Economics of life

Life is not perfect.
You can’t satisfy everyone, can’t do everything, with good quality, because scarcity exists.
Everyday we are forced to make decisions as a result of limited resources (materials, and even notion of time) yet so many demands. Scarcity limit us to how much we can buy, consume, and spend. Thus we need to make choices, prefer doing one task or buy one thing over the other…ultimately constructing our economic behaviors, our economic way of life. Hence the key to better economic way of life is balance.

To help us make better decisions require understanding each choice’s benefits and consequences. Thus a better decision often gives the most benefits (satisfy more of your needs/desire, more incentives) with you spending the least amount of scarce resources (good quality at low price)…this thinking thus forms the basis of our economic life. Making better decision often require risks analysis, thinking further to evaluate whether the decision you make today will have positive return (ie. Bringing more benefits to you) in the future. A high risk choice will likely limit or narrow your beneficial decisions in the future.

One concept people often ignore is that with every decision you make in life has trade-offs (capitol loss). For instance, if you spend two hours overtime to fulfill your work task today, you ended up losing two hours family time with your children and wife, or friends. So no matter how what choice you made, there is always something you cannot recover from. If everyone follows economic principles, lose is inevitable in all decisions made, the question is simply how much you lose.

Back to balance. To live in a economic life is to seek balance between trade-offs, between quantitative choices versus qualitative. However, as technology and (as a result of technology) secularism prospers…the world today exists in an imbalance between quantitative needs over the qualitative. This is evident in a major social problems that we face today - “time-sickenss” (doing everything fast) as a result of hot-pursuit for efficiency. As an architect, one who believes in balance, the world we exist today is overly charged with quantitative over qualitative aspect of living, the lack of so called the mind nourishment. The subject of qualitative properties is rarely discussed especially in architecture because of its ambiguity/subjectivity. We often think that people feel better in one house than the other because of their own background, demographics, experience, etc, things that architects have no control or prediction of, However, ironically, as technology progresses, our understanding of human brain increases, we begin to unravel the truth about sensations and feelings. With MRI technology, we can now accurately pinpoint what causes particular emotion to occur in what part of our brain, thus realizing the fact that emotions can be triggered, or manufactured more consistently, something that is no longer purely random and subjective. Experiments involving exposing certain object to several people and understand their emotional reactions to each object, in attempt to rationalize what causes those emotions. But I am aware qualitative should remain subjective, or else it would not be considered qualitative anymore, thus unable to achieve the quantitative/qualitative balance that I am hoping to achieve initially. However, with new interdisciplinary¬¬ knowledge in neurology, neuroeconomics, I hope to understand human decisions through the emotional side of their brain, in better hope for an architecture that could tap deeper into the minds of the inhabitants, to make us slow down, embrace temporary randomness, to savor every moment of the unexpected (by offering surprising returns/experiences that is specific to site and time), as an attempt to strike a balance in this imbalanced over-quantitative economic way of life.

How to fabricate slowness sensation, how to manufacture mind provocations, not simply visual provocations?
How can architecture have deeper impact beyond its material/visual existence, to influence our sensual and mind experiences? How people understand there is something beyond simply what they see, what is that “something” which drives their experiences?