Life Expectancy!

Life's Span

Having already spent nearly half of my life – if men could live only until 60 years old like the prediction in the list of United Nations, I have just finished my BBA degree at PSE Institute. I still have many things that I want to achieve through this long life time. I also guess that I will have to face a lot of unexpected circumstances and challenges in the future, so life is all about struggling. Once I was in my second year, I was taking a course called managerial economy. This course is all about economic situations in management. It tells us a lot about the world. I got really interested in one theory from Alfred Marshall, whose idea was truly recognized in 1890.

"Economy is the study of how society manages its scarce resources to satisfy unlimited human needs and wants." was written and mentioned in his book “Principles of Economics" in 1890. I observed this idea to be really true in human life. Thinking deeply about this theory and reflecting on human life, I found one simple yet well-known and exceptional idea about life expectancy.  Only if we could think and understand how this theory works, would we be able to have a greater effect to our own life, see the depth of meaning inside Marshall's theory, and use fully the potential in our life.

Visit at Shanghai Science & Technology Museum

To describe the idea that I found from his theory, I have already put bold words – society (we are like a society here in this statement), scarce resources (it is like our life), and unlimited human needs and wants – to make it remarkable and visible, and the explanation here is that the economy is like the study of how we ourselves manage our scarce resources to satisfy our unlimited needs and wants. Of course, we cannot manage to be born in a rich, noble, and or king family. It is fantastically easy to think that when we were born to a family, we bring nothing with us for our new life, and even when we die, we also bring nothing along with us, so life starts from nothing and ends with nothing as well. No-one in this world will live forever without death. Everyone has to face it one day in life. There is one thing that has no end is our unlimited needs and wants, yet due to the fact that our life is limited, we have to use it wisely and fruitfully in order to meet our needs and wants.

According to the Wikipedia site cited from the List of the United Nations, for 2005–2010, Cambodia was tagged in rank 152 in the world in term of life expectancy, having only 60 for male and 62 year-old for female while Japan is on top of the list, with 79 for male and 86 year-old for female. So, what does this mean? Reflecting on the above theory, we (Just in case you are Khmer as the example was about Khmer) can already see that we have already spent nearly 30 years, which is half of our life just for studying – from primary school, through high school, to university – to gain more knowledge and will have to surely spend some more years for work and family life; therefore, how many years remaining for the rest of our life to help our family, society, community, country, and especially human beings. What if we fail to manage our life time since the beginning of our life to the time we are autonomous. That is a critical question we are to ask ourselves.

With that in mind, we should use our time lucratively to reach what we wish for life, and the most important thing in our life is to find who we are, what we like our life to be, and how we want to get our life to be. If we could do so, our life expectancy will be worth enough and it will be likely for us to live a meaningful life.