Abstract
This study investigates the elements that drive living a life in moderation or a life within a balance and not in extremes. These drivers include the benefits of living such a life (i.e., saving money, having a better quality of life, environmental preservation), role models (i.e., parents, the adoption of the sufficiency economy of King Bhumibol, and the company and the government), learning about the sufficiency economy in school, Buddhism, and advertising exposure through the media. The data were collected from interviews with 359 moderate adults that were at least 18 years of age and that had come to the randomly-selected shopping centers in Bangkok. The results from the multiple regression analysis indicated that saving money and learning about the sufficiency economy in school and from one’s parents were the positive drivers of living a life in moderation. The sole negative driver of living a life in moderation was the exposure to advertising through the media. Older people were seen to be more moderate than younger people and the never-married were more moderate than those that were married.
Highlights
Moderation can bring a feeling of calm to all areas of our lives, including our finances, while the opposite of moderation is living in extremes
Saving is one of the key factor that drives us to be moderate in consumption, but there are several other positive factors that affect moderation and that deserve to be investigated, which is a main focus of this study
The earlier-mentioned independent variables, as well as the demographic characteristics, including gender, age, marital status, education, and household income, which were used as the independent variables because they were used as the controllable variables, were regressed on moderation in life, which was used as the dependent variable
Summary
Moderation can bring a feeling of calm to all areas of our lives, including our finances, while the opposite of moderation is living in extremes. We need to be able to find moderation with our finances by saving money but at the same time we need to spend reasonable amounts of our income on things that we enjoy and that will bring us happiness— creating a balance in our lives. This will allow us to never reach the point of having so much money and not having the time to use it wisely or on the other hand to reach the point where we are in huge debt and are forced to spend all our money paying it off. In this study, life lived in moderation is hypothesized to be motivated by several positive factors and the negative factor of media exposure
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