Spend Your Money at the Right Places
Questioner: Sir, I also have a personal question. You say you cannot live wrongly and hope to consume rightly. I see myself buying stuff that I don't want because it's in trend. My friends are wearing it. Now I'll look cool if I wear it. So this is also conditioning, as you say, right? So how can I personally, how can students like us and youth escape this? What's the definite path of this?
Acharya Prashant: Have a beautiful place to wisely spend your money at. You'll be left with no surplus. You won't splurge it.
The first question is, why do you have so much money that you can blow it away? There are great places and great causes and great reasons that demand your money. Invest your money there. Spend it there.
Self-development doesn't come cheap. A lot of things in this world require monetary investment. If you have money, spend it rightly.
Why accumulate it? If you accumulate it, it'll be burnt at all the wrong places, rest assured. If suddenly, let's say you have 10 lakhs in your account as a student, what do you think you're going to do? You let it remain there unlikely.
Money is a very good resource. Don't let it rot in a vault. Spend it wisely. It is one kind of misfortune to not have money at all. The next kind of misfortune is to have a lot of money rotting in your bank account. Why must it be there in your bank account? You are so impoverished, you couldn't find a right place where you can spend your money. Money is meant to be spent. Spend it at the right places. Go enroll in a hobby class. Get a tennis coach. All that is expensive. Spend your money. If you won't, then you will end up just buying whatever your friends buy.
Questioner: It hurts the environment too.
Acharya Prashant: Tennis doesn't hurt the environment, at least not in a big way. No, it does. I mean, if you look at it, there will be some minor carbon footprint, let's say racket manufacturing has some. But once you buy a racket, it lasts several years. So that's fine.
Questioner: Clothes can change every week, like trending clothes.
Acharya Prashant: And it's not that you change them, it's that you buy them, then you also have to wash them, and that washing itself consumes both energy and requires chemicals, pollutes, and does a lot of things. It's not tennis versus clothes, you get the drift, right?
