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At amphur Amphawa, Samut Songkhram, you can see a floating market and the traditional Thai life. There, sufficiency living is the way of life. About 20 kilometres away, you enter another province, Ratchaburi, home to the world famous Damnoen Saduak Floating Market. While the Amphawa Floating Market caters to local people, the Damnoen Saduak Floating Market attracts many foreign visitors, who are charmed by the waterborne merchants selling their farm produce and souvenirs from boats.

Both floating markets are unique and may look similar on the surface. But as a Thai, you immediately tell a difference. The Amphawa market is more easy-going, kinder and gentler, while the Damnoen Saduak Market is noisier, busier and more business-like. The Amphawa market is less tainted by capitalism. Everything there is less pricey than at Damnoen Saduak, which has embraced capitalism in full force.

The Amphawa Floating Market has only come along in recent years. It started with an old lady paddling her boat along the sleepy Amphawa khlong selling Thai desserts. Somebody asked how much money she was making every day. She replied: "Sometimes I make money, sometimes I don't make any money. But money is not important. I am happy paddling along and going from place to place selling desserts. I want the Thai people to taste my desserts. I don't want to sell to the foreigners."

That was the old lady's innocent reply. But local authorities encouraged more boats on the same khlong over the weekend so that Amphawa could create a floating market. Gradually, more people brought boats to Amphawa and started to sell their wares and brought local tourists to see fireflies at night. Local banks also lent support by providing credit for small shops. Thus the Amphawa Floating Market came into being.

The people at Amphawa work during weekdays or have other businesses to attend to. But on Friday evening and over the weekend, they join the floating market by opening shops from their wooden homes. At a corner near the bridge across from the market, there is public karaoke where locals display their singing and dancing talent. You can enjoy good central Thai food there and buy local gifts at half the price as in Bangkok. You can sit and talk to the local people and they will tell you wonderful stories about their lives.

At Damnoen Saduak Floating Market, most of the shops cater to foreign tourists who come on buses from Bangkok. The local merchants do not have a pleasant look, unlike their counterparts at Amphawa. They are under more pressure to make money.

Which brings us to the question of the purpose of our life, or of our community. Should we live for happiness or should we live to make money? At Amphawa the people appear to set their aims at happiness first and money second, while at Damnoen Saduak there is a higher money consciousness. This is my general observation of the two floating markets, and it should not be regarded as a scientific discovery.

His Majesty the King has been telling us to live a sufficient life and be happy. If we know how to live sufficiently, we will demand less. And if we avoid vices and craving for world's pleasures (sil), we will have concentration (smathi). If we have concentration, we will have wisdom (panya).

This is a great philosophy of life, a living principle of Buddhism. We all have a different role to play in society. But at a certain point in life, we should learn to know when enough is enough, and to live a sufficient life.

Once back to Bangkok, you immediately plunge back into the mode of making money, without knowing when enough is enough. Global capitalism is falling apart because of greed. Most financial funds and banks are losing money because they expect unrealistic returns, accompanied by great risk. Those who lost money or life savings in the Ponzi scheme run by Bernie Madoff in the US were lured by the promise of a 12-per-cent return every year. A French nobleman shot himself to death because he lost more than US$1.5 billion (Bt53 billion) in Madoff's scheme.

The world will continue to face the boom and bust cycle of capitalism. The scale of the damage is becoming bigger, to the point where a sovereign country can easily go bankrupt. Capitalism will not go away, because greed is the dark side of human beings. It will find its way back, even though governments will introduce legislation and regulations to tame it. The problem won't go away.

If nations are to adopt sufficiency economic theory by putting happiness derived from sil, smathi and panya first before sheer greed, we will have a chance of creating a more peaceful world.

If you know the level of wealth you are happy living under, you'll be happy with yourself and adjust around that sufficient context. This is the Thai way of life that has been forgotten and that should be revived. Perhaps this should be the way of the world too.