To establish that point, here’s a list of influential entities present in everyone’s life that in some way or another ‘misinform’ you on a consistent basis.

Parents: Since the day you’re born your parents will tell you things that are simply not true (eg: don’t make funny faces, or you will be stuck with it!). Of course a lot of it is good natured, but that doesn’t take away the reality that our earliest learning experiences have many mistakes which we carry for a long time, sometimes forever.

Teachers: Surely you would think that teachers will always speak the truth, it’s their job after all. But that’s simply not true as we know of the existence of misleading teachers that try to influence students based on their own personal thoughts, school types (eg: religious) that only teach a certain brand of ‘truth’ , teachers in some nations that conveniently omit some key aspects in favor of their country, and lazy teachers that just teach you the minimum to make you pass exams and fail to instill a logical way of thinking that can help you in cases outside the classroom.

Friends/Partner: If your friends revealed their true thoughts on Twitter, and shared their real lives on Facebook, you might no longer be able to recognize them. A lot of conversations you might have with friends or your partner will feel genuine and consist of honest thoughts and feelings but that changes completely when something important is being discussed. If the topic becomes a sensitive issue (ie: something you care about) then truth flies out the window in favor of ‘white lies’. (Am I fat? Is my boyfriend nice? What do you think of my nose? Do you like this present I bought you? Etc..) They say that ‘truth hurts’, so don’t expect true enlightenment from your average friend who doesn’t want to hurt you.

Commercials/Ads: Everywhere around us, marketing promotions attempt to make us interested in their wares, telling us whatever they think we want to hear. The whole idea that diamonds are valuable was created by a marketing agency. Are fast food restaurants or junk food producers really being honest when they promote their products, or leave out the key bits like the fact that eating their food consistently will result in a short life.

Media: The media has become a sensationalist machine attempting to generate interest by any means necessary rather than inform or educate. The TMZs of the world are putting the Newsweeks out of business. TV channels are infested with FAKE ‘reality’ shows while meaningful documentaries collect dust and cease being produced. Stories are slanted, headlines are exaggerated, and bias is apparent throughout.

Health Sector: Doctors have been known to not always give the complete truth, with patients being put through unnecessary tests and medications in the pursuit of improving the bottom line. Insurance companies try to keep as much of the important details in the footprints as possible. Companies in the sector are so afraid of lawsuits that they will say what’s ‘safe’ rather than what they think often times. (eg: contact lens companies putting a short time of expiry on their packaging despite much lengthier consumption being possible).

Finance Sector: Financial advisors that give you one advice while betting on the opposite outcome, banks who make credit cards look like your best friend while it’s really riddled with charges and is in reality your worst enemy, and the stock market which is controlled by greedy financial institutions and pitched as a safe haven for investing in your retirement.

Political Sector: Politicians all have their own agenda – with ‘helping the people’ becoming an idealist notion rather than a common goal. Pleasing lobbyists and securing job safety is the primary concerns, while lies will be told to the public with no shame. Governments/regimes will go to great lengths at securing wealth for a select few rather than doing what’s right for the people. (eg: China, Middle East, US during Bush era)

Business Sector: Businesses run on the notion of profit maximization, and that will always come out ahead of any other factor including honesty and integrity. Even Toyota can ‘cheat’ customers if the profit margins necessitate it. The likes of Enron, BP, AIG are just the tip of the iceberg – any business that does not put profit maximization as the number 1 long term goal will be replaced by a business that does, that’s how market dynamics work. The same goes for the people in these companies – if you don’t have the stomach to mislead customers, then someone else can be found to fill your shoes.

Entertainment Sector: Hollywood and entertainment studios keep cranking recycled sequels one after the other, often overcharging and under delivering. The likes of Britney Spears and Charlie Sheen stand as the most well paid people in their industry, despite being mere facades that made their living acting like someone they’re not for a large chunk of their careers.

Technology Sector: Companies release products knowing very well of the improvements that will be made in the near future (Apple) at the cost of loyal early adopters.

Religion: With many religions disagreeing heavily between each other on even the most basic topics – it’s a fact that a large population of the world believe strongly in something that is entirely not true.

We can keep going but you look at every fabric of life and you will find that the truth is deeply buried and certainly not at the forefront of our lives. At times, it can be argued that the truth is not always to our best interest. Other times, the cause may very well be people having to worry about themselves first, and being honest to others later – something that’s understandable for self-sufficient humans.

