Because of human psychology and the need to constantly upgrade our external material circumstances, most people live miserable and money-centered lives.
The sooner you break out of this hedonic treadmill of raising your lifestyle every time you get a paycheck, the quicker you will be able to free yourself from the paycheck itself.
Nassim Taleb, the brilliant author of Black Swan and Antifragile, has a saying “the three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.” The moment you are craving that next paycheck, it means the money is owning your life, not the other way around.
And given you are not working for minimum wage supporting an entire family, there are a ridiculous amount of ways to get out of this system almost immediately.
One, realize the nothingness of money.
Once you get past a certain point of having necessities, money really does not provide as much value as you think it would.
Once you die, you will not take any of it with you.
It’s all so pointless and futile, never make money your entire life goal.
Next, understand that to get truly wealthy to point where you can do anything you want with your TIME, you need to own a compounding asset like equity in a business.
That is the only way you can make money when you sleep and your money is not tied to the time you put in to a certain activity.
True wealth is having freedom to do what you want, whenever you want.
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow.
Get to that state, and you will forever be happy.
Three, seek internal peace.
Once you understand that external problems are infinite and the constant chase to limit them is futile, then you can start looking within for the answers.
Perspective is all that matters.
How will you choose to look at the situation.
You are always entirely in control of that, and so you are entirely in control of your happiness and peace at any time.
Four, as much as possible try to ignore the people and the conventional thoughts around you.
You never truly know what’s going on in someone else’s mind so you should focus on what’s going on in yours.
Society places many traps on us from an early age.
It’s actually scary how similarly people live their lives in the way that the first 22 years they slave away memorizing stupid facts for good test scores.
Then for forty years they slave away their time doing work that is unsatisfying for a corporation that could not give a shit about them.
Then when they’re 60 with a decent amount of money, they realize it was all pointless and without the health and vitality of a young person, they can’t even enjoy their life to the fullest.
It’s a depressing cycle that most people enter, whatever you do, don’t get caught into it.