Material World

I went to Primerica's info session today. It was quite an experience. I actually thought of something else rather than financial management.

First of all, I was amazed by those sales representatives. They were so proud of what they were doing, which was good. They felt good about their job. They got a certain level of satisfaction based on the amount of money they were making by helping other people to get out of debts, to save more money for retirement, and eventually to enjoy their lives at a higher level. Now, this is associated with increasing the standard of living in my economics class. The whole presentation sounded really good. The audience agrees with whatever they said, because we all admitted the fact that MONEY is very important. We can't live without money.

Then, when it came to the last speaker, I felt a little uncomfortable about the way he presented. He compared the wages amoung engineers, doctors and financial representatives. And it turned out that engineers earned the least, then MDs, financial reps actually earned almost double of MDs. I didn't question about the figures, but he sent us a message that we should all be financial reps because they earned that much.

They were showing examples of professionals like lawyers changed their career and ended up earning way more than what they have earned before. They also mentioned about the people who work in Primerica right now came from different fields. Some of them were engineers, architects and something else.

My thought was so messed up at that time. I couldn't stop thinking about why those people were so proud of themselves just because they made so much money? They were so proud that they had this eager to convince everyone to get into the industry. They were so persuasive. They said you could either choose to join their team, or do nothing which ends up to be dead broke. I mean, get a life. I am pretty sure there are something better than earning millions a year.

When I think about it, aside from the average salaries, why would people want to go to engineering? Why did people choose to be a doctor? Why go to law school? Don't engineering students want to be a real engineers one day? After 4 years of tough work in university? Don't med school students actually have passions for the patients? Don't law student fantasize themselves to speak in a court room? Where are all the dreams we had when we were young? Why all those dreams and goals got covered by the amount of money other business make?

I mean it sounds really attractive when they pull out the actual figures, about earnings, and debts, loans. For me, I don't even know how everything works. Life insurance, mortgage, mutual fund, RRSP, stuff like that, I heard about them all the time, but I'd never want to care about it. All I care for is, go for nursing, be a nurse, having satisfaction in my job which feeds myself emotionally, stable income feeds myself physically. That's all. Retirement is just too far away to think about. I either think I won't really reach that age, or I would like to give my all to serve people in need.

I think I'd rather use their service instead of being one of them myself. But, never say never. Because I don't know where I am going to end up in a couple of years.

Another thing, according to professor Hare, increase productivity is the most important thing in an economy. That's why I talked about increasing the standard of living. It happened in my eco notes for so many times that's why I abbreviated it as SOL. He thinks that increase productivity is the only way to increase SOL. And this generation don't need to plan our future. Because whatever problem comes up in the future, it's the next generation's responsibility to solve them. It's not our job to save the environment now for the good of our grandchildren. I mean, what the heck is that? To increase SOL = make more money, is more important than saving the environment?

Oh...now that I thought of it, about the lecture on tuesday. It's the trade between Japan and US. I wondered, US actually introduced congress, which required Japan to balance trade with US in 5 years. Japan should receive more US imports, otherwise, they would take action on Japanese trade. What on earth gave US power to control what Japanese do? And if they didn't do that, they would take action. Doesn't that sound like barbarians to you? Japanese is not any better. They let IBM to build their plants in Japan only if IBM agreed to liscenced their technology to 15 struggling industries in Japan. Both of them sounded like barbarian to me. They did everything based on their own benefit, and who cares if the other party suffers?

Since when we let materialism to dominate in this world?