Half of the sustenance game is ‘getting’. We know how to Get: working more, working harder, working smarter. These are all fitting means to the goal of acquisition. But it’s only half of the picture. The other half is ‘needing’, i.e. the reasons you give yourself for working so hard. Unless you’re a lottery winner you’d better look at the part needing plays in establishing your priorities and motivation, and the toll it may take on your autonomy. It has an enormous effect on the degree of freedom and autonomy you enjoy.
Don’t kid yourself. As hard as you work, you owe it to yourself to also question how much you need, and I mean just as aggressively as you approach the getting, from the time the alarm goes off in the morning until your head hits the pillow at night. The key to increasing your freedom in the short term, today, is found in looking hard at the things that you have decided that you need, the amounts that you let yourself spend.
Is it acceptable for my ‘needs’ to expand to correspond to how hard I’m capable of working? Is it acceptable for my spending to equal and even exceed my best efforts at earning during the best years of my life, so that my time (and even my future, if I’m in debt) is literally traded for these ‘needs’? Probably not, and you might find that needing less is a much easier way to enhance your freedom than making ways to earn more.
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