isn’t significant from your point of view, don’t spend the extra money on the name brand, and buy something else that you’d enjoy with the money you save.

Even with foods that you really enjoy, there are limits you should observe. For instance, peaches are my favourite fruit. But that doesn’t mean I want to eat 10 of them in the next week. I might enjoy 3 peaches this week, but when it came time to eat the 4th before it goes rotten, I might feel like I’m forcing myself to eat it. In that case, I shouldn’t buy any more than 3 peaches, because the 4th peach brings no benefit to me (in fact, it makes me worse off).

By making sure that you get the most of the last dollar you spend on any grocery item, you’ll spend less on your groceries, and waste less food. It all comes down to doing a bit of thinking before putting placing things in your cart. Considering the environmental costs of producing and shipping food to every grocery store, and the millions of underfed people on other continents, it only makes sense to buy only what you can reasonably eat and enjoy in a week. At the very least, you’ll save money for clubbing