What Actually Feeds Your Life

Two people can live opposite lives and both can honestly call it a good one.

One fills the calendar with beauty. Parties, travel, white-sand beaches, the long dinner that has no purpose beyond the dinner. The other enjoys those things too in theory, but pours themselves into building instead. Saving, reinvesting, repairing what could be replaced, keeping the reserves deep enough that nothing could ever catch them off guard.

And yet, what happens when one examines at the other?

The saver looks at the traveler and feels a small twinge, you could call it envy though they'd never name it, and then, almost immediately, resolves it. Reckless, they decide. Nice for them, but reckless. The judgment lets them off the hook.

The traveler looks at the saver and feels the same twinge, and settles it the same way. At least I'm living, they decide. I'd rather enjoy my life than sit at home and be miserable.

Both feel a genuine pull toward the other side. Both talk themselves out of it. And here is the part I find telling: in my practice, both camps are unsatisfied, and both, almost without exception, arrive wanting the same thing. They want the business and the finances to improve.

Neither one suspects the problem might be that they've cut themselves off from half of what feeds a person.

There's a piece of research I think about often here. Behavioral scientists studied how people spend and found that most of us fall somewhere on a spectrum they called tightwads and spendthrifts. Tightwads feel too much of what the researchers named the "pain of paying," so they spend less than they themselves actually want to. Spendthrifts feel too little of it, so they spend more than they want to.

The detail that matters most is this: neither group is happy with how they handle money. Both are living at a distance from what they'd genuinely choose. And when the researchers looked at who was most content, it wasn't the savers, and it wasn't the spenders. It was the people in the middle, perhaps because they were the ones who weren't at war with themselves.

I'd add one thing the research is careful about because it matters for the saver reading this: being a tightwad is not the same as being frugal. The genuinely frugal person takes real pleasure in saving; saving is what feeds them, and there is nothing to fix there. The tightwad is different. The tightwad wants more than they allow themselves to have, and calls the withholding responsibility.

That is the line worth finding in yourself. Is this saving something that genuinely nourishes you, or is it a permission you're quietly refusing to sign?

Because that is what the first part of the series Nourished was really about, permission. The way pleasure gets filed under "irresponsible," the way you'll accept nourishment from almost anyone but yourself. This part asks the next question, and it's a gentler one: once you're allowed, what actually feeds you?

The honest answer is that it's different for every person, and it changes. Sometimes what feeds you is the splurge, the trip, the meal, the beautiful and unnecessary thing. Sometimes what feeds you genuinely is the saving, the deep reserve, the quiet security, the pleasure of watching something you built grow steadier. The mistake is not choosing one. The mistake is deciding, once and for all, that you are a saver or are a spender, and then living the whole of your life as only half of yourself.

There's a reason neither extreme delivers what it promises. If you're a builder, you already know the feeling this series opened with: you keep expecting to arrive, and the arriving keeps receding. There’s a name for that expectation, the arrival fallacy: the belief that reaching the goal will finally produce the contentment, when what actually happens is a brief flicker followed by a new goal, set a little further out. You can't save your way to enough if enough is a moving target. And you can't spend your way there either, chasing the next experience because the last one wore off faster than you'd hoped.

What actually holds is harder to buy and simpler to describe. It's the ability to be fed by your own life as you're living it, to let the money, and the time, and the wanting itself serve you in both directions. To splurge when the splurge is what nourishes. To save when the saving is what nourishes. And to be the one who decides, moment to moment, rather than a fixed type playing out a script you chose a long time ago and forgot you were allowed to rewrite.

Meeting in the middle isn't a compromise. It's the return of a choice you didn't know you'd stopped making.

The  second session of Nourished is inside The Lucid Hour. It's a hypnotic audio session that loosens the fixed identity of saver or spender and returns you to the question underneath: what actually feeds you right now? You can begin at The Lucid Hour.