You expected by chasing money it would bring you happiness, success and solve all your problems.
Instead, you got burnout, mental anguish and wasted time because essentially it was a superficial pursuit.
Keep reading for reasons to stop chasing money and live more simply.
Let’s dive in.
21 Reasons To Stop Chasing Money And Live More Simply.
1. Unfulfilled
More money is not what enriches your life. Without pursuing your true purpose, you’ll feel like you have a gaping hole in your life.
Feeling fulfilled comes from cutting out the superficial things in your life. Actively choose goals that make you feel purposeful.
2. Seek Richness
If life teaches you anything, it’s to wake up every morning with hope. Begin each day excited about the possibility of creating something worthwhile either in your relationships or your company.
Seeking richness means embracing the uncertainty of life with gratitude for each moment, opportunity, and mystery.
3. Money Flows Where Passion Goes
When you’re passionate about what you’re doing, you’ll become proficient at it and the payout will naturally flow to you.
If you’re just doing something to pursue a high payout and there’s no passion behind it, it will only cost you burnout and mental anguish.
4. Work Feels Fun
Most days you’ll wake up in the morning looking forward to your work day. However, only working to run after money will leave you feeling flat.
Work doesn’t have to feel like a chore. Simplifying your life will lead you to a job you want to do.
5. What’s Important To You
Chasing money will detract from what’s really important to you like spending quality time with family, volunteering with the community,learning a new skill, etc.
Focusing only on high income takes away from finding out who you really are and what lights you up.
6. Money Doesn’t Equal Happiness
Many of the richest economies report citizens with more mental health problems than in more impoverished economies.
A study found that money can actually rob people of simple joys in life. More income doesn’t mean more happiness.
7. Less Appreciation For What You Already Have
Chasing money leaves you with more stuff you probably don’t need without stopping to appreciate what you have.
Striving to impress a friend with expensive sushi or the newest iphone takes away from the simple joy of spending time with your friend.
8. A Simpler Life
Chasing money can be extremely stressful and time consuming. It simplifies everything when you take the dollar out of the equation.
Then you can prioritize what actually matters to you.
9. Relationships Can Suffer
Rather than spend time with important people in your life, you choose to slave away to provide a higher income for them. Their biggest requirement is to be with you.
They’ll appreciate that you want to provide everything for them, however, they can’t make memories with you without you there.
10. You Attract What You Send Out
By prioritizing superficial goals, like chasing money, you’ll attract superficial people that reflect what you’re being.
The same is true the other way. By focusing on what makes you happy, you’ll attract like-minded people into your life.
11. More Respect
Following your dreams, rather than your income, will garner you more respect from those important to you. People are inspired by people who do what makes them happy.
12. Time Is Fleeting And Precious
While you’re busy making more and more income, saving that quality time and joy for later, it could all be wiped away in one catastrophic, accidental event or health diagnosis.
The “I’ll be happy when…” may never occur. So make your priority a happy life now.
13. Security
Making money can give you a sense of security and some people feel they need more security than others. How much is enough?
The truth is, you can’t take it with you, so you might as well spend it in ways that bring you true joy while you’re still here.
Create joyful experiences with and for the ones you love. Use it to better your community in some way. Make it a pursuit of your joy.
Related: Top 5 Budgeting Coaches To Help You Master Money Management
14. Make Deposits Into Your Memory Bank
Embrace as many opportunities within reason that you can to make memorable experiences with the people you love.
The money spent will be a fair trade-off for all the memories you make.
15. Years Of Misery
A job or career you don’t like, yet offers a great pension plan can bring you years of misery.
Job security and planning for the future is important according to a financial advisor. But churning out eight to twelve hours a day, five to seven days a week at something that kills your soul is not a fair trade for a future life that isn’t guaranteed.
16. The Key To True Happiness
Being true to yourself is critical to genuine happiness. If you’re tuned in and your work begins to feel disingenuous with your soul. You may feel you lost a bit of your true self.
17. You’re Under Pressure
This era of making money to be happy means you must attain or achieve a certain thing or your life will be a failure.
Of course, that’s not healthy or realistic. Expecting to build wealth as the sole means of living a worthwhile life puts a huge amount of pressure on you.
