
Money doesn’t care about your feelings
The best motivating line for me to save (and maybe work) aggressively is:
Money doesn’t care about your feelings.
That’s really it, isn’t it?
Money doesn’t care that you’re tired and you don’t want to cook a dinner but you’d rather dial and order takeaway.
Money also doesn’t give a damn that you spent a lovely vacation down to the Caribbean for the past 5 years, flying first-class and spending like a mofo just to feel good.
A photograph I took of a beach in Key West, Florida (2012)
MONEY IS JUST A COLD-HEARTED, UNFEELING NUMBER
It’s just a number, yes, but it’s a number that we associate a lot of things to.
We anthropomorphize our money, thinking that if we just stop our crushing debt payment for one month, it won’t be so bad in the grand scheme of things,.
We think that our money will empathize and understand how hard we’ve been working, pat us on the back for a vacation well earned, and goad us into upgrading to that luxurious hotel because we deserve it.
We should just treat money like money.
Farmers in the old days used to dry out, salt or pickle their hard-earned vegetables and fruits so that they’d have something to eat in the winter and perhaps trade with others around them for other things they couldn’t or didn’t grow.
Money is just a physical representation of all your hours worked so that in the winter of your lifetime (retirement), you’ll be able to stop working if your body gets too old and tired to continue.
It’s saved, traded and kept far more easily than a jar of pickled beets (yum!), and it even rewards you by growing if you don’t use it and invest it instead (compounding interest!).
Anyway, that’s just something that has been on my mind lately and has been a great source of motivation.
cj
“flying first-class and spending like a mofo just to feel good.” HAHAHAHAHA!! That is funny as heck! But the message is clear and a good one. Who the hell cares why you spent so much or that you have not learned how to manage your money? Money is nothing more than the hammer we use to forge more of the same or for our resources. If you cannot use a hammer responsibly, then you ought not have one.