What’s the purpose of our life? Work to gain wealth? Or, spend to gain happiness?
Both sound deceivingly the same, or at least, inseparable. But I beg to differ - we can only choose one of the two.
First let me be clear that ‘life’ here refers to our mortal life in this earth now. So let us look at the choices again.
Work to gain wealth. We wake up every morning, and then study, or work, because the satisfying exam result slip or a paycheck is all we need to keep us happy. Ah-ha! Here’s the catch - We depend on those exam results and bank account balance to make us happy each day. But what if we fail, despite grueling days of revision or overtime? The problem is that in these situations (when we say that our life’s purpose is to work to gain wealth), we put ‘wealth’ as our main purpose of life (the only thing which can make us feel good). Sadly, we are almost always vulnerable to failure which makes our life difficult at times.
Spend to gain happiness. But where did the money come from? Wait, i didn’t say: spend money. In fact, ’spending’ here implies using whatever resources that we have. Now remember that you can read this, which means you have a vision (eyes) that you can see this, a sound mind (brain) that makes you able to understand this and probably working pair of hands scrolling down with a mouse to get to the next point (or to click ‘close’). These valuable assets we are blessed to have are often taken being for granted! If we imagine these hands, eyes, nose, legs, brains and mouth of ours as assets - why don’t we think about spending these assets instead? This means using them at their best. It’s not hard really, if I rephrase my words into: why don’t we make use of our talents to make ourselves feel happy? No regrets then because these assets are acquired at birth and most of them develop with time. Isn’t this simply a better choice of purpose in life?
There can be many excellent examples - Bill Gates, JK Rowling, Arctic Monkeys, Coldplay, Sudirman, etc. I believe that these successful personals have one purpose of life, which is to feel good about making good use of their talents. But for regular joe’s like us, the same concept applies.
Why do we feel stressful to work hard, and then stressful again when we fail to achieve good exam results or better pay? Why don’t we enjoy exercising our brains with new facts as we study for the exam, or, get a job we enjoy doing? So that when we fail, we’ll say: well, I enjoyed making all the effort, now that i’ve failed, i could do even more work - and I’m really glad about that!
