Tag Archives: time

China – no fixed price

Posted on by

I have just got back from my trip to China.  My purpose in going was mainly for my kung fu and qigong teaching, to check out the schools there, gain ideas and inspiration, and prepare for when groups from my school may make trips there.  But I also found that I had a lot of experiences and saw a lot of things that gave me food for thought about the ‘give freely receive freely’ concept.

The Great Wall of China

One thing that was particularly relevant was that in China there is no fixed price on almost anything.  Almost everything is negotiable and the locals expect there to be some haggling before a final price is established at which an exchange will take place.  At one of the major markets the vendors will typically ask in the region of 10 times what they will actually accept for what they are selling.  Then a drawn out negotiation begins during which they will act like whatever price you suggest is ridiculous, tell you how other people they would normally quote a higher price for but for you they quoted a reasonable price, they will try and show you inferior products and suggest that maybe you could buy one of them instead, they will suggest a price not much lower than they initially offered, you walk away and then they call after you with a better price, they may act sad, angry etc and then eventually you come to a price you a both happy with.

Inside a market in Shanghai

The process can be entertaining I suppose, but also takes quite a bit of time.  On the two occasions when I tried to shorten the process and get to a price I was happy with faster (and KNEW I could get from experience with other stallholders), they wouldn’t sell to me.  It seems like in order to get a reasonable price I HAD to go through the charade, even though getting to a price we both new was reasonable faster would have saved both of us a lot of time and energy.  After awhile I began to avoid the markets because I didn’t want to put so much time and effort into a simple transaction, although I suppose I would still go there if there was something I really needed.

But it doesn’t stop there, even in the big flash department stores with marked prices on everything, apparently things are still negotiable.  It became very difficult to know what price to really expect for things.

The bright lights of East Nanjing Road, lots of upmarket big brand shopping.

The one exception was food.  I had a long conversation about this with a Chinese lady who  made sure to let me know that I should negotiate on absolutely EVERYTHING in China with the only exception being food, for food the price was the price.  She probably wasn’t aware that there was a slight proviso to that, the price is the price as long as you are CHINESE.  Probably 90% of the time or more I think the people selling me food just charged me the same price as they would anyone else, but there were a couple of occasions at fruit shops where I was charged far more than I should have been.  At one of these I know I was charged 10 times the price of a local, because I saw what a local was charged for the same items.  I could have entered into negotiations at this point to get a better price, but was quite bemused by the whole thing at the time so just paid the money and left.  But while I may have had more money than some of the locals, I certainly did not have enough that I would have been able to afford that price for food on a regular basis, so if I had been staying in the area I never would have bought from that shop again.

A fruit and vegetable stall at Deng Feng (not one of the ones I was ripped off at)

So how does this all tie in to the ‘give freely, receive freely’ concept?  Well for a start in many ways I liked there not being a fixed price, it provided a mechanism by which those with more could pay more and those with less could pay less.  A lot of the time I am sure that even with some hard bargaining I still paid considerably more than a local would, and I don’t mind that, because it was a price I could afford and was happy with.  The bargaining to reach a price though became tedious and time consuming.  So much energy was put into the transaction by both sides to make sure they got as much (or gave as little) as possible in the deal.  Surely we all would be better off if this energy was put into other productive things.  With give freely receive freely, no energy is expended on negotiation, meaning we all have more time and energy for the things we really want and need in life.

It is very hard for us to know the circumstances of everyone we deal with.  Sometimes the initial price quoted by a vendor would be so high it seemed ridiculous even to a westerner used to paying more in their home country.  They really seemed to have little conception of what would seem like a reasonable price to us.  On the other hand, for a foreigner it was very hard to tell where the true local price point was, because many things were so cheap that you could pay two or three times what a local would and still feel like you got a pretty good price.  Using a give freely receive freely approach means that we do not judge the circumstances of another but let them give according to what they can.  I wonder how some of the stall holders might have fared under such a system.  I know there were times when I would have gladly paid more for something, but the whole mindset of bargaining sets you up to try and get as low a price as you possibly can (or have the time and patience to bargain for).

I also respected the fact that for food at least the price was usually the price.  I think there is a basic human understanding  that there are certain things we need to survive so at least for those things we should deal fairly with each other.  While it was possible to pay a lot for food in China, there seemed to always be very cheap options as well, even in the big cities, that I think even the poor would have been able to afford.  For the most part I think I was treated decently by the people selling food in China, and I appreciated that.  Maybe the exceptions with the fruit could be due to fruit being viewed as a luxury?  I’m not sure about that.

