“If you wish to have leisure for your mind, either be a poor man or resemble a poor man.” -Seneca

It is an exchange we make without realizing we are making an exchange. We all push to make more, to accumulate more, and to achieve a higher status in the circles we travel in.  And sometimes we may forget that the more we try to accumulate the more complicated and distracting our life is going to become.

But that is the way it has to be, the more we add to our lives the more things are going to have to manage.

That is the trade off we never really think about. There is likely a limit each of us is willing to get to when it comes to accumulating wealth, a limit where things suddenly become uncomfortable because life has become more complicated than we would like it to be.

And if we think about it, none of us have likely thought of the limit we’d be comfortable with. But the complication is that as things become more complicated, for some reason we are programmed to think that as we acquire more and more wealth it will become simpler. Somehow we think that having these things handled by other people will be easier full well forgetting that if that is the direction we choose, we have to manage actual people aside from ourselves. That isn’t easier.

Better still, live a simple life and be grateful. We’ll be wealthy before we realize it.

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