I promised to make you rich, and I meant it. Here's the method: want less than you have.
I know. You expected something more elaborate. But watch what this actually does: the person to whom nothing is lacking is, by definition, wealthy. The person who has much and wants more is, by the same definition, poor — because he has not yet reached the stopping point that the modest man reached long ago. Alexander conquered the known world and kept looking for more world to conquer. He was poor. The man eating coarse bread and drinking from his cupped hands, needing nothing else — he's the one who's arrived.
He who has enough has attained what never fell to the rich man's lot: a stopping point.
Here's what nature actually asks of us, when you strip away everything added by habit and appetite and the infectious wanting that comes from watching others want: food when hungry, water when thirsty, warmth when cold, rest when tired. That's the list. It's short. And everything on it is either free or close to free. The difficulty of the list is not acquiring what's on it. The difficulty is believing the list is complete.
Because appetite is creative. It takes the basic need and decorates it until the decoration becomes the need. Hunger becomes the demand for a particular preparation, served at a particular temperature, on a particular kind of table, by a particular kind of person. Thirst becomes the need for a specific vintage in a specific vessel. The original requirement — fill the stomach, quench the thirst — has been buried under so many layers of preference that we've forgotten what we were actually after.
Nature is not squeamish. When you're genuinely hungry, you are not particular. When you're genuinely thirsty, the vessel doesn't matter. The squeamishness is not hunger. It's a luxury wearing hunger's name.
I'm not asking you to give up everything — that's performance, not philosophy. I'm asking you to learn to tell the difference between what nature requires and what habit has decided is required. One list is short and always satisfiable. The other has no bottom and will never be complete.
The richest person I can describe is the one who has looked at both lists, understood the difference, and quietly set the second one down.
Borrow from yourself. You have more than enough.
Already wealthy,