That is all fine and besides the point – the point that I’d like to make here is not that people are evil or that the world is a terrible place to live. Being pessimistic or judgmental on such a scale can bring no good. But realizing the existence of all of these cases where the truth is ‘elusive’ is of great importance.

People make decisions, invoke feelings, initiate thoughts, set goals, and come to conclusions based on the data set they’ve been fed. If we take all this data around us that is flawed in nature, and use that in its raw form to shape our lives, we will be misguided in our path toward happiness/success.

So in our current world, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to think critically and evaluate what’s real and what’s not. Most of us are sheep that live life solely based on the information that is given to us, never stopping to think of the validity of the input. Those who dare to second guess, think critically, question what’s presented to them will give themselves a huge edge over those who don’t. Whether it’s saving/spending/investing your money wisely, taking care of your health, managing your relationships, being successful in your career, or taking care of your family – a good interpretation of the basic information around you is instrumental.

Luckily for those with a quest for knowledge and truth, there has never been a better time to be alive. With the invention of the internet and the emergence of the information age – there is new found hope that the truth can no longer be hidden. Consumer boards, user reviews, the viral nature of the web and social networks for spreading information without censor, citizen journalism and new age organizations such as WikiLeaks/Wikipedia are all contributing towards a more ‘open’ world.

My hope here at this site is to contribute to this new open world by applying critical thinking and providing insight to topics where truth may be lacking in areas that can help people in their daily lives.

But wait, I’ve said don’t believe anything you hear, so why should you trust me anymore so than any other blogger, guru, expert, marketer, businessman, friend, fellow human out there. Simply put, my methodology in analyzing life will not hold any loose assumptions or statements urging you to believe me, just because I said so. Any point made will use logic, pragmatic arguments, and common sense. Think of it like maths applied to real life. In the quest for truth, isn’t a scientific approach really the only way to really go about it?

Demand and supply is the framework by which humans operate. There are limited resources on this planet and therefore it is crucial that supply can match demand.

‘Demand’ in our scenario relates to the list of most important factors that make us happy (which we created earlier). ‘Supply‘ in our scenario relates to the two resources that are available to us in the modern day: time and money.

But in fact, we know that time IS money and vica versa – so these two resources are interchangeable in acquiring our needs. I will explain how this all relates to achieving our plans through some very simple maths.

Time is a fixed resource for humans, with most people having at their disposal something around 16 hours per day after considering sleep and such.

So let’s assume that T (time available per day) =16 hours.

Depending on the individual, we can also assign a money value to the time we have (rate at which we can make money). For this example let’s assume we can make 10 dollars per hour.

That means 1/16 T=10$

This is the currency we have to achieve what we want. Now we need to assign time and monetary values to all the items on our list.

Let’s take the sample list I made in the previous post:

-Spending most of the time with wife/kids -> Let’s say 8 hours per day is good enough -> 8/16 T
-Saving enough money in x years to send the kids to a good university -> Let’s say 10$ per day saving is enough -> 1/16T
-Own a home by the beach in x years-> Let’s say 30$ per day saving is enough -> 3/16T
-Try to have your work published in a prestigious journal -> Let’s say 1 hour per day is required to legitimately attempt this -> 1/16T
-Traveling to a new country every 3 months-> This averages out to a tiny fraction of time per day, let’s assume 0.1/16 T and requires 800$ in savings which comes to 9$ per day (800$/90days) of required savings translates to 0.9/14T -> so total of(0.9+0.1) -> 1/16T
-Go to the gym every day -> lets say 1 hour per day so ->1/16T
-Learn to dance Salsa -> lets say 1 hour per day ->1/16T

According to the very rough example given above 49 dollars needs to be saved per day, and 10.1 hours are required per day in the activities chosen. So based on someone capable of earning 10 hours per day (and assuming 49 dollars per day saving is enough to in the long haul to afford house, college tuition, and travel expenses) – then someone can achieve this dream by just working 4.9 hours per day (49$/10$ per hour ). 4.9 Hours for work +10,1 Hours for activities =16 Hours of available time.

