What Money Costs

Somewhere along the way, our definition of success had changed.

We were discovering how to repair a toaster one afternoon when it struck me how much had changed.

In our city lives, we would have thrown it away and bought a new one.

It would have been a reason for an upgrade.
A newer model. One with more features. One that looked better.

Standing, with a screwdriver in hand, I remember saying, “It’s funny. We used to throw away anything that stopped working. Here we’ve learned that almost everything can either be fixed or lived without.”

At the time, I thought I was talking about a toaster.

Looking back, I wasn’t.

The shop had already changed our relationship with money.
Being forty kilometres from the nearest town and more than a hundred kilometres from the nearest mall had changed our relationship with convenience.

Life was slowly teaching us a different question.
Not:
How do we get more, or better?

But:

What do we actually need?
And eventually:
What are we willing to exchange our lives for?

It wasn’t that we stopped caring about money. We simply started paying attention to what money was costing.

Not the price.

The exchange.
The hours required to earn it.
The pressure required to keep earning it.
The commitments attached to it.
The pace of life it demanded.
The things we said yes to because they paid well.
The things we said no to because they didn’t.

For most of my life, more money and more success had seemed like the obvious answer.

More money meant more choices.
More security.
More freedom.
At least that was the promise.

But somewhere between city professional and rural shop owner, I began noticing something uncomfortable.

Many of the things we were working hardest to afford were not making our lives better.

They were giving us more to maintain.
More to insure.
More to clean.
More to replace.
More to worry about.

A bigger income often requires bigger commitments.
More commitments require more time.
More time creates more pressure.
And eventually more things that need replacing, upgrading, maintaining, insuring, storing, cleaning, and paying for.

The cycle looked normal because everybody around us was living inside it. In fact, being in the cycle is often treated as proof of success.

Only after leaving, did we begin to understand it fully.

A toaster became worth repairing.

A purchase became something to think about instead of something automatic.

Not because we had become virtuous.
Because we had started paying attention.
And once you begin paying attention, an interesting question emerges.

If this thing costs money, what did the money cost?

If this thing costs money…

What did the money cost?
And is the exchange worth it?

By the time the floods came, followed by the recession, and the life that had once felt so certain needed dismantling, something important had already changed.

The obvious answer was to return to the city.
To rebuild the version of success we had known before.

But by then we no longer believed the same things.
The dream had changed us.
Not because it failed.
Not because it succeeded.
But because living it had taught us to see differently.

We had learned that bigger is not always better.
That convenience is not free.
That every possession carries a cost beyond its purchase price.
That simplicity is not deprivation.
And that enough is a more useful measure than more.

While we spent that year building the bakery in our garage and deciding what came next, we found ourselves drawn toward a very different future.

Not another large house.
Not a return to suburbia.
Not a faster life.

A piece of land.
A smallholding.
A chance to build something that fitted what we had learned.

Looking back, I don’t think we were downsizing our possessions.

I think we were downsizing our assumptions.

Assumptions about what a good life required.
Assumptions about success.
Assumptions about comfort.
Assumptions about how much house, furniture, income, equipment, and complexity a life needed before it could be called good.

One by one, those assumptions were left behind.
Most of them were never missed.

The toaster was only a toaster.

But it was also the moment I realised that somewhere along the way, our definition of success had changed.

A Small Invitation for This Week

If there is something in your life you are working hard to afford, pause before assuming the cost is only financial.

Sometimes the real cost is measured in time.
Sometimes in pressure.
Sometimes in the shape your life must take to sustain it.

And sometimes the question underneath is whether an old definition of success is still true.

The question is not only whether you can pay for it.
It is whether the exchange is worth it.

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