“Everyday is a bank account, and time is our currency. No one is rich, no one is poor, we’ve got 24 hours each.”
-Christopher Rice
They say that money is the root of all evil. That can be true, but only when it’s spent on the wrong things. People spend their hard-earned cash on temporary happiness, on designer items, on material possessions. In the end, those things aren’t worth much.
What matters the most is that the cash you can spare is spent on things that will improve your life. Money won’t buy you happiness but it can buy experiences that you’ll remember forever.
Don’t Just Buy Things
Material goods are great, but only for a moment. The only provide us with temporary happiness and nothing worthwhile. You may be tempted to buy the coolest new car or jacket, but what will that really give you? In real-life currency, possessions are worthless.
Buying things can easily become a downward spiral that you can’t find your way out of. Once you buy something, you’re excited about it. Soon though, you begin to get used to it and not see it as so amazing anymore. This forces you to always want more and better things at the expense of your bank account.
Don’t lose yourself in the chaos of materialism. Choose to spend your money on things that will bring you real, lasting happiness. Spend it on memories or on investing in yourself. Even if you don’t have much that you can spare, there are still ways for you to do this if you avoid wasting money on pointless objects.
Travel More
Do you really need that designer coat? Most designer clothes cost more than a plane ticket, so why not buy that instead? Use your money to visit places that you’ve always wanted to see. Travel America, visit Asia, Europe, or Africa. Go wherever you’ve always dreamed of going because it doesn’t need to stay a dream.
Travelling doesn’t need to be expensive either. You can visit a neighboring town for the weekend or visit the seaside. There are so many resources online that show you how you can travel on any budget. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t be able to skip that watch you wanted to buy and travel instead.
Learn Something
Knowledge is the real currency of the world. If you want to improve your life, why not learn something new. Buy an insightful book, enroll in a class, take an online course. There are countless ways that you can continue to learn every day and improve yourself as a person.
Experiences Become a Part of You
You are not your house, your clothes, your jewelry, or your car. You are a person who is shaped by the life that you have lived, by the memories that you have, and by the things that you’ve experienced.
Living life forces you to grow and improve yourself. The experiences that you have become a part of your very being.
When people speak about you, they’re not going to say “oh, they’re the person with the Versace belt.” What they’ll really say is “that’s the person I went to that great seminar with … that’s the person I went on an amazing hike with.” People will remember you for who you are and what you’ve done, not what you own.
What Will You Remember?
Every one of us has to pass on from this life eventually. What will you really remember when your time comes too? Will you remember the great TV that you bought or will you remember the time you watched the sunset with your family? In the end, you’ll look back on the time you managed to sail a boat alone or on the beautiful gallery that you went to visit.
Experiences don’t last forever, but their memories do. Truly, the most important things that we can ever collect aren’t objects, they’re our memories. We can share them with the people that we love and look back on them fondly when we reach the end of our lives.
Don’t spend your money on material things, spend it on experiences instead. If you want to achieve true happiness, this is really the way to do it. Save up the cash that you were going to spend on something that you don’t really need and use it to experience life.
Share this article with your friends and family to inspire them to use their money on the things that really matter.
