It's fun to have money, but the more money I get, the less interesting it becomes. If you don't have very much, you have to think about it. If you are starving, you become interested in food. If you are struggling to pay the bills, money becomes tragically important.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the diminishing returns of money on personal interest and well-being.
Sebastian Junger suggests that while money can bring enjoyment, its significance decreases as one accumulates more of it. When financial struggles exist, the value of money intensifies, leading to a heightened focus on basic needs and survival, illustrating the complex relationship between wealth and fulfillment.
In practice
In a conversation about financial health, this quote can illustrate the paradox of wealth.
The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly.
The cause doesn't have to be righteous and battle doesn't have to be winnable; but over and over again throughout history, men have chosen to die in battle with their friends rather than to flee on their own and survive.
When you're scared, you're still hanging on to life. When you're ready to die, you let it go. A sort of emptying out occurs, a giving up on the world that seems oddly familiar even if you've never done it before.
Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.
In some ways, risk-taking is the ultimate act of self-indulgence , an obscene insult to the preciousness of life. And yet, how can one dismiss something that persists despite every reasonable theory that it shouldn't?
I decided to start a medical training program for freelancers, only freelancers. They're the ones who are doing most of the combat reporting. They're taking most of the risks. They're absorbing most of the casualties. And they're the most underserved and under-resourced of everyone in the entire news business.
Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, --will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, --or to diminish something of their pains.
Men are that they might have joy . . . not guilt trips.
Perhaps it's because I appreciate all I have so much that I don't worry about what I haven't got.
If you don't wake up and have your own thing, whether it's writing or reading or traveling or acting or dancing or singing or being a mother or a father, something that drives you, then it's all worth nothing. One of the key elements in happiness is purpose.
As long as this exists, this sunshine and this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?
Pets are always a great help in times of stress. And in times of starvation too, o'course.
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