By assigning the time and money amounts to each item on the list, we were able to see if our fixed resource (time) was sufficient to achieve our goal. In the above example it all adds up to a perfect use of our 16 available hours

Of course this is a very simple formula I used just to demonstrate the idea that we’re working with here. There are many complexities to creating a formula that truly works. You have to consider your daily costs, time you spend doing things that you ‘must do’ (toilet, waiting in traffic, walking to places etc..), calculating the exact amount you need to be working per day to afford these long term items you would like to own, and of course you need a job that is flexible in terms of working hours if you plan to work unconventional hours.

Having said that, this is all achievable! Did you see how we turned what seemed like a magic list of everything you wanted in life into a workable equation that you can strive to achieve.

If you take the time to plan everything you want, assign the right cost and time requirements to it and then find a job that enables you to make enough within the amount of time you have set aside – you’re set!

A lot of things discussed here make perfect sense when laid out so clearly in front of you – but unfortunately we never live our lives this way.

People sometimes take the time to dream and wish they could do this and that, but are put off because they don’t think it’s possible. However the truth of the matter is that numbers don’t lie! You CAN live your dream life.

Now you know how the secret formula works but while it’s a simple concept to grasp, becoming well versed in it requires a new school of thought. The series of entries that follow will focus on optimizing this formula to the max. How to do more in less time, how to need less, how to do more with what you have, how to be more efficient etc. In short, we’ll be taking a look at how you can achieve your purpose in life and be the happiest you can be in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of effort. By the end, everyone will manage to make a perfectly working formula to achieve their dream life and go on to realize it.

So far, we’ve discussed life’s purpose or (what makes a person happy), as a lone singular concept. The truth is however, that humans have a variety of needs that need to be addressed in order to make them happy. This means that baring extreme cases (Mother Theresa, Dalai Lama, Ghandi), a life’s purpose will not be one single thing. This of course, makes the whole ‘finding your purpose/figuring out what makes you happy’ a more complex process that it initially appears to be.

You can have a look at the Hierarchy of Needs by Maslow below to get a feel for what needs to be considered.

The lowest 2 levels are the most basic and ‘universal’ factors in making one happy, but they’re also the easiest to achieve. Simply put, physiological and safety needs in our day and age relates to money. So even if you had made it your life plan to be the most loving person in the world, you need food, water and shelter – making it necessary to plan accordingly unless you are the second coming of the Buddha himself.

The other levels in the hierarchy of needs will depend more from person to person with different people putting a different degree of importance on the range of factors.

The key to figuring out what will make you happy in life is to first determine which of these important factors you value the most: is it acquiring upmost love and belonging, is it achieving high esteem in yourself, or is it self-actualization? Most people will value all these factors quite highly, but balancing these out is the key and a crucial part in realizing happiness in the long term because only a few can really have it all.

Let me repeat that because it’s truly the key initial step to get you on the road to happiness. Determining the needs that are most important to you and balancing them out within the reality of your current state is the primary founding block and key to happiness.
To do that, we need to prioritize the things in life that are most important to us. Putting aside basic food and shelter concerns, list the things in life that you would like the most (be most happy with).

Read each item and consider to yourself what you truly want, and not what society has pressured you to think. So if that means that you want to spend most of your time with your family instead of at work, then make sure to make a point of that. You’re about to reshape your life to truly be happy so at this stage you can write down your dream life – even if it is something which someone told you is impossible like ‘play video games for the majority of your day’.

Keep writing all the things you believe are needed to make you happy. There should be a point where you’re writing things that you don’t actually want or need that much, and that’s probably a good time to put an end to your list.

Here’s a short sample list to give you an idea:

-Spending most of the time with wife/kids.
-Saving enough in x years to send the kids to a good university
-Own a home by the beach in x years.
-Try to have your work published in a prestigious journal
- Traveling to a new country every 3 months.
-Go to the gym every day
-Learn to dance Salsa.
-Etc.

To help you in making your list here are some basic things that are known to make people happy:

Career achievements: honors, awards, promotions, pay raise, milestones, praise, accomplishments in your desired career.
Love/Affection: spending time with and earning love of partner, kids, family, friends, colleagues, peers.
Material things: owning houses, cars, clothes, gadgets, jewelry.
Fun activities: sports, hobbies, traveling, games, arts, eating, drinking, partying.
Self growth: learning new skills, reading, being moral, being loving/giving, being respected, challenging oneself, charity work, donations.

