A person holding a sign that says "What's important to you?"

We can get so wrapped up in pursuit of a goal that we lose sight of the underlying why or purpose. In business, this can happen when short-term targets (quarterly profits! bonuses! stock options!) are valued above long-term sustainability (principled prosperity, balancing needs of all vital stakeholders).

In our personal lives, we can chase shiny objects, surface level rewards, physical things, earthly pleasures whose ability to please us ultimately fade because they fail to satisfy our deeper needs for connection and growth. The even greater danger is when our sense of self, our identity becomes too tightly bonded to what we own for then who are we really? Upon what does our emotional foundation rest?

Folks, none of us really want green and white rectangle pieces of paper with engravings of long dead white males on it… we want what we think it can buy us. A new car, a bigger home, a great vacation, fancier clothes… but as nice as they are, none of those will hold us at night, or can be there for us when the crises come, when we walk life’s inevitable valleys.

The pleasures of the earth are not life’s true treasures and are best found as by-products to a life well lived, to master whatever profession one chooses, to be one’s best self more often. Beware the hedonistic treadmill; excessive desire is never ending, leading to a state of perpetual unbounded want rather than true, lasting fulfillment. All too often, as Arthur Schopenhauer observed, “Every satisfaction one attains lays the seeds of some new desire.”

Closing Quotes:

“If I am what I have and if I lose what I have, who then am I?” – Erich Fromm, 1900–1980, To Have or To Be?

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.” – Seneca c. 4 BC–65 AD, Letters to Lucilius

“Wealth is like seawater; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788–1860, Parerga and Paralipomena

“Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.” – Henry David Thoreau, 1817–1862, Walden

As always, I share what I most want and need to learn. – Nathan S. Collier