Why do we never have enough money?
Most of us can recognize this situation: the salary comes, we pay the bills, then a few unexpected expenses appear, and suddenly there is practically nothing left. How to escape this cycle?
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Most of us can recognize this situation: The salary comes, we pay the bills, then a few unexpected expenses appear, and suddenly there is practically nothing left. We then have to use the credit card, or some other form of micro-credit to get to the end of the month. Then, by the time the next salary comes, it’s already partially spent. From there, the situation just becomes worse: we pay interest, we are forced to buy everything on credit, often paying substantially more, and so on. On top of these, we also pay rent, mortgages, etc., which are also expenses that come from us not having enough money. In other words, not having money costs even more money, keeping us bound to a seemingly endless cycle, where we are reduced to living hand to mouth.
Faced with this situation, the natural conclusion is that we have to earn more. In some cases, it may be true. Many truly don’t earn enough to cover basic necessities. There is, however, another problem that we can keep in mind: our necessities have a remarkable ability to grow faster than our salary. The old phone was perfectly fine until we saw the new model. The apartment was large enough until our friend moved into a larger one. The car was fine until we got a promotion. Our clothes are never enough, because people on Instagram always have better. We earn more, but instead of becoming free, we simply upgrade our prison.
Nowadays, there is even a term for that: the upgrade cycle. We are continuously encouraged to believe that whatever we have is not enough, and we are constantly manipulated into adopting new necessities. Since it was originally launched in 2007, the iPhone has had 17 generations, and there are people around who bought every single one.
The trap is that once we start upgrading things and adding new necessities, there is no end to it. We have to keep spending more and more on maintaining it. More than that, it makes us entangled in karma, making us violate an important cosmic principle, īśāvāsyam idaḿ sarvaṁ. Everyone has a certain quota reserved for oneself, which includes the necessities of life. When we take more than needed, we encroach on other people’s quotas. Material nature produces enough for everyone, but when we take more than what we need, we deprive others of their shares, implicating ourselves in karmic debits. Understanding it and learning to avoid this process frees us from this cycle.
Śrīla Prabhupāda spoke about this decades ago. His formula was very simple: “Simple living high thinking.”
That’s a principle that can be applied at all levels of our lives, reducing needs and expenses and achieving freedom and peace of mind to develop our spiritual practice. It may sound revolutionary in the modern context, but happiness goes beyond disposable material objects.
Desire is expensive
Advertising rarely sells only the object itself; it works on desire. We can see how advertisements of cars and clothes sell status, freedom, etc. with attractive, successful people. It is not about transportation or a piece of fabric to cover one’s modesty, but about a whole ecosystem of images, desires and expectations. The product becomes attached to an emotion or even identity, inventing a need that didn’t exist before. Marketing people call it selling “an experience”, a certain feeling attached to a certain product, or, in other words, an illusion.
Kṛṣṇa explains that lust is never satisfied and burns like fire. Prabhupāda adds that trying to satisfy this lust is like supplying fuel to a fire. It just makes it burn more strongly. This explains one of the great mysteries of modern life: how can someone earn twice as much and remain as broke as before.
A higher taste
We could speak for a long time about all the ways the industry cheats us, but that’s ultimately not the most important question. The question is how to get out of it. That’s what Prabhupāda was explaining fifty years ago, when this system was still in its infancy: Simplify your life, save your time for Kṛṣṇa consciousness.
The goal is not to buy more stuff, but to reduce our material necessities and arrange things efficiently enough so that we can use the human form of life for its real purpose.
The first step is not to earn more, but to desire less. This is the cheat code that breaks the system. Happiness is not in increasing consumption; it is in reducing desire.
In consumer societies, the senses are constantly stimulated, and the mind is trained to interpret every new desire as a need. Unless we learn to control the senses, an increase in income simply gives us more capacity to consume, without solving the real problem.
At first, controlling the senses may feel like depriving ourselves. We see something we want, we have money to buy, but we grind our teeth and try to resist it. attractive, we can afford it, but we decide not to buy it. The mind protests because we have been trained to equate consumption with happiness. Kṛṣṇa, however, gives the solution in the Bhagavad-gītā (2.59): “Though the embodied soul may be restricted from sense enjoyment, the taste for sense objects remains. But, ceasing such engagements by experiencing a higher taste, he is fixed in consciousness.” Repression can work as a provisional tactic in the beginning, but the real solution is finding a better engagement for the senses.
This is where Kṛṣṇa consciousness breaks the chain. We all look for happiness, and the spiritual process gives us a real source of it. That’s a point Kṛṣṇa explains in the sixth chapter of the Gītā:
“In the stage of perfection called trance, or samādhi, one’s mind is completely restrained from material mental activities by practice of yoga. This perfection is characterized by one’s ability to see the Self by the pure mind and to relish and rejoice in the Self. In that joyous state, one is situated in boundless transcendental happiness, realized through transcendental senses. Established thus, one never departs from the truth, and upon gaining this he thinks there is no greater gain. Being situated in such a position, one is never shaken, even in the midst of greatest difficulty. This indeed is actual freedom from all miseries arising from material contact.”
If I find satisfaction in my spiritual practice and in activities connected with Kṛṣṇa, I don’t need to look for happiness in material objects. It’s not even about heroically renouncing things; it’s about getting something genuinely better.
In the material cycle, we are manipulated into desiring things. Desire leads to spending, and spending leads to debt. Debt takes away our peace of mind, forcing us to work more to pay it, which in turn leads to more stress. More stress makes us more propense to quick gratification, an escape valve for the dissatisfaction that builds inside. This, however, creates more expenses, leading to a vicious cycle.
The spiritual cycle goes in the opposite direction. Spiritual knowledge combined with spiritual practice brings us maturity to understand what we really need. Fewer needs means more time, and more time means more freedom to cultivate our spiritual practice. It is very dificult to chant and study when we don’t have a peaceful mind, so from there you can see how things connect.
Simple living is thus not about becoming a miser who spends nothing. The point is to reduce the amount of time we are forced to sell to buy unnecessary things. Prabhupāda put it directly: “Make your life simplified. Save your time for Kṛṣṇa consciousness.”
Time is the actually scarce resource. Money can be earned again. A phone can be replaced. But an hour spent earning money for something we never needed will never return. At death, all the objects accumulated through decades of work stay behind. When we understand that, the question “Can I afford it?” becomes secondary. The real question becomes: “Is this worth part of my human life?”
When we start asking these questions, consumerism stops making sense to us. The advertisements stop manipulating our desires. A friend buys a newer car, but we don’t feel diminished. Others may have more expensive clothes, or newer phones, or bigger houses, but we don’t feel diminished, because our sense of identity is not anchored in these things.
Instead of spending our human form of life producing garbage, we upgrade our consciousness. Instead of working harder to improve our status inside the prison, we prepare ourselves to leave it. That’s the real meaning of simple living, high thinking: freedom.
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