Hopefully this helps you get on paper everything that you believe will make you happy in life. Read your list over and over again until you’re completely satisfied with what’s on the paper to the degree that you start imagining yourself living that life and thinking to yourself – this is the exact life I want to lead!

You now know the purpose of your life – it’s to get from your current situation to achieving everything on that piece of paper. To do that, you’re going to need a special formula that turns dreams into reality.

But before we go into that, let’s address this obsession with having to know the purpose or meaning of life.
Why do people assume automatically that there is a universal purpose to life? How many things in life exist that we know the true meaning or purpose of? Do we know the purpose of a rabbit? Do we know the purpose of a cactus? How about a rock, do we know what its purpose is?

We don’t know, and to be frank, no one really cares – I speak on behalf of all rabbits, cactuses, and most definitely rocks on this matter.

So what’s the fascination of people to attach a meaning to human life and desperately seek a purpose for it. At the root of it is the self-centered nature of humans. For a long time we thought the Earth was the center of the Universe and that humans were the elite race.

Science came along and showed that we were so full of ourselves that not only were we not the center of the universe, but we represented an extremely tiny portion within even our own galaxy. Oh and humans, it turned out, are monkeys 2.0. Here’s a quote from PBS to give you a cruel reminder:

Humans share a common ancestor with modern African apes, like gorillas and chimpanzees. Scientists believe this common ancestor existed 5 to 8 million years ago. Shortly thereafter, the species diverged into two separate lineages. One of these lineages ultimately evolved into gorillas and chimps, and the other evolved into early human ancestors called hominids.

So what makes us think that we have this majestic quest that we must fulfill in life? If you believe in abstract concepts such as love or caring being the purpose/meaning in life then I have a rude awakening for you: the universe, nature, or any supernatural force you might believe in doesn’t care how many brownies you baked for your boyfriend or how many friends you have ‘poked’ on Facebook. Do people really think that a universal meaning/purpose behind life will distract them from all the problems in their lives? Let me tell you that if there was indeed a purpose to life, it would be something so disappointing and insignificant by today’s lofty expectations that it would depress people more than it helped. Want to know what the only purpose of life could really be? Ok, I’ll indulge:

As explained earlier, humans are not a super race that’s here to protect the universe or anything as such. We might be a more advanced living being than the other life forms on our planet, but that’s hardly cause to assume we’ve each been hand chosen to perform something significant here on earth. Yes, we have opposable thumbs and can communicate pretty adequately in this day and age, but then again trees create oxygen and grow fruits while bees can fly and make honey. Apparently, there are other living creatures on this planet with cool tricks up their sleeve.

If there was a purpose to life, it would have to be something that all other living things would also share. So what would that be? Something along the lines of “exist in the universe with respect to the things around you and don’t interfere with its natural progression”. This translates roughly to: don’t obliterate life, nature, planets for the sake of greed. That’s quite an Al Gore stance on the matter, but it’s a basic purpose that can be applied on a wide scale and something that all other life forms on the planet live by, except of course for humans.

So that’s probably not the purpose of life or meaning of life that you were looking for. People usually look for a meaning or purpose in life for a specific reason. It boils down to feeling useless, feeling depressed, feeling intellectually curious, or feeling lost. Most of these suggest that you’re not doing too well at life at the moment.

Purpose of Life

But a good starting point for these people is to realize that you have freedom and ability to change. Given that 1) we don’t know what the purpose of life is, 2) we won’t figure out what the purpose of life is and 3) we will be disappointed by the purpose of life IF we did indeed ever find out – then the most logical and sensical solution is to live life just the way we want to live it. Want to be filthy rich and make loads of money? Want to party all the time? Want to help others and be a giving person? Want to spend your life traveling? Want to devote your life to a spiritual or religious cause?

Whatever you want to do you can do, and the only thing stopping you from doing that is a careful laid out plan, and a clean conscience. The conscience only comes into play if you haven’t convinced yourself of the ‘purpose’ you have chosen. Sometimes it takes time figuring out what you really want – you might start wishing to just party and have fun all the time, but then you realize perhaps it’s not as gratifying and fulfilling as you expected.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. For now, we’ve discovered that there is no hidden purpose to life, no higher order by which you must live your life, nor is there a magical wind that will take you to where you must go. Everything in fact lies with your goal and your plan, it’s as simple as that.

