Monday, May 29, 2006 @10:19 PM
I wonder how many of us do find ourselves lucky. We are so lucky because many of us are living in a place rich of resources on earth in this era.
Just imagine if we were living at our grandparents or great-grandparents’ age; those days, resources were poor, lack of advance technologies to help producing and discovering more resources and many were struggling for survivals during the war time. Many were even dying of hunger; obesity was never an issue during those tough days.
And here we are at the 21st century, with the advancement of technologies; we are getting enough food supply, well at least in the developed nations and many of the developing ones. What has become one of our major concerns? Many of us are constantly talking about so not wanting to get fat. We feel so guilty and fuss about how much delicious food we ate and thus worrying the extra pounds or kilos that we will gain. Or we tend to stock up a lot of food but not consume then and let them rot in the fridge until passes the expiry dates and then end up in the trash bin eventually.
And then it is so common for us to go for the latest gadgets. Every now and then when there is new model of cell phone, computer, iPod, mp3 and stuff many of us will try to get rid of the older model and change for the newest model. Some who can afford more may even want to go for something more and big such as cars.
Even for small little things at work or our daily life, we have cultivated a habit of not fully utilizing the resources. For example, we just simply grab a new piece of A4 paper to scribble or draft something. Do we have to really do it that way? Can’t we just pick up some used single page paper and used the back as rough papers? There are many of us who can be a bit selfish; we buy stuff at work and then not wish to share yet we can’t finish them all before the expiry date. In the end, again we just have to sadly trash them to the bin. Incidentally someone found a new box of reagent that was expired long time ago. My coworker and I happened to hear the complaint of how wasteful the person who previously ordered that reagent, seeing that funding for research is really limited and hence anything purchased are precious and every cent should be spent wisely. Yet this person who found the expired “treasure” was planning to toss it to the bin. My coworker who has had decades of experiences in different labs voiced out her wise thoughts, “I would not throw this away. It’s unopened. I would test it out to see whether it will work on some not so important sample.” That’s exactly what I was thinking. We both happened to have worked in other laboratories barely supported with any funding before. We really know how “luxurious” it is to get to buy reagents just to get the research going.
She exclaimed, “Geez, these people have never been in a poor lab. Wait till they work in one and they’ll be so thankful to what they are having now!!”
Exactly. If we were living at the war or lack of resources era barely getting enough food to feed the stomach, do you think we’d be worrying about the extra calories we’ve just added to our body? If we needed to walk miles and miles to get from one point to the other, shouldn’t we be extremely grateful if we have just a vehicle that is good enough to transport us from point A to B now?
There’s nothing wrong in owning one of those high tech gadgets. There’s nothing wrong to eat well, as long as we don’t make it a habit of wasting resources because we’ll finish them one day. What are we going to leave for our next generation(s)? Eh, if our previous generation did this to us, we won’t be having so much fun right now. So be more grateful, peoples!
