It is true, who are spending time around really influences who much you spend. I come from a working class background. Even when I was practicing law, most of my friends were not lawyers. It was always important for me to maintain my real friendships. However I found there was a lot of pressure to spend money at work:

1- after work drinks in the financial districts or expensive lunches downtown with coworkers. How do you say no to going to lunch when your entire team is going?
2- invitations to expensive fundraising breakfasts or galas.
3- pressured to donate large amount of money to fundraisers. We had stupid competitions where you would sponsor certain partners at the firm
4- I needed to wear suits which were expensive to buy and costly to dry clean.
5- I never had time go grocery shop or cook so I purchased almost all my meals out

At that time, I felt I was pretty frugal and poor because I did not own a car, house or any expensive designer clothing. At my current job EVERYONE brings their own lunch. I rarely get invited to events anymore and when I do I tell people I can’t afford to go. The fundraisers at my current job are small ones like 2-5$ raffle tickets. I no longer have to dry clean any of my work clothes because the dress code is more business casual.

Not only have I saved a ton of money making almost all of my meals, I have lost some weight. I have more free time to enjoy my hobbies. I no longer need to use sleeping pills to fall asleep. For the first time in my life, I have absolutely NO STRESS. It is so weird but a good weird. I’m definitely happier but sometimes the yardsticks that I used to measure success creep up on me. Although I am glad I have paid off 60% of my student debt while managing to go on at least one large overseas vacation a year, I sometimes feel like I haven’t reached a “normal adult” milestone of home ownership when everyone around me is busy working on their homes. I know I would not be happy to have to sacrifice my vacations to own a home nor would not enjoy decorating or fixing a home. Thanks for reminding life is a single player game and in my game a home would not make me happy.

As you wrote above, there is a strong focus on the external factors to make or help us be happy. Career, grades, relationships, activities, etc., etc. I see my kids going down that path. I feel like I had a big win recently. Since 7th grade, my daughter was absolutely certain that if she did not graduate high school with a 4.0 gpa, then it would be impossible for her to get into any decent college. Even though I was a college registrar for 15 years, she did not believe me that it wasn’t true. It took her getting her first B to change, but when that happened, she had what I gave her to catch her and didn’t go the “life is over” direction. She recognized that pushing herself so hard for the 4.0 wasn’t making her happy, but that there was value in having tried something that was difficult (physics).

I’ve had at least half a dozen career changes in my 45 years on earth. I never learned how to focus internally for my happiness and spent many years frustrated at many of those jobs. Reading your blog, using the Headspace app, and other things that I’m just learning now are helping improve my life and well-being. I’m glad in a sense that these are happening to me at the time my kids are going through some important formative years.

Thank you for putting words to how I should alter my strategy. Now I just have to figure out the tactics…

I agree with you and I think we can both be correct. Life is all about relationships, and empathy is powerful. Without empathy we would all be sociopaths (in the true sense of the word, not the tongue-in-cheek was I throw it around in some of my articles).

The way I use single player in this context is not to say we we should isolate ourselves or consider ourselves immune to others, but to point out that our metrics for happiness are all entirely created by our brain. I want people to connect with others; that is the essence of what makes us human. Many of my happiest moments were because of the effects others had on me, but playing the multi-player games of society has never really made me happy.

Opting out of the multiplayer games I describe above has been a form of decluttering for me. Without the distractions I can focus on the things and people that make me happy. By being happy myself, I have found I make the people around me happy as well. It’s a win-win.

Thanks for the comment 🙂

There is no one that can share in your happiness; it is all alone and in your mind. No one really cares about your happiness except you. When people do things to make you happy, it is actually a desire within them that drives this.

I think it’s important to grasp that living our desires is not mutually exclusive from caring about another. Even if the reason we care about another is for our own peace there is power and relationship in that empathy. It’s because we all have an awareness of others and can feel them to an extent that we have meaningful relationships.

It’s important to think about this because we can’t truly live alone and it is not single player. It’s a higher effect of both understanding yourself deeply and independent of others but then understanding how the self you are can connect with others and the world as a whole. It’s in knowing ourselves and seeing how we connect with the world that we find fulfillment and meaning.

Thank you TFR. No one has written a poem in the comments yet and I am honored. I would respond in kind, but I am only capable of limericks and an occasional marginal haiku 😉

Life intervenes, creates many illusions
Getting caught in them is part of our delusions
What did you gain here that you can carry?
Memories and lessons are all there is.

All relationships end with the house
Your children may mourn at the burial
But nobody comes with you on the last journey.
Memories and lessons are all there is.

I could go on, but will stop my attempt at poetry here. Your great post HP insrpired these words. I love the single player framework.