"Strategy is taking control of your own destiny at the full extent to which you can..."

Is it foolish to value things that you receive far more than things that you acquire?

On one hand, it makes you appreciate the little gifts far more than you would otherwise; on the other, it makes you far less attuned to things that you "need", since you learn to live without amassing much for yourself...and don't realize that you live without things that other people would call "essential".

What are the possible outcomes of this? I count six:

1. You live poor, you die poor. By never learning to "need" certain things, you don't embark on the paths to secure them. As a result, you remain remarkably low-maintenance, and find out fifty years later that you cost yourself a lot of health, fortune, time and opportunity with your ignorance, having realized fifty years too late that you'd undervalued them.

2. You live poor, but feel rich. You find that your way of life has enabled you to secure the kinds of wealth you actually needed...friendships, graces, influence on others, and many, many surprises. Those are perceivably equivalent or even scarcer than other forms of wealth, since they are intangible and oftentimes beyond your control. Thus, even though you cannot afford to make your life secure, per se, you amass the kinds of things that enable you to be happy amidst the chaos.

3. You live poor, long to feel rich, but never get there. By pegging your happiness on things beyond your control, you end up disappointed because they don't always materialize in the ways you would want. This is the end state for a person who desired friendships, graces, influence on others, and many, many surprises, and correspondingly places his time and effort into pursuing these things...but ends his life finding that he is alone, insignificant, unappreciated and forgotten.

4. You live poor, but are cared for. Though you are blind to things that you might need, others alert you to these things and make sure you maintain sufficient reserves of health, time, opportunity and fortune as you continue in your pursuit of more intangible riches. Thus, you do not live alone, but builds a community around you that serves as your eyes and ears for maintaining a balanced life.

5. You abandon the poor life and pursuit of intangibles, and go full-force in pursuit of the riches that other people value, following their strategies and frameworks for achieving such riches. This exposes you to the same set of advantages, trials, vulnerabilities and griefs that the other people experience, all or none of which may be apparent at the outset. Similarly, you also must expect that the preconditions that were there for your role model were also there for you. Otherwise, plan on being disappointed when things don't work out as planned.

6. You live poor, but gradually reach an equilibrium. Though your senses are not well-attuned to things that other people value, you continue to learn about these things and upgrade at a satisfactory pace. Though this does not immediately put you at the same pace as your peers, it enables you to continue maintaining a healthy, balanced life with the full range of wealths available, both predictable and unpredictable.

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These states are not discrete. 1 is a simplified version of 3; 2, 4 and 6 may occur simultaneously; 5 is something different altogether.

I want to say I comfortably exist in states 2, 4 and 6, but I cannot. In recent times, I find myself wondering if I will eventually end up with 3. When saner minds prevail, I believe I will end up with some murky mixture of all of these...and by that time, I hope I can say that for most of the journey, I was happy.

Wouldn't it be a lot easier if we could just say there was some optimal path that would maintain our happiness permanently? Certainly, it would be nice to see ourselves living the beautiful lives we see others having...and we are oft in the habit of comparing and contrasting our lives with everybody else's...

What great pain one experiences, then, when judged to have lived a life inferior to another...