In the future, we will discuss how you can figure out your very own life ‘purpose’, or in other words what makes you happy in life. And then we will of course get into the real challenge at hand, and that’s constructing a path for yourself, both mentally and logistically to achieve this purpose the easiest way possible. Luckily I have a formula, along with tips, that will help you along the way.

Assuming the whole process of taking a shower takes about 20 minutes per day, then you could roughly assume that showering takes 1.5% of your whole life, and over 2% of your conscious life. Kids and aging people might take a longer time, and some people might shower more or less than 1x per day – but nevertheless that we can see it indeed represents a noticeable portion of our lives.

Today’s tip concerns this often overlooked area, and particularly the dreaded moment of getting out of a shower. One of the leading sources of catching a cold is because people don’t take proper care of themselves during the transition of being in hot water to being outside the shower in the cold with barely any clothes on.

Of course having a radiator or other form of heater in the bathroom can help make your transition from cold to warm more comfortable, but the best way to do that is to go from wet to dry whilst staying in the shower at all times. It sounds like an oxymoron, but you can indeed go dry in the shower and keep your body temperature at a comfortable rate throughout this process with a few simple adjustements.

For this to work you must keep a towel nearby when taking a shower and have the shower head fixed so both your hands are free. Once you feel like getting out of the shower, simply reach for the towel and move your body so that the water falling on you only goes down your back side. This will allow you the space to start drying the front half of your body and also your hair. This should allow you to dry a large percentage of your body whilst still receiving hot water to your backside, keeping your overall body temperature at a comfortable rate.

You can even bend your upper body forward so that the only water falling is on your butt. You can use this opportunity to dry your back as well, while still maintaining some hot flow of water to your body. Raising the temperature of the water in this step will help your body feel warm despite the small surface area that is exposed to hot water. Finally you can turn off the water, dry your back side and back of your legs in a couple of seconds and you are fully dry, just moments after finishing your shower.

Drying yourself quickly will also severely shorten the process of putting on your warm clothes, and limiting your overall exposure to the cold to a sheer minimum.

So the next time you are about to shower, make sure to keep a towel around and practice this fine art that is sure to not only make a daily routine activity much more enjoyable, but also decrease your chances of catching a cold.

Importance of Confidence / Doubt

Now there are a lot of ways to analyze the meaning of this. Certainly there is a religious aspect to it, and that’s probably the main meaning that most will initially take away from this: if you don’t believe in God, then that will essentially be your biggest weakness. But for the more scientific types, there is a much more detailed element to it all.

Doubt in yourself, in what you do, or who you are – that can also be your biggest weakness in life even if we take out the religious/spiritual aspect of it all. Doubt essentially means that you don’t have confidence, and the impact of lack of confidence on the human psyche is undeniable.

Confidence allows people to really commit to something and really go all out and keep working at it. There will never be 100% certainty in life, and that’s why confidence is the next best thing we have. In life the only thing that can really stop you from doing what you want to do, is yourself. You are your own worst enemy. You and only you, can prevent yourself from giving your hundred percent in what you do.

Life can give you some poor lemons to work with, it can throw some curve balls you didn’t expect, and it can put hurdles in your way. And sometimes, you might actually get knocked down from these barriers life puts in front of you. But in the end it is self confidence that will give you the strength to get back up, that will give you the mental capacity to keep persisting and ultimately the belief that you can do it. Few men of such strong conviction have failed at life.

The success/failure to confidence/doubt connection can easily be linked using a flowchart.

But as mentioned before, nothing in life is guaranteed so actually doubt will always play a strong factor…. unless of course, we have lived through something before, and we have seen it work. And this is the key, our brains are trained this way. Touch a hot stove, and your brain will remember not to do that anymore. Buy a girl some flowers, and she will appreciate it. We experience thousands upon thousands of such lessons everyday. Cause and effect. It works the same with success and confidence. If you have done something that works, you are pretty sure that next time you do it, the same positive result will happen. And that is enough to give us confidence in a world dominated by doubt.

This means that we somehow need to taste success and see signs of something working to create that initial bit of confidence. It’s counter intuitive to suggest that you need to build success to draw further success, but that’s exactly what it is. We need to get ourselves into a situation where we can chain together a few success – that’s all that is required to have a person fully motivated and working diligently towards their goal at maximum personal effectiveness. But it’s never easy to get it going, and the beginning is always the hardest. Especially that initial bit of success to start it all off requires an old and yet classic method: trial and error.

