“Most of us don’t get epiphanies. We only get a whisper— a faint urge. That’s it. That’s the call. It’s up to you to do the work of discovery, to connect it to an answer.”
—Po Bronson

“If I had known what it would be like to have it all, I might have been willing to settle for less.”
—-Lily Tomlin

There are some key ideas in our culture that make it very difficult to separate work from wages. Many of us make money after the point of sufficiency. After debts are paid off and needs are taken care of, we still make money. It seems to me that we have to keep spending it so that we’ll have an excuse to make it—because if we get ahead of the game, we might be confronted with the dilemma that comes from affluence: What I do when I have more money than I need? I think we keep spending and making beyond the level of what actually fulfills us because money is the way we keep score. Money is how become a “player” in society. This means that, often, the nonmaterial aspects of life—like love; family; connection to humanity, to nature, or to God; and service to the community—have been pushed to margins of life. We are in a social and political environment that makes difficult to choose anything other than the dominant paradigm of profits as primary value. you choose to operate outside of dominant paradigm, you’re likely to lose your role as player. You’ll lose your status; you’ll lose respect, either from others or from yourself; and you’ll also lose income, which means you may no longer have a secure future. As long as you’re a player, there seems to always be more—more money, more status, more power.

—Vicki Robin
Vicki Robin is co-author with Joe Dominguez (now deceased) of the national bestseller,Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money & Achieving Financial Independence (Viking Penguin 1992; Penguin, 1999). She is president of New Road Map Foundation, chair of the Simplicity Forum, and the originator of Conversation Cafés.