Yes, you do need money to live. But you don’t need as much as most people think. And after a certain point you end up working to maintain a “lifestyle” that really isn’t fulfilling. You get a bigger house to hold all the junk you own and half your money goes to the government for tax or pays interest on loans you take out to buy things on credit.
Consider:
– you rent and buy DVD’s or go to movies. Why not reserve them a week in advance and pick them up at the library for free? (I’m not sure if you can do this everywhere, but you can in North Vancouver). Sure, the movies you see may be “out of style” by about 3 months, but there are so many movies made these days that most people don’t see many anyway.
– just how fancy a car do you really need? Are heated seats really that important? Do you really need blue lights under your car or a stereo system that costs more than a trip to Europe?
– you can eat far healthier by cooking for yourself instead of eating half your meals in restaurants. And way, way cheaper.
– instead of going for a run along the beach, you spend money to join a gym and then never actually go. Is this sensible?
– instead of reading books from the library, you buy books that sit on your lighted bookshelf that you forget to ever even open.
I could go on and on and on, but I won’t. The point really is to understand that material possessions are literally a burden. You work long hours to earn money to buy things and then you have so much stuff that what you’re looking for you can’t find, so it’s just quicker to go to the store and buy another one.
The fact is that most of us have been brainwashed by advertising to think that we “need” the latest gadget when in fact we need almost nothing material. We have been taught to equate “need” with “want”. They tell us what we need…
Let me try to put it another way… you only have a tiny amount of time that you’re alive. You decide to buy a $40,000 car, but because you can’t really afford it you take out a loan and the real cost ends up being $60,000 (that’s $1,000 per month for 5 years). You’ve got a good job paying $60,000 per year, and after tax you take home $40,000 per year so that car represents 18 months of ALL THE MONEY YOU EARN IN YOUR LIFE. You work for 45 years (from age 20 to 65), so that 18 months is 1/30 of all the money you’re likely to earn — EVER.
Wow. 3.3% of your life is now invested in that car. Do you think that maybe, just maybe, you could find a better way to spend 3.3% of your life? Remember, instead of this car you could do 18 months of ANYTHING else that you want. Learn to play the guitar, write a book, travel, whatever. This one decision — to buy this car — turns you into a WAGE SLAVE.
We are NOT free in modern society. They tell us we’re free, they brainwash us so that we believe that we have free choice, but the consumer society actually makes slaves of most people.
The weird thing is that people voluntarily become slaves to possessions.
All you really have in life is time. You trade time for money to buy stuff that you quickly get bored with. Time is so valuable, yet we waste it on trivialities.
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