Throughout life we try and fail many times, but we learn and build experience so that our next attempt has an increased chance of working. Perhaps we fail again, but this time we are closer to success and that should provide the necessary boost of confidence to try again. If at some stage there really is no progress and no hope of progress, that means confidence will die and we will in the end give up. In this scenario, if there really was no hope in this field, it’s probably wise to move on to something else. Life doesn’t waste too much time making it obvious whether what you’re doing is working on not, there is a self-correcting mechanism to it all. At the very least though, your experiences will allow you to choose a new path more appropriate to you.

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Sometimes, changing the path we're on is the quickest way to get from failure to success

Eventually there is a natural balance to all of this and people will end up where they deserved based on their basic skills and how much they put in.

So what can we take away from this?

Lessons from Confidence / Doubt

-Initial failure, is definitely not a definitive sign that we should give up. If anything, it’s an advantage as to why we should keep trying because we already have some experience in this area, and we have something to work upon. Failure takes us closer to our goals. Take this quote by Thomas Alva Edison as a way to look positively on previous failures:

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

-Confidence comes primarily from previous success and believing that ‘it’ can work – and it’s importance has clearly been discussed here. But confidence can come from other areas as well (in the short term). Motivation and support are two powerful ways that confidence can be instilled into someone. Therefore, it can be a great tool either in helping your loved ones, or perhaps in the work place to push people that extra bit to get them over the hump. Of course, this is best used if there is actually hope in the person in this field.

-There is another way that confidence can be generated, and this one is self-created and doesn’t have a short-term aspect to it. In fact, it is a source of lifelong confidence in one’s self and what they do. The source of this mysterious power? Faith. This gives real ammunition to people who are religious over those who are not – with the belief that there is a supreme power out there making sure everything is ok and daily prayers further motivating individuals that their endeavors will end happily. Even if their beliefs are ‘wrong’ – the fact that they can derive something as powerful and as important as confidence out of thin air is quite the advantage.

-At the same time, a false sense of confidence (possibly derived from religious/spiritual factors or fake motivation/support by close ones), too much confidence or arrogance can lead one to keep trying in an area that they actually have no hope in. This takes away life’s natural balancing act of putting you where you are better suited at and wastes your time in finding your true calling.

Too much confidence can also be a bad thing...

-There is also the opposite which is just as bad – taking away confidence from yourself due to your personality traits. Self-pity, negative attitude, laziness and complacency can all be states of mind that will limit the chance that someone will be successful for the simple fact that they will be quick to feel they can’t do it, and kill any self-confidence within themselves. Being a positive and upbeat person can therefore have real world advantages.

-When you have achieved considerate success in a field and have accumulated enough experience to really feel like you know what works and what doesn’t – that is when you really need to reap the benefits of all your work. Your experience has led you to the state of lowering the chance of failure so much that you have practically removed ‘doubt’ from the equation – something that we talked about being extremely difficult to do. With such a high level of confidence you need to milk your area of expertise to the maximum and not stop until you have achieved the highest level that you could or would want to attain. Such moments might come once in a lifetime or perhaps never at all, and if they do make sure to take advantage of the opportunity and capitalize.

Here are three quotes that further take the point home:

“Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.” Peter T Mcintyre

“The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.” Sven Goran Erikson

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” Robert F. Kennedy

CNN (the 'worldwide leader in news') ranks the 'best' jobs

In the material world we live in, it’s not so surprising that these comparisons exist in the first place. We’ve still not come any closer to figuring out the ‘meaning of life’ and people will naturally try to substantiate their position in life. One of the basic human needs is the need for a sense of acknowledgment and people will try to get it any way they can.

So is having one job better than any other? In the purely theoretical realm – no, all jobs are created equal. If you think about it, a job serves a specific purpose and who can say that one purpose is more ‘important’ than the other. People might look at being a ‘garbage man’ as a low level profession, but imagine for a second a world without these people performing this crucial service.

Oscar the Grouch might be the only one capable of living in a trash infested world

Society has evolved from the day when hunter-gatherers was the all important ‘profession’. With national boundaries, governments, social systems, international trade, and the structure of society – everyone is dependent on each other for the life that they live. Comparative advantage between countries has led to ‘specialization’ and every country is dependent on each other for basic resources. In fact today there are some ‘jobs’ that apparently doesn’t make enough money and hence are subsidized by governments such as agriculture – and no one should need reminders of what will happen without such jobs.

