How Rich People Can Be Poor

Hello steemians!!! Today I would like to discuss a story about how rich can be poor. I am very thankful to the people who are encouraging me to write on steemit. My friend told me a story. I am writing that story . Here "I" refers to "ram" who is my friend.

"Money can't buy you happiness."
Mom was lecturing again. It seemed the older I got, the more frequent her lectures. I stood in silence, knowing what was coming next..
"There's more to life than money…why, when I was your age, I was busy doing my chores to think about such things..it's not good for you to be so obsessed with money."
I tuned her out. All I heard was "blah, blah, blah." When she sighed I knew she was running out of gas; it meant the ending was near. Her last sentence was predictable: "You know, son, I'm only scolding you for your own good."
Then she would calm down as I promised to do whatever it was she wanted me to do. Meanwhile I was crossing my fingers and telling myself, "She doesn't know what she's talking about!"

This lecture was all too familiar. My brother and sisters never got such lectures, but they didn't feel as I did about money. I loved money. Everything about it fascinated me. My brother loved cars. We nicknamed him the "broke-chanic" because he was more interested in taking apart than in making them work. My sisters were interested in the arts and spirituality my mother was proud of their hobbies. But when I suggested to her that money was my hobby, she just thought I greedy. While my brother and sisters were encouraged to explore their interests, Mom often expressed her concern about my tuning into Inhaled Duck's rich greedy uncle, Scrooge mcduck.
Her objections went unheeded. By the time I was nine, I had my first job for ten cents an hour. I went on to manufacture my own money, both paper and metal, until dad explained that this was known as "counterfeiting"—which was against the law. I had to stop just as I was getting good at it. At ten I joined the country club and began playing golf. Dad found this amusing since he had never belonged to a country club and wondered how in the world a boy my age had ever managed to get accepted. (I negotiated!)

As I grew, so did my obsession with money—and so did the vehemence of mom's lectures.
"Money can't buy you love," she said. To argue my position, I pointed out how many rich men in town had young, good-looking wives or girl-friends. That day she almost slapped my face.
In spite of my mother's efforts to change me, I spent most of my first 34 years pursuing my first love, money. Then one day I asked myself, "Is there more to life than money, pretty toys, fast cars, wine, women and song?"
At this point in my life I started to gain a little more appreciation for my mother’s opinions about money. She associated money with greedy evil, manipulative, immoral and valueless people. Granted, this world is full of them. I was one of them for several years. I had absolutely no sympathy for people who were poor and, in fact, did my best to stay away from them. But as I sat thinking that I had what most people could only dream of, I began to feel confused about my life.

My parents had worked primarily for the fulfillment of their minds and their souls. My mother was a registered nurse who worked for her love my father was a teacher and worked for that same for two years they worked with President Kennedy's Peace corps. My mother stressed that I should find work I enjoyed. I couldn't understand why she was unhappy with what I did. I loved driving ships and piloting planes throughout the world. As I matured, however, I noticed a fine distinction between what my parents did and what I was doing. Yes, I was doing what I loved. The difference was that part of what my parents pleasure was the realization that what they did not only gave them pleasure but also benefitted others. I did what I loved for only one person, me. The work they did to make the world a better place was a form of wealth that I must admit I didn't have. With all my dollars, I was living in a kind of poverty.

Better is bread with a happy heart Than wealth with vexation.
-Amenemope

David Suzuki, a great Canadian of Japanese descent, provides a story that best summarizes my way of thinking. He is noted, among other things, for his research on fruit flies. I shall paraphrase the story from his book, Metamorphosis.
He begins with the parallels between the lives of humans and fruit flies. After birth, humans and fruit flies begin responding to their environments. They grow, learn and become more mobile. A fly or maggot goes through a series of molts. A child experiences various stages of maturation, learning to walk and talk, then entering puberty, and so on. Early in life both are in the gathering, or "me" stage.

On cue, the maggot enters a phase called pupation. In butterflies, pupation happens when the caterpillar spins a cocoon, to emerge some time later as a butterfly. At pupation the fruit fly maggot digests what it has accumulated (as adults digest accumulated experiences, information and knowledge), goes through metamorphosis, and then flies about the planet performing the mission for which it was genetically designed. This is where humans and fruit flies differ.

