2.2.2: Enough is more important than more

Living in alignment with your values beats living large

Understanding the importance of living an examined life, to express your soul through your spending, is all well and good, but it needs to be applied. The temptation to see not an ongoing process, but a destination to be arrived at – and therefore to believe it can be dealt with later – is strong. It leads us to accumulate ‘more’ while we work out how to allocate it later. In theory, this seems sensible. But in practice, it has never worked. ‘Of wealth,’ wrote Solon, in the 6th Century BC, ‘there is no limit that appears to man, for those of us who have the most wealth are eager to double it.’[i] Beset by cowardice, we are addicted to delay, and forget to live. Later never comes. And in the meantime, we allocate our resources in wasteful ways by default. The ‘more’ monster sits between us and the Good Life. It’s time to tackle it.

2.2.2.1 Give, give, give, me more, more, more

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[i] Solon, quoted in Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics