The Real Wealth Equation: Why Managing Desires, Not Money, Is the Secret to a Happy Life

We spend so much of our lives chasing money. We calculate returns on investment, track our savings, and strategize about how to maximize every rupee. We put our effort there, believing that this is the path to wealth and security. But if we stop and look at money for what it really is, a fascinating realization emerges.

Money has value only because we collectively agree to give it value. That is all. It is paper, metal, or digital entries with no intrinsic worth beyond what we assign to it. And wealth? Wealth is actually a state of mind. It is simply the relationship between how many desires you have and how much you possess to fulfill those desires. That is the entire equation.

Think about it. If I have one rupee and I have zero desires, one divided by zero is infinity. I am infinitely wealthy. But if I have one million dollars and I have two million desires, then that million dollars amounts to nothing. I am impoverished despite my bank balance.

So the key thing that defines your true wealth is not the money you have. It is the number of desires you have. That is it. Daily necessities, ambitions, cravings, all of these are desires. They are what determine whether you feel rich or poor.

The Mechanics of Desire

Now here is where it gets interesting. What is it that triggers and increases our desires? The answer is stress. When there is no peace of mind, when there is stress, the body does not understand what is happening. It simply knows something is wrong. So it starts craving. It craves food, it craves company, it craves attention, it craves distraction. And then these cravings go completely haywire.

The secret to having a happy life is having very few desires. But how do you achieve that? Desires come from within, and how often do we actually have control over them? So we must look at the desire-creating mechanism itself.

Desires arise from a perception of lack. And that perception of lack always comes with stress. Only when you are stressed do you feel that something is missing. Consider this scenario. You are walking on a road all alone. The nature around you is beautiful. You are happy, you are content, you feel like you are on top of the world because this is it. This is life. And then somebody drives down in a Porsche. They are in a wonderful car, the color is just what you like, and they seem to be enjoying both the car and the nature. Suddenly a desire creeps in. If I had the money, I could have that car too.

What happened there? Your desire was caused by an external event. Something outside you created an instability. It made you feel incompetent or a little lower than you felt moments before. The comparator started working. And when does the comparator start? It starts when there is no balance within.

Now consider a different scenario. What if you were a billionaire who owned a couple of luxury cars and this Porsche was a car you had gifted to your assistant? What if it was he who was enjoying the drive with his kids, taking in the scenery and showing you how grateful and happy he was? What then would be your state of mind?

When you are completely satiated, when you are not hungry after a hearty meal, you really do not care how much food is on someone else's plate. You are not hungry, so it does not matter. The only time you compare and feel that someone has more or you have more is when you are hungry for something.

So the best way to handle desires is to address the root cause, which is disturbance. Once you understand that desire is a signal of lack, you can see that the most helpful thing you can do for yourself is to become complete. When the body is completely happy, when it is so content that it does not desire much, you have found the answer.

Look at a person who is satiated. They do not want other things. Similarly, a body that has no inflammation, no problems, a mind that is relaxed, neural circuits that are completely balanced, a lifestyle that creates harmony, such a person will look at someone driving a Porsche and feel something completely different. They might think, what a pity, they cannot even get down and enjoy the nature. Their brain will work in a manner where it does not say, I do not have it. It will say, I do not need it. And with that clarity, the intellect can flower.

The Vicious Cycle of Stress and Desire

When people are stressed and leading lives of stress, their desires increase. This becomes a vicious cycle. You run after money, which creates stress. The stress increases your desires. Your increased desires make you feel you need more money. So you run after money again, creating more stress, which increases your desires further. Once you get into that cycle, it is very difficult to get out.

Consider the parallel with weight loss. If you want to lose weight, do not exercise for weight loss. Exercise for health, yes. But do not exercise specifically for weight loss. Why? Because if I want to lose fifteen hundred kilocalories per day through exercise, I have to walk thirty kilometers. That takes six to seven hours. But if I want to lose fifteen hundred kilocalories per day, the best way is to not eat them. Not eating fifteen hundred kilocalories takes no time at all.

Yet what do we do? We invest twenty minutes putting food in, and then the body spends seven hours burning it. We are putting it in and burning it, putting it in and burning it. There is no net loss, and we wonder why we are not losing weight.

The key is this. If you want to lose weight, do not think about exercise. Think about the most practical thing. Do not put something in your body. Similarly, if you want to become desireless, there is no point striving to satiate every desire. There is no point trying to work hard and collect enough to fill the bottomless pit of desire. First try to get rid of the stress. That is where you break the vicious cycle.

This is where meditation comes in. Calming the mind comes in. Being with people who are intelligent, who can create those resonant circuits in your brain, matters tremendously. When two intelligent people connect, they share information. It is like resonance. They communicate through talk, through gestures, through any mode. And they start living in a way that reinforces each other. The understanding keeps growing in magnitude.

