In a wonderful conversation today, with a couple of the guys at the practice, we talked about the chase for money is just for more, or the alternative to that, the thing about never having enough.
I was doing that philosophical claptrap that I do, talking back about 30 years of experience and I remembered that when Alison and I were in our first rented flat in Lenton in Nottingham I could bang the sofa with my hand and clouds of dust would emerge, and we could only get 4 inches of hot water in the bath, ( no shower) and storage sheeters on the walls. It was freezing. It was just the two of us, Alison working shifts, me on call for Max Facts. Limited time together, very limited money.
I was no more happy, or no less happy, then than I am now. I have more stuff, money, things, status, experience exponentially, whatever, than I had then, but no more contentment and happiness, not because I wasn't happy then, but because I was.
When will everyone learn that it just isn't linked to the stuff that you collect over a very basic point or amount? This has been done like 1000 times. Over a certain small amount of annual income, there is no more happiness, no more contentment, until you get to an extraordinarily high level of income, and only for a very few people.
There's also a baseline happiness level that everyone returns to, so if you are originally a miserable ba***rd and win the lottery, you will be a miserable ba***rd after you have won the lottery.
The problem is that what we do throughout our lives for many of us is that we put our golden eggs on the shelf and admire them, and count them, and then we want another egg, and over time, another egg will come inevitably, unless we have a catastrophe, and then over time another, and then we have a collection, and then the urge is to go to the goose and open it so that we can make the collection bigger, quicker now.
But of course, what happens then is that the goose is gone, and we go back to the start. We're back to where we were, but at least understanding that the happiness was never related to the collection of the eggs on the shelf, but only always ever related to the journey.
Blog Post Number - 4417
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