Note taking from Asian speaker on ted talk

Life is easy. Why do we make it so hard

by  Jon Jandai

summarized by Najmiatul Fauza

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21j_OCNLuYg

The phrase that he always want to say to every body in his life is life is easy and fun ‘  he never thought it before. When he was in Bangkok , he felt like life is very hard and complicated. He was born in poor village in Northeastern of Thailand. When he was kid everything was fun and easy before the TV came, after that many people came to the village and said to him” you are poor, you need to follow success and you need to go to Bangkok to pursue success  in your life”

Then he went to Bangkok, but the situation not like what other people said, he had to work very  hard, eight hours per day at least, but all he could eat was a bowl of noodles or some Tama dish of fried rice or something like that, and also the place that he stayed was also very bad. He started to question a lot, “when I work hard why is my life so hard?. It must be something wrong because  he produces a lot of things, but he cannot get enough. Then he tried to study at university, it also very hard and very boring. When he saw the subject every faculty, most of them have destructive knowledge there was no productive knowledge for him,

If you learn to be an architect or engineer that mean you ruin more, the more these people worked the more mountain will be destroyed.

If you learn agriculture or something like that, that means we learn how to poison, the land ,the water and learn to destroy everything. He feels that everything that he has done are complicated and hard.

Life was so hard and disappointed, then he think” why did  I have to be in Bangkok” he thought when he was a kid, no body worked eight hours a day, they always worked two hours per day,two months per year , the rest was free time. They have alot of free time that’s why people in Thailand have so many festival. They have a lot of time to be with themselves and they have time to understand themselves. When they understand themselves they can see what they want in their life, to be happy etc.

Because of that he quit the study and went back home, than he remembered how was his life when he was a kid, he started to work two months a year, planting the rice and he got 4 tons of rice, he and his family only spent one ton for food, and the entire rice he sold . And he also had small garden with many varieties of vegetable and he also got a lot of income from that. Now he realized why he came to Bangkok work so hard and had not enough food to eat, but here, only two months a year he could feed six people. That’s easy

He also thought that he could not build the house, because he had low education. He saw his cleaver classmate had to work 30 years to build a house. Then he think of building earthly house, he spent three months to build a house and his friend also can build a house for three months but with paying the debt for 30 years. To compare to him, he has 29 years and ten months of free time, life is easy, he keeps building house every year at least one house, although he has no money but he has many houses.

The next thing is clothing, because he felt not handsome  so, he tried to dress like a movie star to make himself look good. He spent one month to save money to buy a pair of jeans. The most expensive pants could not change our life, then he think why he should buy them. At that time he stopped following fashion, just be yourself. He never buy any clothes again but a lot of people gave him so many clothes. Life is easy.

Last thing when he got sick what will he do? He worried because he had no money, then he started contemplate more. Sickness is a normal thing, it’s not a bad thing. Sickness is something to remind us that we did some thing wrong in our lives that’s why we got sick.then he turned back and realized what something wrong that he had done. He used water, earth and basic knowledge to heal himself.

The four basic needs food, house, clothes and medicine must be cheap.

If anybody want to have a choice, you can have a choice, to be easy or to be hard it depends on you. I think this speech can give as motivation to care more about nature.