Despite its headline, this has nothing to do with money. Living beyong your means is just refering to a life that diverts from your true purpose and your ehtical values. If you have always dreamt of being your own boss and have your own business, everything that deviates from this authentic you, will drain your energy. No matter whether you have a secure job at a big bank with a good salary or whether you are cooking burgers at a fast food chain with a lower salary and less job security, your energy will drain. The reason for this is that you have to live against your life’s purpose. It is like acting to be someone else. You need to act rather than being yourself. And the very process of acting will cost you energy.
So the odd consequence is that if you have had a big dream that appeared to be unreachable, and have therefore settled for less, reaching the lesser thing will cost you more energy than the purportedly unreachable dream. As weird as it sounds, in the end it would be easier for you to follow your dream than settling for less.
This phanomenon occured to me early in life, when I was living in London and was invited to an old friend’s dinner party. He was a banker in the City of London, so were many of the guests. Some looked happy and satisfied, but a couple of them were looking worn-out and apathic. I talked to one of them, who was probably earning three times the amount I was making. And he told me if he could go back in time, he would look for a job that is fulfilling. He just wanted to earn as much as his professor when he went to University, and therefore decided that investment banking would be the way to go. But little did he know that doing the job would drain the energy from him like nothing ever has before. I asked him what his interests were and he told me, he would have loved to do something creative. Some thing which he can put his name on.
I don’t know what has happened to him. I don’t even remember his name. But soon thereafter the financial crash of 2008 arrived. I hope he took his chance to escape his self-built prison.
The same processes are in place when you perform work under your ethical standards. If you have high values and are supposed to sell old or poor people some shady insurances or fool them into signing up for magazine subscriptions, your energy will drain even if you are successful.
And earning money has nothing to do with this. We have all seen the documentaries of people who got really rich by running Ponzi-schemes and betrying people for their hard earned money. Some of them looked disgustingly satisfied with the lives they were leading before they were caught. This serves as proof that they didn’t have high ethics. If they would have, you could have seen them being energy-drained to an extent that would likely have had phsyical consequences.
So should you lower your ethical values? Of course not. All these guys went to prison and at least then got what they deserved. The ones who sell shady products to unsuspecting customers get their true reward by having their energy drained and getting sick in the process of it.
The question is, what can we make out of this? Should we all now indulge in helping the poor and needy? Well, while this is an admirable goal,