"How To Spend It" is a section in the Weekend Financial Times, which I consider "unputdownable." The section basically introduces you to expensive habits and items from Clive Christian perfume to Gagganeu kitchen appliances. The adjective "expensive" here is in strictly monetary term. That is why it is called How to Spend It. But of course, with Financial Times, you donÕt have to worry about being labelled unfairly as bearing the unfavourable spirit of the parvenus, for all you see in there are topics of good taste and quality sketchily touched upon in an elegant yet understandable tone, accompanied by books and art reviews. Readers will find it an absolutely good read. For me, how to spend it has different meanings. My understatement occasionally is even greater than that of the British, that is why I need to explain a bit of how to spend it more than apparently necessarily. There are a lot you can spend. You can spend money (yours or OPM) Ð like the diseducated petty merchants in Hong Kong who believe abalone and sharks fin soup are the whole of the world. You can spend your time Ð like the dye-your-hair-golden teens who spend 16 hours a day on the PS 2 and another 8 to speak of it with their futureless compeers. You can spend your talent Ð like the government officials who think hard in their whole work life to shrug off the monkey on their shoulders to those of the others. Edward Gibbon, Esq. said a rich man was one whose income is superior to his expense (which most people do), and his expense equal to his wishes (which few do). There comes the question -- whether your expense equals your wishes. If I want to spend something, I shall spend it on the better things.
One of my recent comments on "some of my friends" goes quite generally, which says, "they are just bad. All they want to tell me is the better things in life." Perhaps in an absolute and serious sense it is not fair to say so, for they are not bad at all by sincerely telling me what the better things in life are and should be. They just inform me of where I am not. In quid pro quo, I wish to provide you, who are those of my friends, with what I think are the better things in life. Before taking the liberty of so doing, I wish to raise a few questions concerning the better things in life and the pursuit of them.
What is a better thing in life? How is it better when comparing it with lesser? Why should we pursue a better thing rather than the worse in life? Is it arguable for a miserly life not to pursue the better thing yet only to go after the worse? I am not prepared to answer these questions until the very final section of this series when I have completed my intimation of the better thing in life of which I earnestly wish to let you know, for it would be too cumbersome to answer weighty questions such as these and in the meantime let my friends appreciate what a better thing actually is by real examples. I choose to do the latter before attempting at tackling, possibly in vain, the former.
Why did I talk that much? It was because when one's goal is to attain a happy life, one should pursue the better things in life, which, to my understanding, are the means to lead to a happy, and perhaps, meaningful life.
