Leave With Nothing
Recently, I’ve been increasingly fascinated by research on the correlation between money and happiness. Logically, intuition suggests that money and the opportunities it affords play an important role in happiness. Undoubtedly, access to wealth can provide access to enjoyable experiences, material possessions and increased security. However, Psychologists often cite empirical evidence showing an exiguous relationship between wealth and happiness, and conclude that money is unimportant for happiness. In fact, they argue that beyond a certain amount of money, it doesn't make one’s life any better. While this is open to debate and certainly not the underpinning message of this write-up, it serves as a preamble to the main message.
It is no news that in modern society, we are beguiled into trading our time for money. A huge amount of us live in the paradigm where we have to trade our time by way of work in order to earn money which in turn affords us material needs and wants. While this is norm for most people, the trap is that we are seduced into undertaking more work so as to afford more material things. As such, the opportunity cost is that we forgo the very essence of living by being too busy earning.
Once we become accustomed to earning money, we often lose sight of the fact that money itself isn’t the be-all and end-all of human existence. Instead, the very essence of life is to accumulate meaningful experiences. In an ideal world, we’d simply trade our life energy for meaningful experiences. However, the harsh reality is that we must first make money in order to survive, and then enjoy the aforementioned experiences. As a result, we must exchange our life energy (in the form of work) for money, creating the ideal process flow of Life Energy → Work → Money → Access to Fulfilling Experiences. However, most of us tend to omit the final part. Like the proverbial Ant, we spend more time labouring/gathering, and very little time enjoying our fruits of labour before we age or die.
Bill Perkins highlights this point in his book Die with Zero. He argues that the minute we attain financial security, our focus must be on quality of life, not our bank balance. The book is premised on the idea that we should aim to have zero balance in our bank account, ‘give or take’, by the time we die. Anything more than that might mean one has lived sub-optimally. It infers that any money that we haven’t converted into fulfilling experiences (or given away) by the time we die represents wasted life energy. Furthermore, it stresses that expending one’s life energy on making more money when one is financially secure makes zero sense.
Most people might object to this and understandably so, particularly when it comes to leaving behind inheritance for one’s children. However, a school of thought also argues that - “if you raise your child to be useless why give them money; if you raise your child to be useful why do they need money”. Better yet, it is perhaps sensible to discard the age-old tradition of donating money to our children whilst on our deathbeds. A windfall of money is helpful, but with the average age of inheritance being 60, a windfall begins to question its own usefulness at such age. So give your children money while you’re still alive and able to them channel it towards an impactful life for themselves. The same goes for charity - there is so much inequality in the world at present, so engage in more charitable things while you’re still here and able to make an impact on the lives of others.
Remember - “For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it” - 1 Timothy 6:7
Peace, Love and Light,