The Dropdown List

How is it that sometimes things are said quite eloquently?

“Because of the rat race, a lot of us have been pushed into studying something that would give us security for life”.
– Scarlette of Core Design Gallery, Timeout KL April 2010 –

If you were a post-secondary / college student in Malaysia in the late 90s, instead of “I want to be ___”, your career decision may likely have been influenced by “I will select from the below list”, which looked something like this:

1. Accountant
2. Engineer
3. Doctor
4. Banker
5. Lawyer
6. IT (no designations because to be honest at the time, no one really knew what it was, other than IT was the next big thing)
7. Pharmacist
8. I am struggling to even come up with more

Call it realities of capitalism, the developing country, or the arguable conservatism/foresight of parents who want the best for their children, there is no wrong or right. I do hope though, that we are moving towards an environment where individuals from more professions can find their choices equally rewarding in practical and personal aspects, so long as they do their jobs well.

To fill that blank myself, I might have said….anthropologist. What about you?

Discussion with an atheist

Today a colleague of mine told me that spirits cannot exist in the same realm that we do, simply because the world would then be overpopulated. I told him that unlike real people, probably more than one spirit can sit in the same chair, so really they wouldn’t take up so much space.

This is the math grad who believes that there is no God (in the context of the bible, at least) because given the proven time that photosynthesis takes, the world could not have been created in 7 days. I don’t argue with that, but then, I haven’t read the bible.

Anyway, he counters by saying that even if this were true, at some point, we would still run out of room because think of the multitude of spirits we must have through time since the creation of man (being from Hong Kong, he is very concerned about space and population control. Being Malaysian, I am a little more easygoing about real estate in general).

Why then I say, that is exactly why we have reincarnation. Same soul, re-born into a different body that lives through a different time. At some point, perhaps that soul might move on to somewhere beyond, and there will be room for a new one here and there. Everyone/thing else in between, is what we accountants would just call timing differences.

Hey I don’t have all the answers, but mathematically it seems to make good sense, no?