Since the days of bartering, people figured out that every job has its place in the world. You would have the local blacksmith, the farmer, the traveling salesmen and everyone would be grateful for these jobs. But since the concept of a common currency evolved, there has been a discrepancy in the value put on jobs. People have started assuming that jobs which don’t warrant a high salary are essentially not as ‘valuable’.

bartering

In one sense, it’s not incorrect. We know that supply and demand governs the laws of value in our resource limited world and jobs which have limited salaries are usually ones that can be supplied more easily. It’s also worth noting that education is usually the key driver of how difficult it is to perform (supply) the job in question. Since education (intelligence) is one of the most respected universal qualities since the dawn of time – in one way it makes sense for people to feel entitled and ‘above’ others for seemingly contributing more to society than others.

And technically speaking, doing a job that fewer people can do does in the linguistic sense make you ‘special’. However, there are many imperfections to the system – take for example Mother Teresa and compare her to a drug dealer who would make way more money providing a service that few could provide and some people desperately are in demand of. You could also flip the script and make the point that being a president MUST be strictly ‘better’ than some other jobs such as a maker of gadgets – and essentially think that you have disproved that ‘all jobs are created equal’.

It’s all starting to sound a bit complicated and hopefully it will at least serve to prove that the amount of money you make is clearly not a good signal as to define a person, whether they’re good or bad, or even successful or not. Also the nature of job that you do can have different degrees of importance to different people in the world. Some people might not care the least bit what the President intends to do with his foreign policy, but might be in love with Apple’s products to the degree that he genuinely believes that Steve Jobs is the most ‘important’ person in the world. Isn’t the purpose of jobs to make this a better world, and fulfill needs of the people inhabitting it?

iPad or iCan?

Clearly, if there is to be any judging based on nature of job, it’s a highly subjective affair. This would essentially prove that you can’t empirically or objectively say any job is more important than an other, leading to the premise of this post: all jobs are created equal.

Funnily enough, life always has a way to balance all the chaos out of the world and make sense. People who value money, will deem those make most money as ‘most successful’ or ‘most important’. People who value ‘social service’ or people who value ‘entertainment’ will have their own criteria. In the end, despite having a common currency system that is able to compare everything in the world with a single universal metric, things are not so different than the days of bartering. Jobs that are needed are supported by the people who value it.

In reality, it’s not so weird that there is some balancing nature to this whole thing because it is exactly the way that nature works. A stable ecosystem can’t exist without all the different parts that are necessary. Some people like to see mosquitoes as useless insects but without them the whole ecosystem could collapse ruining the lives of everyone.

Yet no one appreciates..

And while things have changed considerably since the days of cavemen – it is still all about survival. If you find your way to survive in this world, then that is proof enough that you’re succeeding because the only way to not ‘succeed’ at life, is to stop living.

Something's not right...

Or if we’re lucky once in a blue moon there is good progress towards some exciting future developments. However, at the end of the day none of these developments are LIFE CHANGING.

Until now! News in recent months – with the development of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – have hinted at a very exciting possibility: time travel.

Now, THAT is something “Life Changing”. Yes, the odds are that it’s not going to happen in our life time or our grandson’s grandsons lifetime, if ever. However, it can no longer be considered purely ‘science-fiction’ and just the possibility of it happenening is something truely exciting.

The LHC...don't build this at home!

It’s difficult to understand what this would exactly mean for us, because wild science-fiction movies are usually the only instances where such possibilities are played out for our entertainment, but even these science-fiction novels and movies never really analyze the intricate implications to every-day lives that these discoveries will create. Given that scientifically there is a chance of this actually happening, it would be criminally irresponsible to not consider the fallout in case of such an event. It never hurts to “Be Prepared” as the Boy Scout motto goes, and to prepare you for when that time comes, here is how life would play out, if indeed time travel occurred.