When we discuss these things, every time we discuss, it puts us on a trajectory where we learn a little bit more and our desires become a little less. Desires become less because the disturbance is going down. And the disturbance is going down because we are cutting at the root of stress.

The root cause of craving for money or anything else is uncertainty. It is stress. This is where the ancient texts came up with an excellent idea. They said trust God. "Why fear when I am here?" was what they believed was God's personal assurance. Assurance was a much more powerful gesture than insurance. The minute you break that fear cycle, because it is all about fear, you are no longer stuck. Clear thinking becomes possible.

Stress's Twin Sisters: Inflation and Inflammation

One of the indicators of an economy gone wrong is inflation. Similarly, an indicator of a diseased state of health is inflammation. When there is inflation, things become more and more expensive, and you realize your money is losing value. Your wants become expensive because your money is losing value. The solution is not to hoard more money. It is to learn to let go of the obsession with money, to rebalance and recalibrate expectations.

Inflammation is the same. You want, want, want. The more you want, the more inflammation increases. Just as quantitative easing is not a viable solution to inflation, a tablet of Diclofenac sodium, a potent anti-inflammatory, is not the solution for inflammation either. Both require addressing the root cause, not just suppressing the symptom.

You go into a spiral that is just like inflation. Inflation in the economy and inflammation in the body are the same thing. So somewhere you have to decide. You have to say, I will cut this thread. I am no longer going to be inflamed. Once you step back, you cut the cycle.

The Possibility of Desirelessness

I made this connection recently. The children in our community who are homeschooled and whose parents have been practicing what we call PreHealing are different. Different when it comes to wanting things.

Take the case of a young nineteen-year-old. He is content with whatever he has. When I offered to buy him a new iPad Pro, he smiled and asked, why? I can do the same thing on this Android tablet. When I offered to buy him a phone since his is an archaic 2015 model with a partly cracked screen, he quipped, a phone is for making calls. This works and it is good.

It is not that they do not have wants and desires. But their desiring machinery is based on logic, reasoning, and calm. Even if they do desire something, there is no urgency, no ultimatum, and they are quick to let go of the desire if it does not seem to add value.

Their grandparents are no different. They are ready to spend for others, they never cut corners, yet when it comes to their own wants, they are content with the least.

That is the key. If there is no happiness, desires keep increasing. A person who is not happy starts craving so many things. They do not even know what. They crave food, they crave attention, they crave distraction. The human body, when it lacks something, often does not know how to tell you what it wants. So you start craving specific and non-specific things.

The Misinterpretation of Cravings

When people crave pizza or coffee, it is not actually the pizza or the coffee they want. When they crave coffee, they might actually need hydration. When they crave pizza, they might need some nutrition. But the pizza does not provide the nutrition. It is a betrayal. The person craves more because they have not given the body what it actually needs.

The same thing happens with alcohol. When people ask for alcohol, they might be asking for probiotics. But alcohol is sterilized. It has almost zero probiotics. The body feels cheated and asks for more. What the body is asking for is probiotics. What we are giving is an empty promise, alcohol that is an indicator of probiotic life without any life.

Similarly, when a person desires a car or more savings or more fixed deposits, what they are actually asking for, that deep heartfelt call, is something else entirely. I want happiness. I want to be at peace. I want to be stable. I want to be content. I want to be complete. But that message, I want to be content and complete and happy, is always misinterpreted. It gets translated into, if I have more fixed deposits, I will be happy. If I have more properties, I will be happy.

The problem is with the translation. And the translation happens because we have not been exposed to the true environment. We do not know what proper meditation is. We are not with people where we have seen real joy.

The World of Comparison

Today the world is all about comparison. I just came across an article about something called rage bait. It is a new media strategy where they find out what upsets people and they give more of that content. People watch it, they get upset, they comment. The platforms want to encourage participation, so they promote negative elements more and more. It used to be click bait. Now it is rage bait.

Everyone has opinions, and when you are angered by something, you read it. The platforms realize that presenting a negative person creates more views. So they present that person. They present their comments on someone good. Instead of projecting the good, they project the bad. They make more and more people look at the bad because it irritates and instigates. People want to see why he is saying that. But inadvertently, they are programming everyone to get into a negative loop.

The same thing happens with our desires. Whether it is fixed deposits, mutual funds, real estate, a car, or anything else, these are all baits. The true thing we want is happiness. But because we do not know that we are after happiness, we think these things will give it to us. We believe that happiness needs a reason.

Happiness Without Reason

We have to get out of the idea that happiness cannot be gotten without a reason. Once you realize that happiness and love are possible without any reason, and that you can have them unlimited, that is when you will get out of this loop completely.

The person walking in nature was happy until the Porsche drove by. The happiness was there without reason. Then the comparator started, and the reason appeared. But the happiness was real before the reason existed. It is always available.

The trick is not to accumulate more things to satisfy desires. The trick is to calm the desire-creating mechanism itself. Address the stress. Calm the inflammation. Find the peace that does not need a reason. That is the real wealth, and it is infinite.