People have strange conceptions about money.
When we don’t have it, we often believe that money will make us happier. When we do have money,
however, we tend to want more. The odd thing is that we all know, at least intellectually, that
money won’t buy happiness.
But unfortunately, we’ve been steeped in a
culture so heavily mediated that we’ve started believing the lies. The
cars, the houses, with me the whisky collection - living the so-called Dream will make us happy. But of course this is not true. The opposite, however, is also not true. A life of poverty - a life of perpetual deprivation—isn’t joyous either.
You see, there’s nothing inherently wrong with money,
just as there’s nothing innately wrong with material possessions or
working a 9-to-5. We all need some stuff, and we all have to pay the
bills, right? It’s just that when we put money and possessions first, we
lose sight of our real priorities. We lose sight of life’s purpose.
A common mistake we tend to make is that we often assign money as our primary driver of happiness: If I make £X, then I’ll be happy. Once this happens though—once we earn £X - we quickly discover that the
equation is broken. There is, after all, a reason why most lottery
winners end up broke: bad habits. Besides, there are plenty of miserable millionaires and countless happy poor folks. A much better conductor of individual contentment, then, has little to do with money: our daily habits. Said another way, the outcome of better habits is more rewarding than your income will ever be.
We have a much better chance of radically improving our
happiness by just changing our habits—by forming new, empowering daily
rituals. And we needn’t earn exorbitant amounts of cash to do so. High income or no, we must avoid passivity in favor of active, engaged, deliberate tasks. We must acknowledge our mistakes, make the right direction-changing decisions, and then take incremental actions each day. Over time, as we move further in the right direction, we’ll be able to wave at our bad habits in the rear-view, happy and content, driving toward a more meaningful horizon.
And so maybe getting some of the excess stuff out of the way - clearing
the clutter from our lives - can help us all save money and make room for
the most important things in life: health, relationships, growth,
contribution, community.
This is all, of course, not as easy as it sounds. But, then again, it’s simpler than we may think. In this case... because money helps accentuate the most important things in life, but
the size of our wallet is much less important once our priorities are
in line with your beliefs, I will raise a dram of That Boutique-y Whisky Company (Bruichladdich, 15yrs, 420 bottles) tonight.
Slàinte mhath.
