How wealthy will you be in 2020?

Ever since I entered adult working life, I've been painfully aware of a mind movie that keeps playing in my head. It is a fantasy played by your mind about how things should be. It usually portrays a certain lifestyle and we create a vision of ourselves living this idealized life. I believe experts call this "referencing". The problem is that we routinely reference and measure ourselves against a vision that is fed to us by a hyper-materialistic and consumer culture. As a result, we often fall short and in a desperate attempt to realize our aspirations to measure up, we borrow heavily, we feel poorly about ourselves, we overwork and we burnout. Yet we just can't seem to get there, we are always falling short in comparison to someone else or to our vision. We gradually get caught up in a vicious cycle we can't escape and it separates us from the things in life that bring us the most joy. 

It took me quite a while to shift my thinking about this and I hope to implement a different mindset from 2020 onward:

From now on my wealth will be measured by the quality of my kids' education, the joy of their play, our family's reciprocal health. My wealth will be measured by intellectual conversations with a friend, a shared vulnerability, the quality of a friendship, the amount of friendly quips and witty remarks. My wealth will be measured by self-acceptance, self-knowledge and growth, affiliation and community, by the integrity of our officials in office. My wealth will be measured by how much I can give, freely and selflessly (which is truly difficult in our culture, we all crave that recognition that accompany our "good deeds"). My wealth will be measured by the time I spend thinking, reading, hiking, living within my means, living lighter with less stuff.

May you all have a blessed, prosperous 2020 and may you accumulate immense wealth!