People who are in businesses or jobs relatively unaffected by a year of lockdowns are finding themselves cashed up. Those who love to travel, well, they have found themselves with money to spend. And spend they do. The pandemic has seen an explosion in online shopping for luxury goods, we’ve seen luxury car sales boom and people are also finally getting around to those home renovations that they’ve put off for years.
Being cooped up at home has also meant that people have much more time on their hands to think up ways to spend all that extra cash.
And you can’t deny that there’s a sense of deserving or entitlement that sits behind it. If you can’t get out and about, or travel, spend time with family and friends, well, you deserve to spoil yourself a little. Right?
Of course, we all like to have nice things. When we first get our hands on something new and beautiful, there’s a real buzz and a spike in feeling happy. But once it’s ours, well, how long does that happiness last? That luxury item, once ours, just becomes an item. That luxury car, after a while, we are so used to it, it becomes ‘just the car’. And the house renovation? After a while, we take it for granted.
That’s the thing with spending money on yourself to buy material things – the payoff is short-term. The happiness doesn’t last. Sooner or later the buzz fizzles and you go back to thinking up ways to spend your time and our money.
Investing in yourself, on the other hand, is a whole different thing. Investing in yourself – your skills, your education, in your own development, well, that’s something that can take your life in a whole new direction.
If you know that you haven’t been living your best life up until now, well, invest this extra time and extra money to get yourself onto the path that you would love.
Think about it. We’ve probably got another year ahead of living with various levels of restrictions. That means another year of a bit more time on our hands a bit more cash in our bank accounts. What is it that you’ll be doing with that time and money? Do you think you still need more stuff? Or will you use that time and money to invest in your future life.
If you keep living and breathing for this next year, at the end of the year, you will have created another year of life. What do you want that to look like? More of the same, or do you want to be doing something different? Do you want to be different?
Stop putting it off. Stop distracting yourself with short-term fixes. Now is the time to invest in yourself and in what you would love to create for your life.
