What if you are wrong?
What if we are wrong?

What if everything that we have come to known, everything that we have done are completely wrong all along?

Therein lies one of the biggest reasons that people hardly ever change.

Yet, therein lies the key to real change.
Therein also lies one of the key to spiritual growth — that everything we think we know as truth is not so.

Can you accept?

Knowing that you are wrong.
Knowing that you don’t know.
Could be the biggest hurdle for the change you need.

Knowing that you are wrong.
Knowing that you don’t know.
Is a wonderful first step to a new beginning.

The labor day ended so fast. I hope everyone had a good time.

Did you exert yourself too much and is trying to recover from it during work week?
Did you eat too much on the holiday [again]?
Are you planning and looking forward excitingly to your next vacation?

Are those the average ways we treat our vacation and holidays? I am not sure but perhaps they are quite close to the average.

Let me take a few minutes to talk about playing vs. the average way we spend our vacation.

I feel like the average ways we spend holiday are us overcompensating for the hours we’ve sacrificed working. On the flip side, we also plan all the festivities and excitement in an attempt to get us in the mood to work again, or some sort of rewards for working hard.

First of all, a bit of logic. If we had worked hard for hours and days and finally holiday comes around, we always (that we must) take our bodies through desserts, wine, parties, and exotic places, when do we rest? If we are to recover in order to do better work, what in the world are we doing to our bodies? Adding stress upon stress. So that means the logical way to spend holiday is to rest, calm down, finally do some exercise, and assume more proper diet to help our body recover from the junk food and abnormal meals during the week? By the way, watching TV is not really resting either.

Consequently, the observation I have where people fill their schedules with festivities and assorted dramatic events with the goal to make us work better… is completely paradoxical.

Also consequently, there is little wonder why disease and cancer are upon us these days.

Well now, I am not against playing. I am saying we need to find a balance, between stress and rest. People have a problem with stress management because they are always stressing themselves out, albeit in “good” ways.

Now that I mention playing… I’d like to ask, “What is playing?”

For the answer, I would point us to look at kids. How do kids play? Well, I’ll just answer it.

Kids play without a sense of purpose, and I find that modern people lack this sort of playing very much. The worst part is, we are taking it away from kids younger and younger now.

To truly play is to play without purpose. So the above scenario where we play on vacation to make us feel better and stronger for work… is not really playing.

Playing for the sake of playing. Purpose-less. Perhaps we need to find more time to do things that are purpose-less. I would not be surprised if we do this and find ourselves becoming happier, healthier, and more compassionate people.

Is that so unimaginable? Probably for most of our heavily left brain biased modern people, who would condemn the idea of living, playing, behaving without a purpose — in the sense that what we do is not a mean for an end but doing for the sake of doing? Can we accept that? No?

Then I would end on a question, would you need a purpose to love someone? Yes, you need a purpose? Well then, so much for unconditional love…

For work or personal relationship, we are presented with the questions:

What does it mean to communicate?
How can we do it well?
Or rather, how do you really listen to the other person?

So then quite frequently, we took classes and lesson. We studied some psychology and philosophy. We are taught tricks and techniques such as…
- say certain phrases
- ask certain questions
- use certain hand gestures
- mirror the other party’s movement and behaviors
- how to process the words coming out of the other person’s mouth

Well, those are all dandy and fine, but I find those can only be effective in so much depends on how well you know yourself (as I often say here) and ultimately, on the basis your realization that, we are all human beings.

The other person is a person, a human being. Just like yourself.

This basic realization is fundamental and consequential.

That is very important because we often let our own and the other person’s identities get in the way and thus lead to both parties being scared, intimidated, distant, defensive, offensive during conversation.

Bosses and employees.
Teachers and students.
Parents and children.
Husband and wife.

We must realize that we are not merely identities.

Part of being present in the moment is this realization. Not that we ignore people’s identities but to have a “non-grasping-ness” with the identities while knowing that are the same human beings as I am. We are fundamentally the same… human beings who are both rational and irrational, with both thinking minds and emotional hearts. We all have parents. We all thrive on a healthy Earth. We… well, you get the point.

A few other details on what not to do in order to allow true communication…

Not wondering about other things in your mind.
Not thinking or preparing what to say next.
And definitely, not lying and saying things to ONLY achieve a personal agenda.

On a last note, these ideas point out a few limitation of communication through the virtual world. In that, when we are not physically together, thus the Internet, our communication relies heavily on the identities we already know of the other people or identities that we claim and establish. In other words, through Internet and text exchanges, we can only see fragments of the other person… rather than truly connecting.

Yes, emails, text messages, and social networks are great convenient tools, but at the same time, I find us making the grave mistakes of over-using it to represent and communicate ourselves as if they can represent and communicate ourselves in totality. Perhaps this is why more people are feeling lonelier than ever? That more people feel isolated than ever? That there are more depressed people than ever?

