Whether you like it or not, you probably spend a lot of your daily life thinking about money. I do too. Every time I start my car, or get a haircut, or buy a new book, a fraction of my bank account dissolves into the wider economy, leaving me slightly poorer than I was before. It seems strange to me, then, that something so important to our daily lives (money) is so often touted as unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Why is it that we are told that “money isn’t everything” if almost everything costs money? In this article, we’ll drill down to what money really does for us, and—consequently—how we should orient ourselves in order to achieve a fulfilling life, whether that be through financial means or otherwise.
Naturally Aspirated
If you gave me unlimited money and ten seconds to buy a car, I would probably choose a manual transmission Porsche 911 GT3 RS. It’s not the best car in the world by any specific metric, but it’s a sleek, formidable machine. Therefore, if I woke up tomorrow and saw one in my driveway, I’d probably be quite happy.
Imagine something similar happening to you. Imagine you wake up and suddenly have a mansion, or a supercar, or a massive yacht. I suspect you’d be pretty excited, but—whether or not you choose to acknowledge it—there’d soon come a time when you no longer appreciated these luxuries as much. This process of hedonic adaptation is the same reason why your “New Phone” becomes your “phone”, or your “Dream Job” becomes “work”.
Everyone, even those with stupidly-large quantities of money, are subject to this adaptation, making it very difficult to derive sustainable happiness from an unchanging level of status or convenience.
Why, then, does the average person wish they had these things?
The answer to this question is actually pretty simple: the average person can’t afford a mansion, or a supercar, or a massive yacht. Oftentimes, people believe they are dissatisfied because they don’t own these things, but—in reality—their dissatisfaction stems from the fact that they don’t have the choice to do so. The same can be said for work: having lots of money would give you the option to quit your job and do nothing all day long, but it wouldn’t necessarily force you to.
Perhaps, then, on some deep level, wealth can be represented not by the accumulation of money or possessions, but by the abundance of choice. On the surface, this seems to make sense, but there a few problems with this proposal…
Optionality Blur
In the modern world, many of us are lucky enough to live in countries where we suffer from too many choices.
We’re given too many options of things to buy, and so we accumulate credit card debt. We’re given too many hyper-stimulating ways to spend our time, and so we rarely go deep into any one activity. We’re given too many people to interact with over the internet, and so we form fewer, less-meaningful relationships.
This phenomenon has become more noticeable to me as I read Greg McKeown’s Essentialism. Put simply, the message of McKeown’s book is this:
“[Essentialism] is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at your highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”
The more I think about it, the more I believe in the validity of this approach. We live with constant access to a near-infinite expanse of data, but—paradoxically—it’s probably best to shut most of it out. The more activities, hobbies, and commitments we take on, the less effort we can dedicate to each one of them individually. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t live varied lives, but rather that we should stringently regulate the allocation of our time in order to better achieve this variety.
Why Try?
With this in mind, you might be prompted to think: why bother creating anything new? Why should we develop novel medical treatments, or write ground-breaking books, or create more powerful computers, if all these technologies simply pollute our lives with an excess of choice? At first, the association of wealth with choice seems to contradict McKeown’s ideas, but it’s not that clear-cut:
Judge a person’s wealth by the number of choices they have. Judge a person’s effectiveness by the number of extraneous options they reject.
Note that simply rejecting options does not make someone effective, but rejecting extraneous options that serve to distract them from their biggest priorities. Implicit in this is the idea that we can improve our lives, but that it’s best to do so by substitution instead of addition whenever possible. Therefore, there is no reason to stop generating options for ourselves as long as we remain disciplined during the selection process.
It's not possible to make the most of every single opportunity you will ever encounter in life. Conversely, it’s inadvisable to pursue one activity, relationship, or commitment at the expense of all others. Strike the right balance between these two opposites, however, and you can prosper beyond belief.
Never stop thinking.
- Will