"Many people remain maggots, growing larger, richer and more powerful, without an accompanying evolution in wisdom, sensitivity or compassion."
-David Suzuki

Before I lost everything, I did my best to become a very big, rich maggot. It wasn't until I became a flat-broke maggot that I began to evolve. At 32, my thinking changed dramatically. I found that I had a deep need to give back instead of just gathering and taking. I began to search for a different kind of wealth. Money was no longer the main motivator in my life. With the help of dear friends and teachers, I began to see things I had never seen before. I began to enjoy the kind of wealth that eludes all too many rich men and women.

For the very first time in my life I began to appreciate how it might feel to be a poor person—that poverty of any kind had a direct impact on self-esteem. Most people think of poverty as something experienced only by the homeless or by people living in ghettos. But there are many different kinds of poverty. In the final analysis, it may best be defined as "a need without wherewithal." If a family, for example, needs a larger home and does not have the knowledge or the wherewithal to acquire it that can constitute their poverty. But if a person feels unfulfilled emotionally or spiritually and doesn't know what to do about that, this is a form of poverty, too.
My own poverty was of this latter kind. It had less to do with money than with fulfillment of myself. Though I had all the money I had ever wanted, I was still living in poverty because I did not know how to be happy. I remember how shocked I was to discover that poverty wasn't limited to money—that all the material wealth in the world would never heal the ache I was feeling.

I discovered other categories of poverty during this period: emotional poverty and professional poverty. The "need without the wherewithal" in people is alarmingly high. There are people who suffer in abusive relationships, not knowing how to get out; there are couples whose marriages were dead years ago, but who are clinging to little more than a now-vague memory of happiness. And there are lonely people who, in a world of over five billion people, can't find that sped someone with whom to share mutual loving and caning.
Emotional poverty does not discriminate. One of the worst wastes of all is the financially wealthy person who is emotionally bankrupt.
The other category of "need without wherewithal" is professional poverty. I am amazed at the number of people I talk with every year who are either bored with their jobs or simply hate their work. How anyone can get up day after day to go to a job he or she feels is empty and ungratifying? If we must spend most of our waking hours at work' why not figure out a way to spend it doing something that is nourishing to our minds or our souls? When we start looking at the afternoon coffee break as the high point of our day, we're in trouble.

Increasing numbers of people are expressing the desire to do something meaningful with their lives. They want to make a contribution rather than merely working for a living. So many people end up feeling that their lives make little or no difference. while there are a great many people who think a raise is compensation enough for the emptiness they feel in their work, there are also people who find their work so satisfying that they don't care that they take home a small paycheck. They work because they are satisfied that they are making an important contribution to society. This sense of making a contribution is why most teachers stay in a profession that offers less money than most.

Without a sense of self-worth and personal satisfaction, we live in poverty, in a void where there is little or no real happiness—regardless of how many dollars we have in the bank. And whether this poverty is derived from a miserable relationship or an unfulfilling job, it will not magically disappear just because we increase the amounts in our bank accounts.
Must we choose between happiness and money? On the contrary, there is no reason in the world not to have both. One of my greatest teachers, R. Buckminster Fuller, awoke me to the fact that poverty has nothing to do with money and that money does not produce wealth. Fuller said that wealth is what a person knows, and that the more people know, the richer they will feel. In its present condition, our educational system diminishes a person's knowledge by punishing mistakes; in the end this produces people who enjoy the wealth of neither knowledge nor money.
Mother was fight. It is one of my greatest regrets that she died before she saw her son metamorphose—hopefully, a few stages beyond his identity as a maggot.

I hope this story made some sense and quite useful for us to know

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The pictures i used were taken from pixabay.com under creativecommons

If u want to read my post on success and a chance
https://steemit.com/psychology/@bharathpreetham/success-is-a-choice-not-a-chance

If u want to read my story on psychology of evil please go through this link:
https://steemit.com/psychology/@bharathpreetham/which-is-evil-money-or-poverty

if u want to read my story on self hypnotisn for attaining peaceful state of mind:
https://steemit.com/psychology/@bharathpreetham/practice-self-hypnotism-attain-a-peaceful-state-of-mind