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The Most Important Lesson I've Ever Learned
It's only...
Blake Bottrill
February 10, 2025
I think I’m gonna have $5000 in car repairs this month.
Someone hit our van in a parking lot and drove away without leaving their information. Then, last week, I got into a 1 km/h accident where I bumped the car in front of me at a stop sign.
An expensive oopsie and a good lesson to be sure.
Not a fun way to spend money but the lasting impact on our lives will be functionally nothing. Instead we laugh about it… “It’s annoying I worked all of last week for free!”
Nobody got hurt and there is no financial ruin.
It’s only money.
The credit for this lesson goes to grandma. One of the wonderfully consistent things I remember her saying throughout our time together.
The whole listen to your elders thing is becoming exceedingly underrated. People have started wearing their naive independence as a badge of honour that they’ve made their own way in the world. At this stage of my life, that seems like a lot of wasted mental energy to me.
It’s only money.
Chris Williamson has a new idea he’s termed, Unteachable Lessons:
“There is a certain subset of advice that for some reason, we all refuse to learn through instruction. Unteachable Lessons. No matter how arduous or costly or effortful it is going to be for us to find out for ourselves, we prefer to disregard the mountains of warnings from our elders, songs, literature, historical catastrophes, public scandals and instead think some version of ‘yeah that might be true for THEM, but not for ME’.”
The most potent of these lessons is: Beyond a certain point, more money doesn’t equal more happiness. The extension of that logic is that, money then, is only a tool to be used to achieve other goals.
Money can only be used for 2 things:
Creating positive life change.
Mitigating or preventing negative externalities.
Neither bucket has a direct correlation with happiness though both contribute to it.
While you’d like to spend as much of your money on the former as possible, ignoring the latter will cause more stress and anxiety than you could hope to outrun by pouring all of your money into the first bucket.
When you look at the list of unrecoverable catastrophic occurrences in your life, all of them are tied to people, not things.
Therefore, when I have to spend money on the second bucket it’s encouraging to remember the situation is recoverable. As Don Draper says, “That’s what the money is for.”
If the situation is recoverable, I’m using money for one of its limited intended purposes and I’m mitigating stress from my life, I should feel good about escaping the situation without any unrecoverable damage.
It’s only money.
Words I Wish I Wrote
“You can go to hell without moving an inch, just focus on what you lack. You can taste heaven without leaving earth, just rejoice in what you have."
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