2 kinds of tax on your pleasures.
Nothing you enjoy in life comes for free.
And there are 2 kinds of “not free”,
the one you pay upfront, and the one you pay after.
During a recent weekly client review, I asked:
- So, what helped you be moderate in your choices? (Moderation has been a challenge)
Enjoying just one small glass of wine instead of a bottle,
tasting all the food you love in bites, not plates and second helpings,
and going to bed after one short episode, not the whole season?
He paused to think,
I was more conscious of the fact that I’ll have to pay for it later -
not feeling fresh, needing to catch up on work,
restricting food more, pushing harder in workouts…
- So you thought about that poor future-you who has to deal with the consequences of the pleasures your present self overindulged in?
Exactly.
There it is.
The 2 taxes of life.
You can pay now through effort, discipline, courage.
The workouts. The extra mile at work.Choosing honest conversations that lead to deeper relationships.
Or you can pay later through fatigue and pain, regret, health issues, disconnection, and lost time, lost confidence, lost self-respect.
I noticed, that people who live well have one thing in common -
they’ve learned how to share the load between their present and future selves.
Even better, when they learn to enjoy the work that pays dividends.
They’ve built a life that feels more like a tax paradise, reaping the abundant fruits of their labor, that feels more like a play, paying little to no tax at all in the future.
One commitment I made to myself sometime in my mid-30s that I remind myself of every day:
Never live your today so that you dread an unpleasant tomorrow.
And another to go with it -
If you want to make tomorrow a masterpiece, you must master today.
Over to you, dear reader, what are some things you do that increase your tax on tomorrow? What can you do today to make tomorrow tax-free?
