While, at some point, it will get down to crunching hard dollars, trust me, there
will never be a bottom line that will ever be
enough to purchase the right frame of mind. This is something you’ll have to bring to the table yourself. If your only motivation is to live cheaper, that’s not enough. Sure. when you pare down to your physical essentials, it is without question, a cheaper lifestyle. Until you begin to understand the currency of the real intangibles, you’ll never reconcile the math. So that’s what I’ll concentrate on here.
Happiness for sale
First, let’s get your head in the right frame of mind. If you’re working backwards from what’s in your bank account, to decide how much "quality" of life you can afford, you’re already thinking about it in the wrong direction. That’s what you’ve
been doing. In fact, that’s what everybody’s been doing for way too long.
The, “when I have more money, I’ll then choose a better quality of life” idea is a sure fire way to assure it will never happen. .
firstthings first
There’s nothing wrong with capitalism and commerce. Private enterprise, entrepreneurship, and fair trade are what this country was built on. It’s only when profiteering and the mechanics of money feels like a national mandate that it becomes corruptive and entrapping for those who place it over human quality of life. For a while there, more folks bought into it then didn’t, but not any more. Now
well over half our population (having already gone to extreme lengths to buy into the philosophy) woke up and realized that life, liberty and the individual pursuit of human happiness are still the legal American rights. That’s what’s called seismic shift.
vicious cycle
Through social media millions of people already have shared vivid examples of the stress, the personal indignities and even the abuse they’d justify for a paycheck. They’d put up with it for the majority of their waking hours. In the brief moments, finally left to themselves, they'd spend most of that precious time recuperating from the stress, personal indignities and abuse. In many cases, only about four to five hours are left, in which they’d do nothing because they were depleted.
So, in an attempt to feel better or escape and somehow find “reward,” they'd do passive things like drink, overeat, zone out on escalating and costly entertainment
sites, or spend more money then they’ed just earned. Then the only redemption for this was to return back to work, and repeat the cycle all over again. Only then could they continue to afford the quality of life they were earning, which is zero…and expensive on every front.
At some point, the stress, personal indignities and the abuse of costed them as health care bills mounted. In fact for a lot of people it’s their health care benefits they prize far more than the job. They’ll kill themselves to get them, so they can afford the hospital bed to repair themselves. after killing themselves for the benefits.
In the end, who did they blame for this absurd lifestyle? Life. Because everyone else they know lived the same way. In fact, it was topic number one. Next, they blamed, the company they work for, then, the people under their own roofs who'd spent their hard earned money, and finally, the government who took the rest of it away.
That’s the vicious cycle when money is the key, central starting point objective.
Recalculating the math
What if $30 grand a year suddenly became $90 grand a year?
Now we all know what money buys, according to the traditional life that most people live. In the traditional system 30 grand, a year classifies most people in "the barely surviving" category. In the Intentional living world, it can equivocate to as much as
three times that, because everything you now own is, in some way, an essential. Meaning you use it daily. There is no waste. This reduces your square footage considerably, so the size of your dwelling need not be nearly as much.
Since you don’t have to allow space for traditional social entertaining (and all the eye candy and trappings that come with it), the living space you have, is all yours to customize specifically for your daily needs and day-to-day life. Since you’re not in a conventional job where "image" is key, you can nix those image essentials too. Your dress can be more "easy care," their storage needs, can be far smaller. Even the price you pay to live in the neighborhood to be within reasonable commuting distance. for the job you don't want, shrinks. All the other related expenses associated with the job (you could care less about) along with the recuperating consequences dwindle too. Furthermore, the "escaping from" fees, and the stress-related bucks, reduce proportionally too.
Relocating the creativity
"It's too late for me. The leap to Intentional RightSIZING would kill me!"
So even if the math gets better, and the idea of being able to have a fulfilling quality of life on far less a year doesn’t motivate them, most people think they haven’t got the stamina or emotional mojo to even embark on a more intentional lifestyle. From where they sit, it’s understandable. Their frame of mind is muddled, they're emotionally spent, their health is questionable, and their motivation to even fathom (let alone begin to construct a new life) in the four hours of downtime they have, seems ridiculous, and impossible.
That's because for too many, it’s been so long since their real heart, has really been invested in anything, that they’ve forgotten what passion actually feels like. They put
an emotional embargo in dreaming, imagination and faith long ago. The idea being, “don’t torture” yourself while your fate is in other people's hands. That's understandable too because creativity has been pushed so far down.
When our daily lives are devoted only to living out of fear of losing the job, potential illness and status, the creativity we all possess, can’t innovate, inspire and propel us forward as it was designed to do.
Our inherent creativity is part of our DNA and is there to actually be the antidote to stress. Yet we relegate it to the minutia of life. But it's there waiting to do far mor important things. Without it one couldn’t get up, put an outfit together, or even drive in busy traffic. It never goes away, it just gets switched to automatic pilot, handling stuff that doesn't matter...rather than curating and repooting us to live up to our souls true life potential. While creativity is the single most transformative tool we have, it won't do its thing in an atmosphere of disbelief. Because, where there is fear, there is no creativity. But, it’s proportionate. Meaning, creativity increasses at the same rate we as we reduce fear. It's just that creativity won't come out to play, in a big way, to just be in service to fear nor will it do battle with our noisy brains filled with only what we put there. When we re-engage our creativity and rehook up the GPS we begin to trigger the reinvention process.
Rebooting creativity
We must stop telling ourselves that we have no skills, that we’re too old, that we barely have enough just to get by. If we lose our jobs, no one else will hire us. If we get sick, no one will help us, That’s the value system and truth drummed into us from birth...we buught it because it's a shared beleif from the time we could begin to communicate. As a result our amazing creativity often gets completly burried by the time we're seven years of age by people who define success in often very brutal dog-eat-dog, terms for us. But it is all fear based and really isn't true and won't do anything but perpetuate more imoblizing fear.
Transformation begins with one simple question. How do I really want to live now? It's a question which, finally over half the population is asking at the same time. The new generation of millenials who are the first born in the fully digital age and have already answered it having intently researched our entire history.
As you begin to ponder that question, walk around the place you call home. Open every drawer, look under the beds, in the closet, the attic and basement. Ask your self, "how do I really want to live now?" Then ask yourself how much of what you're paying and working for really serves that new life.
While you decide you can't do anything with no money, start getting rid of the stuff you no longer use on a daily basis. it's free! As you physically begin to commit to
RightSIZING, you begin the transformation process and your personal creativity signal starts to beep once more.
