How to Beat The House and Win in Life

Flipping the mental switch needed to really living on your own terms

Photo by Josh Appel on Unsplash.

The deck is really stacked against you if you aspire to having fewer better things. First we have the evolutionary survival instinct for more of everything, then we have nonstop advertising telling us what we should desire, and finally we have 24/7 online access to buy anything we think we need and desire.

It’s never been easier to spend your whole life in front of a screen ordering stuff that you don’t need to be stored in a house that you regularly need to upgrade in size to make sure that you have enough space for more. The answer to any problem seems to be the never-ending game of more of everything.

But the problem lies neither in the market economy nor in the access but in how little we understand human behavior in general and our own personal needs and desires in particular. It’s when we know better that we make better life decisions and that’s my mission with fewer better things, to show an alternative.

“What I try to focus on is not to try to stop the march of technological progress. Instead, I try to run faster. If Amazon knows you better than you know yourself, then the game is up.” – Yuval Noah Harari

Fewer better things is a little bit different than essentialism or minimalism in that it’s not only about less and it’s not only about the essentials but about designing a meaningful lifestyle that has fewer but also better things. And by things I don’t just mean stuff but also thoughts, people, needs, and desires.

I personally believe that no one can or even should tell you or decide for you what is meaningful in your life. That’s a personal decisions that you have to figure out on your own through trial and error. And that is really the hard part: who are you, why are you here and how would you like to live your life?

I had my epiphany during my last year at one of the largest tech companies in the world almost 20 years ago. I had been through the scrappy startup phase and we were now big and powerful, and eventually became more like a corporate battleship than an agile speedboat. Not my style, I thought and left.

I had money but no time, attention, or creative energy to focus on what I really enjoyed doing: experiment and explore with new solutions to interesting problems. And the money I made I spent on things I didn’t really need.

One day I realized how stupid it was to be part of this rat race where I exchanged my time, attention, and creative energy for only money. I had to liberate myself from this closed system that only fed more consumption and create my own – a very interesting problem to solve, in my mind.