Yummy noodles in Deng Feng, apparently the Henan province noodles are quite famous.

When we deal unfairly with someone in our community, it may make us a short term profit, but ultimately in the long run do us harm.  In the case of the fruit stands that charged excessively for what I bought from them, they would have really lost out if I had stayed in the area.  I eat quite a lot of fruit, but having been ripped of once, I would not go back to that shop, I would find somewhere that charged me fairly and they would get all my business.  I am sure this also has wider implications that will affect those involved even if they manage to only overcharge those who would not be returning to their shop anyway.  The world is all interconnected and our actions tend to have ripple effects.  Others would observe how the shop owner treated foreigners, and this in turn would shape their view of the shop owner and how they interact with them, I’m sure in the end there would be some effect even if not immediately – a bit like the concept of karma.

So all up China was an interesting and thought provoking experience.  There were many other things I saw or experienced while I was there that have a bearing on ‘give freely, receive freely’ too, but I think I will write about those more when I get to writing about various specific topics.

Is the love of money really the root of all evil?

Posted on by

You’ve probably heard the saying “The love of money is the root of all evil”.  It comes from the bible in 1 Timothy chapter 6 verse 10.  It’s quite a bold statement, identifying a single cause as the root of evil.  But is it true?  and if so why?

I think to understand the statement we need to look at it carefully.  It doesn’t say the love of good food is the root of all evil.  It doesn’t say the love of fast cars is the root of all evil.  It doesn’t say the love of houses, clothes, fashion, jewelry, holidays, entertainment, international travel or art is the root of all evil.  It specifically identifies love of MONEY as the root, not these other things which we sometimes associate with money implying perhaps that it is possible to love these other things without it leading to evil – but not money.

Whats wrong with money?

So whats wrong with money?  Well money is pretty useful in many ways, it is hard to imagine a means of exchange that would allow the for efficient movement of goods and services without some form of money, whether that be printed pieces of paper, chunks of metal, beads, or more recently recorded electronic data.  It would be hard to obtain many of the wonderful things we have available to us today if we had to directly trade goods and services with each other for everything we wanted.  I am not sure what Lenovo would want from me in exchange for this laptop I’m typing this post on, and I have no idea what I would trade directly with my internet provider for their services which I will use to upload this post to my blog.  Money allows us to participate in exchange for a wide variety of goods and services whether or not the provider of those goods and services wants anything we can provide because as long as we can exchange what we provide what someone else wants we can use money as a common denominator and medium of exchange.

When you think about it, money is actually pretty wonderful, so what is wrong with loving it?  I think the problem becomes apparent when we dig more into what money actually is.  Essentially money is ‘made up’, there is no intrinsic value in the electronic bits of data that represent money for most of us today.  If you try to eat it, you will gain no nutritional value.  If you try to use it to protect you from the weather, you will gain no shelter.  Money is an abstract representation of underlying value, BUT it does not truly have any value itself.

How does a money focus obscure or detract from true meaning and value?

I think when we begin to love money, we begin to separate ourselves from understanding and loving REAL things with REAL VALUE in our lives.  Essentially we start to miss the point and love something that is not real which leads us no longer understand the true value of things.

There are many examples of this in life which are easy to identify and for us to understand.

When an artist decides that they will create their art with a primary focus on how much money they will make from it, most people consider that this in someway debases and devalues their art.  It no longer has the depth of meaning, beauty and integrity of art that has been produced with some other primary motivation.  A classic example of this are the Hollywood movies where the decisions have made by executives with only money in mind, they may still be quite entertaining, but they end up being a bit bland and generic compared  to a film where someone has been allowed to express their own authentic creative vision.  Somehow they seem to lack soul.

The extreme example of this would have to be prostitution where sex is bought for money. While this is becoming legal in more and more parts of the world, most people still consider that this cheapens the experience of sex as it becomes separated from emotions of love, commitment and so on.  What physically takes place may be exactly the same, but because the motivation is money, somehow the meaning changes.

I think this general principle carries over into all areas of our lives.  Whatever we do purely for money is somehow cheapened and not as highly valued as the things we do for some other reason.