18. Mistaking Money For Success
When you have enough money, you’ll be successful and then you’ll be happy. You’ll have everything you need to be happy. At least that’s what you keep telling yourself.
In truth, you’re pretty miserable. You can’t remember the last time you took some time off to rest. You barely remember what your family looks like. Your blood pressure is dangerously high.
19. Trying To Prove Something
Maybe it’s your parents, your first boss, that teacher back in high school, or the significant other who dumped you because you were struggling.
You work harder than everyone else to show them they were wrong about you five, ten, twenty years ago. Yet, you’re the one suffering. You get the idea, the point is, it’s not really worth it in the long run.
20. Material Possessions
Already your closet is full of high-end clothes, your garage has multiple luxury cars, your jewelry box is overflowing with expensive necklaces, earrings, and rings… but it’s not enough and… the chase is on for more.
You’ve chased money and accumulated so much stuff yet still feel empty. Choose to stop the chase and find out the joys life holds.
21. Life Is On Pause
You’re so focused on chasing money and meeting that goal you’ve failed to notice that the world is passing you by.
You delay what brings you joy and being in the present moment until you earn enough to buy that house, finish your degree, get that promotion.
Related: Reasons To See Money As A Tool
What Does Chasing Money Mean?
Chasing money itself is not a bad thing. Let’s get that straight. If you really want to be wealthy, it will hurt you being wealthy.
We can “try” to get a million dollars by getting 1 dollar from a million people (chain letters, lies, faking it) or we could give value to a million people and ask for a dollar in return.
Chasing money itself means we are chasing something that’s just an exchange of value.
Paper bills have no value, only the value we give to it (and soon enough it will be worthless in many countries in the world, think hyperinflation in Zimbabwe).
So when a person says don’t chase money, it means don’t chase it because it has no value!
You can use nefarious means to get it, though those don’t last and you’ll eventually be found out.
However, if you have tons of clients paying you because of the value you provide for them, you aren’t chasing money, instead you’re thinking of what you can do that gives value for other people.
That gives you fulfillment, joy and purpose.
Is Chasing Money A Waste Of Time?
An analogy for chasing money is like a dog chasing cars. All that time and effort going into chasing a car that he can’t possibly catch. Even if he were to catch it, he could very well be hurt by it.
Reflect for a moment on this quote by the Joker in the movie The Dark Knight.
“You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it!”
Your relationship with money could be about balance but more likely it’s an issue of priorities or not knowing why you want as much money. Only you know for sure.
Give yourself the respect you deserve by being more mindful about money than a dog is about chasing a car.
Related: Best High-Income Skills To Make You Rich
What Is Chasing After Money?
If you always take the best-paying job without considering other factors, you’re chasing after money.
Doubling your income while it takes you away from your wife and kids for most of the year, compared to less money for a job with less travel, but still a good living, you are chasing after money.
These steps can help you alter your beliefs about it and help yourself grow into positive behavior and habit change.
1. Common Beliefs
According to research, one of the most common beliefs among people is “More money will make things better”.
Is it convincing? Experience the feelings when you say “Happiness can be achieved with less or no money”. Which one of these statements resonates more?
2. Understand Why You’re Often Stressed
Not surprisingly, the American Psychological Association found that money is the biggest cause of stress by far.
Maybe you’ve run out of time to exercise this week because of your work hours, or you’re running around so much leaving you no time to eat well. Do you prioritize your commitment to making money higher than your family and friends?
Saying yes to any of these questions generates stress in all of us.
3. The Role Of Money In Your Life
Look at three unfortunate beliefs many people are leading their lives believing:
- Money → vacation → relaxation/adventure = happiness
- Money → buying future free time = satisfaction with life
- Money → Big house, fancy cars → admiration of others = happy with self
A healthier mindset is where money is at the end of the path instead of the start. After all, money is a by-product at the end of the path for people living out their core values.
Define your why. Getting and having money isn’t a bad thing. It’s not inherently evil and the reality is we all require it.
Try brief exercise though. Write down five good reasons why you pursue money.
- Do you like what you see?
- Is your time spent and priorities for getting higher pay more important than other things you value in life?
