We all need it. We all want it. We all live our lives by the come and go of it. And it does… come and go. It comes to us when we work for it, or when we steal for it, or when we unexpectedly do nothing for it. Maybe it’s a cheque from the government. Or from a family member. Maybe we sold something. Whatever the source and reason, money comes into our lives, homes, pockets and into our bank accounts.
It also goes away. It leaves. We send it away. We spend it, or we lose it, or we gamble it. Whatever happens, it never stays around for long. Maybe we invest it. And we end up with a little more. Or we invest it and we end up with a little less. Money is fluid. It can dry up. It can flow freely. We never know for sure if it’s going to come or go. And it’s always risky when it comes to knowing what we should do with our money.
So just the other night I was out getting gas. My car was outside getting filled and I was standing inside the gas station store waiting to pay. There was one other customer before me. She paid and she left. A minute later, a younger couple came in and the woman handed the gas store guy a slip of paper and asked if he could check her lottery ticket. He took it from her, scanned it in the lottery machine and the digital display suddenly lit up with bells and whistles and woohoo sounds.
The screen then flashed “WINNER: $50,000!”
You should have seen her face. You should have heard her scream! She jumped up and down and clawed at her face and clapped her hands. Great BIG squeals of joy! She kept exclaiming that she couldn’t believe it. And her boyfriend just stood there and smiled. He took it all in stride. I gave them both a high-five. I was SO HAPPY for her! What a moment to witness. I wondered what she would do next. And then she wondered what she would spend it all on. This spoke to me. It made me speak up and suggest that she not think like that; that it would all be gone before she knew it.
I said it had happened to me.
Twice in my life I have come into large sums of money. And both times I fell into a pattern of thinking obsessively about how I could spend it. I would wake up each day and think about what else I could buy to make my life ‘better’. And after indulging these impulses, I eventually learned two things. First, that I didn’t really ‘need’ those things… and secondly, that the money goes fast and that I wished I had saved the money for my real needs.
There is a difference between needs and wants.
We can reduce our wants to better know our needs. We can do this by denying ourselves those impulse buys. We need to recognize the pattern of thinking that leads us to them. I think it comes in thoughts of “Hey, I could sure use that!” Or maybe it’s “Wouldn’t that be nice to have for something? I could do something with that that I have never done before”. So what happens here is that we create a need in our minds that meets the thing we think we should buy. An example would be how I thought I would like to have a bike rack for the back of my car. It cost $200. I told myself I could take my bike and my kid’s bikes to different places to go bike riding.
But, this wasn’t something we really needed to do. My kids were perfectly happy to ride their bikes from home as we have always done. But we tried. And it wasn’t a big success. So the bike rack got used only once. And eventually I sold it for half of what I paid for it. We didn’t really need the bike rack. I only wanted it… because I talked myself into why I should have it. But if one of our bikes got broken or stolen, then we would have needed another bike. That would have been something that I could have better spent that money on, if I had saved it for that.
It’s hard sometimes to know what our needs are and what our wants are. We live in a world where our thinking is heavily influenced every day by ideas of what we should be buying to make our lives better. Advertising is everywhere. We are connected and dependent on all sorts of media, whether it be social or entertainment, and advertising dominates our experiences there.
And I feel like this has gotten out of hand.
Years ago I unsubscribed from cable tv service. I didn’t see why I should be paying to watch advertising. Online streaming services were relatively new then, and they were advertising-free. That however has begun to change now. More and more streaming services are including advertising and asking that you pay more to not have it. This to me is greedy and insane. It perpetuates a world where we become mindless consumers who lose any value of quality of life and living and any appreciation for what the world has to offer.
I do not think that we need money to enjoy life. We need money to sustain life. We need food and shelter. We need resources and services that support our health and well-being. Everything else is a distraction from our needs. Not to say that we can’t get some enjoyment from those distractions, but in the end it’s only stuff. And you can’t take it with you when you die. And having more stuff, doesn’t mean having more life.
It only means living less by your needs being met.
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