Of course there is no reason why you can’t earn money from doing the things you love, and I think this is true of the happiest people in this world.  They have found things that they love and feel good about doing, and found a way to be paid the money they need to get by in this world while doing it.  But if you asked them why they do what they do – they would not say it is for the money.  You might get answers along the lines of that they are following their passion, they like making a difference in people’s lives, it makes them feel good, they have a creative vision they want to fulfill and so on.  In fact you would likely find that these same people would be doing the things that they do even if there wasn’t any money involved because they appreciate the intrinsic value of it and happily they also get paid to do it.

The problem comes when money becomes the prime motivator, and this can occur even in areas where the individual previously had a non-monetary motivation.  When the focus shifts to the money, the value and meaning of the activity goes out of focus.  This often results in people doing things they don’t really want to do – for money.  They feel they just have to.  How many people work at jobs they hate and which seem to have little meaning for them, but they do it for the money?  It is likely that the job has value, and that they may even enjoy the job if they were able to reconnect with that value as their motivation; but the money focus takes the meaning out of it.

Also how many people would take food away from hungry people, or take someones house from them?  Very few, when these things happen there is usually an outcry because people sense the injustice of the situation and do not wish others to be harmed.  But how many people will allow someone to buy a product they cannot afford, or charge fees for services at a level that people who need them cannot pay?  Many people do every day.  Somehow the layer of abstraction and separation from meaning that money provides makes these things much more palatable as the effect on the other person is not as obvious.

And then of course there are those people who actively embrace their love for money and make it their prime objective.  Are these people happy?  They can seem that way at least for a while as they achieve a measure of success within their own definition.  But what are the things that really make us happy in this life?  The exact details are probably different for different people but I would guess there are a few common factors: good food, adequate shelter, good health, loving relationships with family and friends, a means of expressing yourself and believing that what you do has purpose and meaning.  I think all too often those who put money as their goal find at some point that they have sacrificed one or more of things in their pursuit of money.

How do we overcome this problem?

So how then do we overcome a love for money?  I think we need to connect or reconnect with the value and meaning of our actions.  When we do this we are more likely to act with integrity, compassion and passion.  I am sure that many people are able to do this within an ordinary job or payment system, but for many of us it is a real challenge as the constant need for ‘money’ even just to pay for the basics of food, shelter, clothing etc can cause us to take our eye off the real value of things.

Various religious orders have addressed this issue by swearing vows of poverty, renouncing all property and wealth and living only on the donations of others.  In this way they can be sure that their actions are not motivated by money.  These same religious orders tend to isolate themselves from the rest of the world so that they can concentrate on their prayer and meditation.

I think the ‘give freely, receive freely’ concept can give these same benefits without the same need for religiosity or isolation from the world.  In fact it encourages us to engage fully with the world around us and focus on giving as much of value as we can to the people we interact with, but as we do not know what we will receive in turn, it helps us to keep our focus on the true value of what we are doing isolate this from the exchange of money which may or may not take place as a result of this.

My experience

I know for myself as I have begun to experiment with giving and receiving freely in my clinical work I have found that it is easier for me to focus purely on the client and the treatment they are receiving.  I do not feel the same need to keep track of time, to make sure I don’t go overtime or equally to make sure that I fill the whole appointment time up so that they will get good ‘value for money’.  Instead I am able to focus more on exactly what they need.  If I have done all I feel is best for them at the moment and there is still time left, I don’t need to pad out the treatment – as they are only going to pay me what they want to anyway.  Equally I no longer have to think of my ‘time as money’ and make sure the client doesn’t take too much of it either.  Of course I still need to keep track of time from the point of view of scheduling and allowing the client to get to other appointments they may have as well, but not having a set price somehow removes this strong association between my time and money.

I really like that aspect of it.  Time really isn’t money, it is far more precious than that.  Removing money from the time equation makes each moment of life more alive and meaningful.

Conclusion

So is love of money really the root of all evil?  I think there is a really good case for saying that it is, especially if you put it into context as robbing actions of their true meaning and value as the root of all evil.

Does this mean we have to forsake money and all the good things we can obtain with it in order to overcome evil?  I don’t think so.  I want the good things in life, and I think it is healthy to have them, money makes exchange so flexible I think it can make it easier for more of us to obtain those good things.  They key is to find a way to be connected with the meaning and intrinsic value of what you do and not let the abstracted value of money take your focus away from what really matters in life and what really makes you happy.

I have painted a few things in pretty broad brushstrokes in this post.  I may have got a few things wrong, and hey – I’m just new to this concept of exchange myself, I’m sure there is a lot more I will learn as I continue to experiment with it and my views on things may change.  But what are your thoughts on this topic?  Please feel free to leave comments below.