Silent Wealth
Mobile-home owner, threadbare clothes, no car/TV/computer, multi-millionaire.
One of these terms doesn’t fit with the other.
Everyone seems to have their own vision for what they envision wealth to look & feel like.
Commonly, luxury cars, big homes, name-brand clothing.
This type of wealth = everything you can see.
Geoffrey Holt created a new image for what wealth looks like.
Having very little, Geoffrey donated his $3.8M estate to his town of 4,200.
This type of wealth = everything you can’t see.
From someone who didn’t appear to have wealth, it tells us:
Wealth is what you don’t see.
But what is wealth?
Is it income? Net worth? What’s owned?
Or could it be:
A sense of arrival?
Acceptance of what may happen instead of what we wish to happen?
The former describes events that aren’t up to us.
The latter describes events that are up to us.
One stoic practice is prosoche.
In English, this means - to pay attention.
Paying attention to each impression in the present moment so you can properly assess the character of the impression to prevent yourself from attaching a value judgment that has the potential to pierce the veil of your inner citadel.
We judging external events, we go through the following sequence:
Impression → value judgment → desire → action
Wealth is something that is outside our control.
We control our effort, but we do not control the outcome.
There’s nothing wrong with pursuing wealth, as long as you're exercising caution along your journey to pursue something that you don’t have full & complete control over.
It’s easy for this pursuit over a preferred indifferent to turn your desire from virtue into vice.
This is where the line gets crossed through a stoic lens.
You can easily try to overstep and expense all resources to generate wealth - but if wealth is not in your nature you’re causing yourself more psychological stress than needed.
What good is striving for money if all it does is cause you stress?
Could you not step back, re-evaluate, and recognize maybe that’s not in your nature (accept that) and fulfill your role as a rational, virtuous human, family member, and citizen of the cosmos?
How could your life improve if you stop fighting what you wish to happen and accept things to happen as they do?