Common sense is not so common

common senseWhat do you do when you see the train coming? Common sense tells you to stay away from the tracks.

What happens when you are short of cash? Do not spend.

It’s just common sense.

A lot of people have no common sense. They need people to tell them what to do. In the USA, the rich pay financial advisors to teach them how to invest. The obese have  to pay more money to nutritionists to teach them what food to eat. The wealthy hire personal shoppers to shop for them. People usually get an interior decorator to decorate their houses for them. What a waste of money. Why would you hire and pay people to tell you what to do? Why would you let people choose things for you?  This could be done by what you call common sense.

If you know you are overweight, you need to stop and examine what you are eating; if not, go to a medical provider to find out why you cannot lose weight. A normal person usually would maintain his/her weight if an adequate amount of food is consumed everyday which is proportional to the body’s requirement. The extra calories are stored if not burned by any activities. If your energy level is higher than your calorie intake, expect weight loss. It is common sense to eat less and behooves you to understand weight management without the help of an expert.

If your salary is just enough for your household, learn the art of budgeting and proactively make plans for your future. Why wait for a disaster to happen before saving? Why wait for a calamity to happen before setting some funds for emergency situations?

Do not waste your time and money or any resources you have at hand. Use your time wisely instead of talking to somebody to tell you what to do. Use your funds wisely by doing things on your own. Why would you pay an interior decorator to decorate your home? That means it is the interior decorator’s taste, not yours!

Why waste your time  going to church every Sunday, or maybe every Wednesday, Sunday or feast of whatever patron saint? In short, why waste too much time inside the church? Are you sure somebody can hear you besides the altar boy lurking in between the pews?  Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.  (Anonymous).

In my personal opinion,  we don’t need the Church to dictate what is moral because we have our intellect and reason to determine that.  We have mental faculties to decipher which behavior is acceptable or not. We are all rational human beings, capable of changing the world.  Each of us has about 100 billion neurons in our brain; why waste them? Think, think, think… the brain is a terrible thing to waste. Do not cloud your mind with ideas that do not make sense at all. Try some mental exercise and ask yourself, “am I using my common sense in my choices in life?”

Wake up, common sense is not so common, but choose to use it anyway!

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.

George Bernard Shaw

10 comments

  1. Get laid, have a good sleep, and get a life! It's the best way to spend your late nights, instead of thinking too much how should rich people spend their money…use your other head,..or your other mouth more often.

  2. There's common sense and there's specialization. It is common sense to recognize that there are people better than yourself at a lot of things, and some so much so that they make a living doing these things, like investing, keeping fit, decorating a home. It is my opinion that common sense dictates to not try everything without the assistance of an expert. It is common sense to ask for advice.

    I take it from this post that you feel a lot of people do not share your standards of thinking, and that you feel frustrated that people do not already know the information we take for granted. I imagine this is a common source of frustration when in surrounded by people less educated or enlightened, which is why like minded people seek each other out. But it should say nothing about what is or is not common sense. By its definition alone, common sense is, and will always be, common. Whether or not this is up to your standards is entirely up to you.

  3. If you are lazy enough to use your own commons sense, is it not a sort of common sense also to hire (if you have emough funds) anybody with a lots of common sense to do it for you. It is also using ones commons sense in choosing the right kind of people. On the other hand, the Church is not dictating us or anybody else in the world now to what is moral. It is up to any of us to accept those things (Church statement of their doctrine) or not. Even if you hired the Church to find the truth for you (a bad choice), you will find out later in your life that those "truth" are not or cannot be practice consistently resulting to more confusion and contradiction to your natural common sense. If you hire a man of science to find the truth, then you made a right choice. By the way, what is common sense? Five senses are all common to us human beings (sense of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell). It is the starting (first stage) point of our knowledge. It is on the next higher stage that is not common to all–that is abstraction, concept formation. We shared the first stage with the lower animals. But the second stage the animals do not have it.

  4. I think common sense should be used described as degrees of practice instead of either having it or not. Just for the sake of inclining people to "practice" it so that they won't get offended by statements like "they don't have common sense". 😀

    Although with Finance, informed knowledge is better. Never leave it up to someone else, you can listen to advice but never get the notion that someone told you how to spend your money. Because if risks don't pan out, psychology it will be hard to disassociate the failure to the person; when actually it is a problem of not understanding one's own errors.

    There are a number of books and science available about finance, The difference is in examples and emphasis by the authors and studies.

    Kudos!

  5. The sentiments of this article are good, but it seems to oversimplify things. For example, I wouldn't really say that financial investing can be addressed with common sense.

    The rich can argue that why would they spend time managing their $100m, when they can just hand that over to a financial institution, and let it grow. Then they can spend their time doing what they enjoy doing in life. Same with personal shoppers. Or decorators. They're probably hiring not because they want people to tell them what to do, but to let other people do things for them.

    Common sense is a tricky phrase. If we use the definition "what most people would agree as sound judgment", then we should all believe in a "God". I guess what your statement "common sense is not so common" is trying to say is that the common sense of people is not really as sound or good as most people think, and you want people to think more. And to that I agree with. But I wouldn't use "common sense", I'd probably prefer reason or science. There are a lot of counter-intuitive things in life that we don't want to leave to common sense.

    • I agree with you about investing. this is for the "everyday Juan" with few pesos in their pockets.
      When your net worth is over 50Million PHP, absolutely, you need to hire experts to guide you with financial vehicles/investments, and that is also common sense.
      I purposely oversimpified this topic, so people can understand that it is not difficult to manage your funds when you do not have much yet.
      When you address the public, simple terms are better used.
      Thanks for the reply.

    • They’re probably hiring not because they want people to tell them what to do, but to let other people do things for them”

      Spot On…. that is exactly what it is…. and I like Your common sense, as well as rich peeople’s common sense in letting others do a better job FOR them…

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