How You Can End Up Broke?
Let’s hope you don’t
Many people who chase money end up being broke. Why is that?
Thinking the purpose of life is (cheap) happiness
Cheap happiness is temporary happiness.
Let me explain.
For most people in their 20s having fun would mean having a nice car, having a house, and having friends to hang around with. With all that, having money for occasional trips and being able to buy what you need at a given time.
This usually comes with having a decent amount of money coming in, supposedly from their jobs or maybe from a business.
To sum it up, usually, a person in his 20s is happy if he is making equal to, or more money than people closest to him.
Does that make him successful? Well if he is happy, that would mean he is, right? Not particularly.
The trouble comes when that one income stream gets into some trouble.
Then what you are doing is hiding behind a rich lifestyle.
That brings me to my next point.
Buying into a lifestyle you can’t afford
Most people like hanging out with their friends often. No problem with that.
When your friend is making more money than you, we can become envious.
To catch that friend up in terms of money, we buy dumb sh*t to make them think we have enough.
Otherwise, we feel embarrassed.
An example is buying a car when you clearly don’t need one. Spending money you don’t have.
In another case, people let their monetary successes get to their heads.
Say, you have a business and you make exceed your expectations in your first year running by a mile.
This causes you to buy a luxurious apartment with the perfect view.
Next year, you end up making a loss for whatever reason. What do you do?
If you sell you let the world see you as a failure. Plus you consider yourself a failure.
Of course, you end up selling because what else can you do? This is where people become stressed and it brings me to my next point.
Caring for what other people think
You can’t go to someone and say,
Hey, you need to stop caring what other people think
That is naive thinking and I have been a victim of that.
Everyone cares what others think, everyone! Even the guy who just wrote those words cares what people think.
But, you have to draw a line.
People who end up achieving what they wanted to say, I stopped caring what other people think.
But it isn’t as easy as that.
Personal disasters teach you to not care because if you do care, you’re f*cked.
Experience is the best teacher.
I know I would be so much better off if I stopped caring but that does not change anything. I could say the same for you.
None of this is to say that you can’t reduce how much it affects you.
The way you could do that is, to spend time with the people who genuinely mean more to you. And spend more time with yourself.
People who especially mean more are your family members, maybe friends who have stuck with you through thick and thin.
I just heard a Ted Talk of Dorothée Loorbach (you can watch it here). She explains how a ‘good’ lifestyle for her resulted in her becoming broke and having 5 bills to pay when disaster struck
When she had to stop living that way she ended up spending more time with herself and her daughter.
She calls these the moments she cherished most despite having a plethora of memories with friends over the past years.
She never felt happier.
When you spend time with people you love over people who are ‘fun’ (some might be both), that is when you lessen the degree to which you care what they think.
The same goes with spending time with yourself. Let me take this to the extreme. If you can only see yourself every day, why would you care what someone else thinks? You’re only priority is you.
When people’s thoughts dictate your behaviour you live a life true to them, not yourself. After a point, there is bound to be a feeling of meaninglessness that causes despair.
Sucess=Happiness
For the longest time, I have been adamantly defending this statement.
I don’t believe in it anymore.
Happiness comes from within. If you are not happy with yourself, if you can not accept yourself, no amount of success will make you happy.
It makes perfect sense. There are miserable billionaires in the world because they don’t have enough.
If you are satisfied with the life you are living through you 9–5 that is completely up to you.
Just remember this.
Success ≠Happiness, Gratefulness=Happiness
This does not mean having high ambitious goals is wrong, it just means that if not reaching them despite your best efforts makes you miserable, you need to take a long hard look in the mirror.
Being miserable comes from feeling inadequate, or having negative thoughts.
You may feel demotivated. Feeling inadequate is a whole other thing.
You need to have someone to talk to when things mess up. And if you can’t talk well to yourself, what will you do when you are alone?
Keep trying, you only fail when you quit.
Stop chasing something that isn’t running
A common misconception is that you have to CHASE success or a certain monetary amount.
It isn’t running away from you though.
Yes, you have to work hard for it but you don’t have to chase it.
Chasing something means it doesn’t want to be caught. That is what inflicts the ‘chase’.
Let me tell you what chasing looks like.
It looks like hopping on whatever is trending and profitable and riding that bandwagon with everyone else.
What is wrong with this?
The problem is you don’t have any interest in that particular field in the first place. The interest is solely monetary.
People who are actually interested will profit a lot from it and when you see them flying about you will have negative thoughts because they did what you couldn’t.
This results in people thinking
Is there something wrong with me?
Or thinking that the world has forsaken you with the lack of luck.
Don’t do that.
Final thoughts
Many successful people have moments where they go broke. The problem is ending up broke.
It feels more like a choice than anything.
Ending up broke is a by-product of bad decisions that come from staying comfortable your whole life.
Lack of comfort is scary, of course, but is necessary to get what you want!