Category: Featured Article English

In today’s consuming culture, most people wouldn’t mind having more money to spend. But while money matters in life, ie for meeting basic needs, always wanting more, or having more and spending more may not necessarily be a good thing. Too much money shatters one’s life. That’s no preachy philosophy, but an emerging scientific verdict from a growing body of research today. Based on...

On 31 May 2018, the late Sarawak developer, Ting Peh Khiing famous for the Bakun Dam project announced that he would be launching a RM30 billion development project to be built on reclaimed land off the west side of Langkawi island on 01 June 2018. Called the Langkawi New City project, it would be located on 81 hectares of reclaimed land. The proposed project was envisioned to be a high-end...

Consumer culture was promoted in the 1950s to create demand for the factories that came with industrialisation. It become the new "religion", where even spiritual satisfaction was invoked, and we were asked to consume and waste as much as possible for economic growth. It created a new generation of consumers and led us to face the many environmental, spiritual and existential problems that we...

Economic growth is now sacrosanct all over the world. All governments adopt it and most citizens just accept it. Governments don't pay the price and keep doing the easy sell to their citizens. Economists do creative accounting and externalise all the social and environmental costs that citizens bear. If all the externalities are added (or rather deducted), in the calculation of GDP, the...

Industrialists, governments, advertisers and PR agencies want us to believe that consumption is the way to attain happiness. We are made into consumers to keep the factories and economic activities flourishing. Chasing status and materialism by consumption. Buying unnecessary goods, getting new models, getting miracle products... the cycle never ends and our greed is never satisfied. And the...