The official MENSA 'predicting the future' stance

The way the LHC technology works (according to tabloid papers where I get my intel) , is that there is a chance of a ‘time door’ opening, allowing visitors from the future (assuming they have sufficiently advanced technology) to visit our planet. As this would be the first ‘door’ to open in the history of mankind, it would mark the furthest point back in time people of any time could visit. So, unless mankind becomes extinct at some point, or some terrible disaster wipes all documentation of such a ‘door’ opening in 2008 or future research suggests time travel would lead to terrible catastrophes, then essentially people from the year 390124 could and should visit us. You would have to think that thousands and who knows even millions of years later, mankind could develop some truely mind boggling inventions and why shouldn’t a time machine be one of them. So all that requires from us is that this ‘door’ we open in 2008, is enough of a opening for future smart people from the year 1958309753 to work with to establish contact with us.

Now lets get down to what this will mean. A person visiting from essentially the latest point in time could bring with him infinite news/developments/technology. We can in this way, jump thousands of years in progress. Imagine for a second if we were to go back to caveman days and showed them cars, televisions, airplanes etc. That is similar to the impact people from the future visiting us would have. So one day your checking the news and reading about the Microsoft/Yahoo acquisition talks, and then as you surf abit more in the tech section you read about some breaking news that has just transpired. Headline reads: “People from the future have arrived, they have offered the cure to all illnesses, little pills that give us immortality and removes the necessity to eat or drink anything.” In a few minutes, the whole world that took thousands of years of steady progress and calculated achievements to develop – will have completely been overhauled.

The question then becomes: if the future does solve all our problems, then what will be left for us to do? We will have everything we want, nothing to worry about – life will be…perfect? At the beginning this is what it will seem like. Sick and poor people will no longer be sick and poor, the concept of poverty will cease to exist, and people will no longer have to ‘work’. This last point could create major issues. Fine, we won’t need any more companies producing anything because it is assumed that millions of years from now, there will be cheap machines that can create whatever you want with some simple inputs. But even with infinite resources, our world still needs some hard labour. Even if that problem is solved with robots, there will still need to be some ‘people’ that work (right?)- world leaders, police forces, scientists that produce this future technology, everyone in the entertainment industry, shops and stores of some sorts, babysitters etc.

Babysitters - the most important career of the future?

How would you motivate these people to work, remember people don’t need money anymore with high-tech advancements solving all problems (is this perhaps why the supreme being created our world with limited resources?).

There certainly will still be crime and terrorism, because poverty is not always the reason for such things. Of course, more and more technology can be brought from the future to combat all these problems – drugs that remove the anger from psychopaths, and police intelligence so smart it prevents bad things from ever happening ala “Minority Report”. But perhaps you can see a dark pattern developing here, and it is similar to those science fiction movies where ultimately technology fails us. Utopia simply can’t happen when everything in the world is unnatural.

Furthermore, even if the implementation of future technology solves all our problems – what reason would we have to live? We have infinity to live, but yet there is nothing that hasn’t been done or needs to be done. Life perhaps would be sweet for the first 5 or 10 years where everyone in the world is on holiday and enjoying everything and anything with no worry in the world. But then that all too familiar feeling would start to kick in. You know the feeling you got towards the end of the summer holidays back when you were in school, where after a while you got bored of having nothing but free time.

The future of humankind

There would be no progress because all progress has been made, there would be no change because all change has been implemented. So what would be the purpose of anything?

There would be a million of entertainment sources, and things to do but at the end of day when you’re going to bed and close your eyes – there will be that realization that it all sort of feels empty without the mystery, without the wondering of the unknown, without all the imagination and possibilities in your head about the future. It would be like watching the most amazing movie/sports match ever possible – but you already know how its going to end. That kind of realization would ultimately crush the human spirit.

A lot of what drives us in this world is that in some small, perhaps almost insignificant way we are changing the world and responsible for its progress. Like imagine the guy who invented the paper clip, he might not be the most famous or important person in the world, but I’m sure that his life was great knowing that he had just singlehandedly set a legacy and changed the world.

Perhaps it didn't win a Nobel prize, but it did change the world forever

All in all, while there would be amazing short term benefits, in the long run time travel would be a terrible thing for humankind. Just like it is incredibly stupid to take a drug that gives you short term pleasure at the cost of life long repercussions – time travel should similarly be kept away from.  The way towards a utopia is through sustained development: education, smart economic systems, and politics that is communist in ideal but capitalist in approach.

Sorry Doc, you're just not welcome

Hopefully, people thousands of years from now read this, and never enter that portal that would land them in our untouched and perfectly legit world.