Rich vs Poor

Not too long ago there was this article on the civil servant spending a very expensive holiday with his family in France. There was a great uproar from the public - some felt that he should not have done so given the current recession while others felt that he had a right to how he want to spend his money.

I begin to understand how some people are so upset with his expensive holidays. Basically nobody can stop you from spending money. However, please be humble and think about the poor before you go round publicising about your expensive holidays.

I suddenly remembered this primary school classmate. I have a lot of Indonesian Chinese friends in my class when I was in primary school. And from what all of us know all Indonesian Chinese are rich. I remembered going to this classmate's house to do project and she shown us a blueprint of a villa which is named after her. At that point of time, all of us were like "WOW". Being kids and Singaporeans living in HDB flats, we were all full of envy. However I did not feel that she was trying to "show off" when she shared that piece of information with us. She was just trying to share with us about her life in Indonesia. She is a humble girl and so is her family.

I guess in order to be humble it have to be link to your own values and and upbringing. Unfortunately this kind of values is really lacking in current days. Sad to say that I have friends that are behaving like that "civil servant" and I really wondered if they understand what it means to be poor. What it feels to be living in a rental flat and surviving on only a few hundreds dollars per month.

Of course people may push all these thoughts aside and say that they are only using their own money and they are not doing anything illegal. But I guess if you are more humble, people will not view you like that "civil servant". So maybe it will be good if you can think about others before you declare your next adventure to the whole world.