Related: How To Overcome Greed
Does Chasing Money Make You Happy?
Many people lost everything and came to America with nothing—literally nothing but the clothes on their backs. If money had been what defined them, their lives would have been over at that point.
Instead, they relied on courage, confidence, determination, intelligence, and resilience to pull themselves up and start new lives from ground zero.
Money is fleeting. If money equaled happiness, lottery winners would be the happiest people on the planet. Instead, lottery winners are more likely to declare bankruptcy within three to five years than the average American.
Studies have shown that winning the lottery doesn’t necessarily make you happier or healthier either
You may think once you reach that “target” financial goal, you’ll feel like you’ve made it. Instead, what seems to happen is you want more. It’s never enough.
Having money as a goal won’t fill you up because money isn’t a destination. It’s a tool. It’s a means to buy clothes, food, cars, homes, tuition, health care, and all the other things that you may think you want or need.
Let money serve its purpose. Don’t live to serve money.
If You’re Chasing Money It Runs
“When you chase money, it runs. When you make money, it’s different.” – Pitbull
That’s when you start to create things. Have fun creating what you enjoy instead of doing something just for financial gain. Do what you feel happy doing.
Whatever you run after will run away from you and that includes the dollar.
It’s not worth it to have a million dollar business that gives you a billion dollar headache or heartache. Unfortunately there’s a lot of that out there with people chasing the “American Dream”. Maybe the American Dream has been misunderstood.
- Remember to have fun
- Have patience, passion, perseverance
- Put in the work
- There may be failures
- Learn from the failures
- There is no such thing as perfection
I Regret Chasing Money
Money makes things happen. It can build schools, buy better health care, fund startups and pay for vacations. It can buy better houses, better cars and send rocket ships to space.
That’s exactly why it will forever remain a universal obsession. It really can do those things and much more.
Despite how powerful money is, though, it can’t change the way you feel about yourself. That’s where most people go wrong.
They want to be powerful. They want to be cool. They want to be admired, and most importantly, they want to admire themselves.
Your wealth can’t do anything to change the way you feel about yourself. Your insecurities will survive becoming wealthy. If you aren’t proud of who you are, financial status won’t change that. If you don’t believe in yourself, it will fail you there, too.
Tom Bilyeu wrote about the time he decided to give up his businesses, live more simply and move to Greece to write. He “felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted off my shoulders.”
He says, “I had been miserable for so long—years, in fact—that I had forgotten what it felt like to be excited about the future. But I never made it to Greece. I didn’t even make it all the way home before a phone call would change my life.
The phone call was from my business partners. They wanted me to go out to dinner with them. They told me, “We could do this without you, but we don’t want to.”
Those words changed me, connected me to something other than the pursuit of money; it connected me to the brotherhood.
I realized the brotherhood was more important to me than the business. I realized that I had been subverting my true belief system in the service of chasing money for a long time, and that was the real source of my anguish.”
Related: How to Attract Money Using Mind Power
If You Focus On Your Mission Money Comes
“The right decisions come from the right focus. You’ll succeed if your focus is on the mission, not the money.” – Robert Kiyosaki
A very clear truth is that our focus drives everything in our lives.
It plays a huge part in determining if we’ll experience high quality in our lives and accomplish things that are meaningful to us.
How do you stay focused though, when your list of goals and dreams seem endless and more are being added on a daily basis?
Here are 3 different ways that could be helpful, derived from Brendon Burchard, author of “The Charged Life”.
- Limit the number of decisions you make daily to save your willpower and energy for key decisions in your life.
- Define your mission to determine what you’ll do with your precious time. Your mission in life is for where you want to go and what you want to do. Then you’ll have direction.
- Say “no” to everything immediately, as a first response. Don’t immediately commit to projects. Check them against your mission and passions first to make sure they align.
The mistake many people make is pursuing a definition of success that’s not our own, using skills and talents we don’t have in order to amass what we don’t really want or need.
This leads to spending time working longer hours, sacrificing relationships and health, and ultimately living unfulfilled lives.
Don’t be that person. Be your own person ✅ who strives for your own version of a good life with success and meaning in life.
