It's great to have money. Money can buy you many of the finest things and experiences in life. Sure, there are some things you can't get for money, but there really aren't that many.
When I was a kid, I used to dream about having a yacht. I could spend hours researching different luxury yacht models, looking at pretty photos of what I thought represented a happy life.
I guess I was spoiled by our materialistic world from an early age. Or maybe I was born that way. But now I've learned that materialistic goods don't add much happiness to our lives.
I used to think that owning a Retina Macbook Pro would make me so much happier than having my two-year-old laptop. So I worked really hard and saved up some money until I could finally afford to buy it. It's by far the most expensive thing I ever bought.
As I'm typing this, I realize that I like my new MacBook Pro a lot. The display is just gorgeous. The design is perfect. The laptop is fast, very light, and easy to use. The battery lasts forever. It really is the finest computer money can buy.
Today, that is.
Three years from now my new MacBook will (hopefully) still be functional, but it will no longer feel as nice and fast. Five years from now it will be old and I'll be using a new laptop.
So was it actually worth it? Well, let me start by saying that what laptop you have has no impact whatsoever on your day-to-day happiness. It's just not something you think about very often.
But to buy this laptop I had to work my ass off for about 130 hours at a mind-dulling call-center job. This time and energy is lost forever. It's a part of my life that I'll never get back.
Five years from now I'll be looking back at my college years, thinking about all the cool things that I could have done. The things that I never did because I was too busy working. Working to buy a computer that was nice and fast. For a couple of years.
Keeping my old fully functional laptop all of a sudden doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Money can buy you really nice stuff, but that stuff probably won't make you much happier. I'm glad I learned this lesson early on, while the stakes are still low.
Most people only figure this out after they've spent their lives slaving away to pay mortgage for a house that they thought would make them happy. Even if they are happy, it probably isn't the house that makes their life worth living.
If materialistic goods can't make your happy, should you spend a lot of money on experiences instead?
In the last few days I've been daydreaming a lot about rafting in Grand Canyon. If I had a few thousand dollars to spare, I could actually do it. I'm sure it would be a trip of a lifetime.
At my current level of income, it would take me up to six months of hard work to save up enough money for a trip like that.
I'd have to give up months of hanging out with friends, reading books, cycling around, hiking in the woods, doing all the things I really love... just to paddle down a pretty river for a week.
If I make a lot more money in the future, it might be a good idea to go on a trip like that. But for now, it makes no sense to give up everything else I love just to go on holiday once.
The next time you buy anything, think about what you're giving up to be able to afford it. Sometimes it's not just the money you're paying. You may also be giving up your life.
I was a teenager with way too much time on his hands. It was summer break and I had just finished middle school. I used to spend hours browsing the web mindlessly, which is something I still occasionally do. In one of my browsing sessions I decided to see if there was any way to make money online. I didn't want to get a job. After all, I was a teenager who was scared of having to do any kind of work. But I also thought that it would be nice to get some extra cash to buy a few more beers, or whatever else I thought would make me happy back then.
I knew almost nothing about making money online. A friend of mine had tried clicking on ads for a while, and that earned him less than a dollar per week. I wanted to know if there was anything more profitable, so I joined a forum about making money online. There were a lot of people who said that making money on the internet was impossible, and a few more who claimed to have easily made about $1000. I focused on the second group, and I soon found out that they had all made money from sports betting.
What? How is sports betting supposed to make you any money?
Even if there is a way to make money from gambling, there surely must be a lot of risk involved. That's what any reasonable person would think. However, I soon found out that it's possible to make money from bonuses that bookmakers give to their new customers without any risk. To keep a long story short, you bet on all outcomes of a sports event so that you're guaranteed to keep a fraction of the bonus no matter which team wins.
It took me a while to wrap my head around the concept, but once I did, it all made perfect sense. The only problem was that I was only 15, way bellow the legal age of gambling. And I had no credit card, of course. I still don't know what arguments I used, but I managed to convince my mother to give me one of her credit cards for matched betting.
I had a discussion about book pricing recently with one of my favorite bloggers, Sebastian Marshall. His new book, Ikigai, is being sold for $7.77. He doesn't really care how much money he makes off it (his portion goes to charity, anyway), but he didn't want to lower the price because he thinks that it would signal that the book isn't high quality. I said that I'd accept that possibility for a chance of reaching a larger audience.
And due to lowering the price of Life Nomadic to 2.99, I've been able to reach an incredibly wide audience. In the past month I've sold far more copies of Life Nomadic than all other months combined. Reviews have been coming in, and lives have been changed. Despite much thinner margins, I'm even making more money from it. I couldn't be more happy about all this.
Make Her Chase You and Life Nomadic