Wealth 2. How to Think About Money
Understand how to think about money, know what it's actually costing you when you spend it and how to think of your investments.
Welcome! The ‘Wealth Playbook’, ‘Science-based Tools’, ‘Lead to Win’ & the ‘Le Monde Élégant’ sections are companions for The Stoic Manual to help you build wealth and enjoy the financial freedom and power it affords, enhance your physical and psychological health, vitality, stress resilience, discipline, focus, motivation, and refine your people skills, relationships & leadership skills for a distinguished life—by Dr. Antonius Veritas
P.S: Most of you loved this previous entry on How To Deal With Toxic People.
“Contentment comes not so much from great wealth as from few wants.” — Epictetus
“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.” — Seneca
Adrian had just dropped $3,200 on a new leather couch. It was Italian. Hand-stitched. The salesperson said it would “transform his space.” But now it sat in his apartment like a trophy he didn’t want to look at. He hadn’t had anyone over in months. And half the time he sat on the floor because he didn’t want to wrinkle the cushions.
The worst part wasn’t the buyer’s remorse. It was the math. He opened his budgeting app and realized he’d just spent nearly everything he’d saved that year. Every shift he worked. Every freelance gig. Every meal he skipped. Gone—converted into cowhide.
And the high didn’t last. Not even a full hour. The dopamine fizzled before he got the thing through the front door.
That night he stared at the ceiling and had what he later called his “couch crisis.” He wasn’t poor. He wasn’t extravagant. But somehow he felt stupid. Like he was on a hamster wheel he didn’t remember stepping onto. Work. Save. Buy something big. Feel nothing. Repeat. Was this it? Was this the whole game?
He started asking questions no one had ever asked him before. What if money wasn’t just for spending? What if he was looking at it all wrong? What if the problem wasn’t what he could afford—but what it was costing him?
This entry is for anyone who's ever felt that same existential dread—that sinking feeling that you're doing everything “right” with money and still getting nowhere, yet it’s hard to come by. The essay offers us a different way to think. A way that opens up time, freedom, and actual peace of mind. It starts here.
Mistake I.
“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.”—Viktor Frankl
Most people think of money as a…
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