36. The Price of Our Vices

What are your vices costing you in money, time, happiness, freedom? When you look at how we live our lives, there's a couple of different ways we can do things. If we have very few vices in our lives, we can earn our income in less time, we have time to enjoy life and get our rest, and we don't need external things to satisfy us as much. What I found is the more I'm working a four day work week, the more I'm taking time off, I don't need vices to help me do things or get over things. Now, with many vices, we need to work harder. We sometimes turn to our vices for short term fixes, to give us energy, to give us focus, to give us comfort. And again, that can help us in the short run, but usually there's a long term cost to that. And so I'm going to call vices, I'm going to use a generic category here that pretty much will lead to something that most of us use in some form or fashion. So anything like smoking, alcohol, drugs, coffee, energy drinks, fried foods, highly processed foods, refined sugar. I know I've got a couple on that list.

These are all things that I'm just going to call them advice because we know they're really not that great for us. It's not necessarily a mortal sin or anything unbelievably huge, but things that we just know aren't helping us get where we want to get. And yet sometimes we need that pick me up. We need the energy, we need the focus, we need to feel good about ourselves. But overall, we really know deep down that we're not really making a good long term investment. It's a short term fix. Now, if you look at the price of our vices, well, first of all, there's financial cost. Usually, we need money to afford our vices. Depending on what that vice is, that might be small, that might be a lot. If it's alcohol and you're having one beer at home that you bought at the store, maybe not a big deal. If you're dropping 20 bucks on a drink at a bar, that might be rather costly financially. There's the financial cost of what it takes to afford them. So we're actually spending time working to afford the vice that's supposed to help us get over the fact that we're working so much.

So there's a cyclical nature there that's not too helpful. There's the physical cost. If it's energy drinks or coffee, these are things that they'll give us short term energy. But we know in the long run, they're either leading to our illness or some sickness, not necessarily some diagnosable sickness, but they're not helping us in the long run. We're becoming less healthy. We're less energetic in the long run. We're constantly having to go back to that thing, that drink, or whatever it might be. Emotional costs. This is where things can start getting a little not as fun to talk about. I spent some time when I worked on my master's degree in psychology, working with kids with addictions. Some kids really didn't have addictions. They just depended on something in a minor way, or it just helped them. Then some I saw really did have addiction, and they needed some advice, some whether it's cigarettes or drugs or alcohol or something, either to fit in or to feel like they included, or even more so just to deal with the emotions that were coming up for them. And again, this is not a judgment. I'm not looking to put you down.

If this is where you're at, understood. I feel really good when I eat sugar for a while, and then after a while I don't. But any of these things or eating when we're not feeling well to hopefully feel better, these are all things that, again, in the long run, it's going to lead us dependent on external things for stability. That's usually not a good thing. Mental costs, we get short term focus, but again, long term risks of illness or damage, and all these different things, whether it be the five hour energy drinks, or any of these sorts of things, or when I was in college, it was no dos, and all these caffeineated pills. Well, somewhere in our brain or in our intuition, we know there's going to be a price to pay for this somewhere. We might not know what it is. Maybe it's not been studied, but we usually know, okay, somewhere this is going to impact me in a negative way. Just because I don't know what that is doesn't mean it's not happening. Then there's the spiritual costs. Really, the best way I've learned to understand what addiction is, I know there's a lot of different ways to define addiction, but my understanding of addiction is when you're using something that can't fix something to make it right.

So if I'm thirsty, I might drink water. That's going to work. But if I'm feeling insecure about myself, which is an emotional need, and I grab a beer, which is a physical substance, let's say a physiological need, the beer isn't going to make me feel better about myself, at least in the long run. And so if I over depend on that, if I over depend on that external solution or that external intervention to what's really an internal issue, me not feeling good about myself, that's really a core definition of what addiction is or how that plays out. So this is not to make any of this wrong or say, Oh, my God, you're a bad person. Do this. All of us have something that doesn't help us. And you might say, Hey, wait, I like a good drink once in a while, or I like a big cake, or whatever it might be. Awesome. But just understanding what it costs us, because basically, we're either usually in a not so good or pretty good cycle of how these things work. So as we depend more on vices, we have lower quality of energy, less focus, at least less sustained focus, lower quality of work, lower income, less time freedom.

So we need to work more to pay our bills. We have less rest, and we have a greater need for our vices. If we have less vices, we have a higher quality of energy, more focus, we're able to do better work, we're able to earn, generally, a higher income, or at least over the long run, we'll earn a higher income, which is going to allow us to have more time freedom if we want that, which will require us to work less, get more rest, and then we'll have less need for vices. So that's a virtuous cycle. We're moving in that direction. And since a lot of our focus is on four day work week and having the time to create the life we want, really more vices leads to more work. Less vices leads to less need for work. Now, if you want to work, great. But being able to be in the position where you can choose is a really powerful position. So whatever your vices are, just start. Do them less. Don't have to completely make them go away, depending on the less it's something really severe. Just do them less. Just have that intention.

Some people really obsess over this stuff and then they turn it into another thing of stress and they beat themselves up and, Oh, I'm such a bad person. I have this vice. And some people just say, You know what? I smoke 20 cigarettes a day. Next week, I'm going to smoke 19. And the week after that, I'm going to smoke 18. And I'm just going to go down. I'm going to go 20, 18, 16, whatever it is, you're just going to do it less. It doesn't have to be dramatic unless it's something really dramatically horrible for you or for a doctor's told you. Obviously, if a doctor's told you, Hey, this is dangerous to your health, or it's something severe, totally different. But for the most part, most of these things, eating less sugar, unless you have a real bad sugar condition, or you can't handle that. Basically, this is just about creating a better life for ourselves, which then puts us in a situation where we're more likely to create the lifestyle we want. If you specifically want help on creating your game plan on how to get to a four day work week and how to sustain that, go to 4day gameplan.

Com. And in there I share a tool and some training videos and even a little Excel tool if you like to use that, or PDF if you like to write things out, a written version of it, where you can create and map out your four day work week game plan. It has to start somewhere. In my case, I semi focused on it and it took me 22 years to get there because I didn't see anybody saying, hey, here's how you make your game plan. Here's where you get. If I had known this, I probably could have gotten there in about half the time, if not, maybe a quarter of the time. I don't think it'll take you 22 years to get your four day work week if it's something you have on your mind and you start working towards this, and this is a great place to start. If you have any questions on this, you can put them in the comments section below or shoot me an email. As always, I look forward to helping you make more money in less time. Do what you do best so you can create the life you most desire for you, your friends, your family and your loved ones.

Thank you very much.