Talking with Adela, a great friend, a professional in the financial sector, I discover that many people reflect from time to time on what it means to be rich. Because (almost) all of us like to do well materially. In relation to wealth, it is worth remembering that wise thing from Seneca: “I do not seek riches, but I prefer them.”
The classics continually teach us that there is almost nothing new under the sun, except the digital destruction to which we are subjecting children too early and in which we participate as accomplices, I would like to believe involuntarily, because educating is tiring and we get used to it.
Let’s go back to what concerns us: many of us care about living in a country where there is wealth, which, according to Josep Pla, is characteristic of a serious country, because it has a strong currency and order in the street.
Money could be one of the forms of measurement in relation to time; It is striking to observe how some people consider that money is an end and not the means that allows them to distribute their time.
Actually, one of the keys to life in relation to money and how to get it occurs to me that depends on knowing how to be ambitious, but controlling: that is, not letting legitimate ambition turn into pernicious greed. To do this, one of the most advisable things would be to think like that character who said: “I don’t want to be rich, because I am already very rich.” Understood this very rich being as someone who knows how to enjoy what he has without wanting something excessive.
Wealth is having money without it having you (or, that it is a good vassal and a bad lord, as the well-known phrase says). And, I add, there are people who are rich, who live like a wretch, and there are those who know how to live like a rich man, without being one. All this, naturally, are nothing more than truisms.
But let’s celebrate remembering the obvious when it’s still necessary. Because, after all, wealth is energy. And, as our world changes brutally due to the ways of producing energy, its costs and its effects, it is convenient to close this article by remembering the wonderful phrase of Viktor Frankl: “Contrary to energy sources, meaning is inexhaustible”; Therefore, if we want to be truly rich, let’s seek to live a life with meaning. Everything else, after.
