How much money do you need? I
Channel: Quest for a Meaningful Life
Date: 2021-08-01

Money, money, money.
This is the preoccupation of so much of our lives every day, so much of our thoughts about how to get money, and so many of the limitations around what we can do.
And money, it's so easy for it to be entirely consuming, to just be completely focused on it, getting money, as this sort of never-ending spinning hamster wheel of trying to get more.
And I find it useful to get as clear a picture as I can on how much money I actually need.
Because if I don't, then I just think about- it just seems like money's always flowing out and so I always need to keep getting more.
But when I can see how much I need, it helps to define it.
It helps to put money in its place, in a way.
Money is a necessary part of life, in the sense that my money represents all our physical needs.
Everything that- all our material needs.
Any kind of stuff.
If we want food and shelter, especially, the most basic needs of the material world.
Being able to actually get food that we can eat to fuel ourselves: that keeps coming up.
And, of course, having a protected, safe and warm and dry place to sleep, at least.
These are material needs.
we have to deal with the material world for at least those needs.
No matter how much we can live in some kind of spiritual world, or some mental world of abstract ideas, or art, or anything, we still have those basic needs for some kind of specific arrangement of the material world to suit us.
And the simplest way to make those things work is through money, through paying somebody else to give us food, and paying somebody else to provide a protected shelter.
And if not, then we replace money with growing our own food, and building our own house.
And it's certainly interesting to imagine what life would be like without money, what it would be like to be entirely self-sufficient.
But I mean, I've always imagined living in the wilderness.
I love the idea of having a cabin, and growing my own food, and living off the land, completely free of any need for money.
But I remember once just seeing in the grocery store, in the supermarket, seeing a bag of beans, and it was like $3.
And I think about how much work it would be for me to grow the equivalent amount of beans.
And you really have to make an extra effort, and really it becomes a whole world in itself to start to go into replacing money.
So yes, we can certainly live without it.
It's certainly possible.
But it is the easiest way to get what we need.
So the question, though, that I have is how much money do we need?

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