Something for us to ponder…

This is not so far from us missing the point by mistaking our abstractions of reality as reality. But, this is a topic for another day.

Buddhism has a lot of good suggestions for us to conduct our life. Now, I would not call myself a Buddhist, but just that I learned and found many of their concepts practical.

Impermanence is one of the pillar concept in Buddhism.

Why do we worry? Because we expect things to be as we think they should be. And often, we expect things to be the same as they are now, that they will last forever (namely, the good things). Intuitively, we know that cannot be if we stop denying it. When we deny impermanence, we make thousands of plans and let worry take over our life.

The next moment can never be the same as this moment. Things are always changing, whether they are visible to the eyes (or scientific means) or not. Not just the outer world, even our cells are constantly dying and being remade every second.

Yet, we seem to think that we are changing only when things change according to our measures and parameters. It’s as if we consider time flows because the clocks we make is ticking. Rather than the other way around.

Change is inevitable. Therefore, the notion of “we need to change” is off the point. Rather, the question we should ask is, “How do we want to change?”, both on a personal level and on a wider, cultural, societal level.

Another good question to ask now is, “Are we trying to change the outter world just so that we don’t have to change?” I am suggesting that, could some of what we are doing now be a demonstration of resistance to change masqueraded as desire to change?

“Change the world around us for us, but we are not going to change.”

Food for thought.

Here’s the practicality of understanding a bit about impermanence… Just as the good things will come and go, like water brushing by a rock in a stream, so do the bad things come and go. With this realization, we can fully enjoy the moment with good things and not hold on, and we can learn from the moment with bad things and let go. As such, we can take things lightly and enjoy and be in the moments of life.

Ultimately on an individual level, the inevitable impermanence is death. Thus, it really sucks that death has become such a taboo topic in modern days. It is a good thing to contemplate about death. “How do I want to die?” Meaning, and the key is, “What inner state do I want to have when I am leaving this world?” When one is about to die, that’s probably the last and only thing that matters. So…

How do we change to achieve such the inner state we want to be in before death?

Whatever the answer you find, it is a good idea that whatever the answer is, is what dictates your action.

For me, it is peace. Can I find peace underlying everything that I do?

What do you think about impermanence?
What is your answer?

These days, every time I read a blog or some online article where people simply preach about 401k or are celebrating their annual max out of 401k contribution, I… just chuckle. That’s me being polite.

People, please stop blindly echoing and following each other. Do some studying, learning, thinking for yourself. There are certain things you need to consider, keep reading.

First thing first, if your company provides 50% or 100% of certain amount of contribution, by all means, take advantage of it. Beyond that, perhaps you should re-consider the benefits and the (over)hype of 401k.

Now, pay attention to the points below. For each, take a minute and pause and see if it makes sense. Don’t just take my words for it.

• At the rate our national debt is going, do you think a bet on having low income tax rate in the future is a smart bet? Especially when income tax rate for low to medium income households are very low currently.
• Following previous point, withdrawal from 401k account is taxed at income tax rate, versus, withdrawal from taxable account and only its gain is taxed at capital gain tax rate. If government must raise taxes, which is likely to be increased more? Which is likely to be lower in the future? The answer is capital gain tax rate.

  “But 401k grows with pre-tax money, blah blah blah…” Yes I know. But if I am to make a conservative plan, which is what we should do for something so far down the road. I will bet on the latter because there is less variables, meaning, I know the taxed principal will be there (I should have a good percetage back to “cash” near “old age”). Better to overestimate than underestimate.

• Depends on the 401k account management, the chance for shady, kick-back, and “hidden” fees is not negligible.
• Many 401k accounts do not provide “good” selection of funds.
• Generically speaking, if you need you money to be locked up in order to save, there is a bigger situation about yourself that you need to handle. Namely, responsibility, discipline, foresight…
• The population is aging. More people are retiring than people joining the workforce. That means likelihood of more people selling (whatever that’s left in the account) stocks and bonds in the 401k than people buying in. This puts pressure against future stock growth. I guess we have to be cautious with our belief in future growth in general.
• Lastly, we don’t live forever and can very well die before 60s. I am not sure about locking up all that money, that I cannot access and use without penalty except for some very dire siutations. There can be good argument against this, but I still think there is value in this thought. Mainly, we are not immortal. Stop living like we are.

So now you have my skepticism with 401k. Again, if there is matching from your company, get it. That’s “free” money. Otherwise, it would be a good idea to spread things out some in taxable accounts than having full belief and your $$$ in the 401k basket. It’s not that difficult… just following the same allocation in both places. You do have some ideas of your portfolio allocation, right?

Meanwhile, I contribute to my company’s matching. Maxing out my 401k yearly? I’ll pass. (I don’t do Roth IRA either…)

Update: Thanks Meg for pointing out my confusing comments with Roth IRA which is corrected. It is my own decision not to. If interested why I don’t, read comment.