While money and wealth are essential, they can lead to our destruction if it becomes an obsession or leads us down an unhealthy path. People must understand the psychology of making money to combat the challenges earning money can bring to your life.
Money is positive reinforcement for many people in the short term. That reinforcement fuels obsessive thoughts about accumulating more and more. That obsessiveness can be fueled by greed or pressures to keep up with those around us.
Having more money is intimately related to success and success in our society, to be more or less valuable as a person. The need for approval is so great that these people must make great efforts to show wealth and success worthy of admiration. This obsession can lead to crime or excessive borrowing to keep up appearances of success.
Money Leads to Higher Social Status
Psychologically and in reality, having more money, wealth, and possessions puts a higher social status. This rise to the top of the social food chain can be dangerous to the psyche of a person obsessed with money, wealth, and status.
As in any case in which short-term hedonism gains prominence, these people end up losing their values and their more internal commitments. Nothing has value for them, but in turn, no amount, possession, or achievement is enough. In addition, they lose their friendships in the long run, they can destroy their family, and they end up alone.
That obsessive need to be accepted and approved by others, since they cannot do it for themselves, leads directly to the situation they fear most. Thanks to their self-fulfilling prophecy, they remain alone and without the approval for which they have sacrificed everything.
The mental need they harbor is never completely satisfied. Therefore, the solution to their emptiness is not something as superficial as having more or less money, property, or assets. The solution is to review their values and realize that everything they need is not related to money but something more profound.
The truth is that there are people so empty inside that they need something external to cover those shortcomings. What can lead these people to demand more than they already have? What kind of life do they want to make?
These questions lead us to consider that more than money to get interested in the image they think money projects. In them, there is a need for recognition, to be valuable and mighty in front of others, in addition to the excitement that can involve carrying out clandestine or prohibited actions.
The Need for Approval
The need for approval has motivated a large number of behaviors throughout history. In prehistoric times, the group did not accept staying out of the cave, with all the dangers that this entailed. The death was much closer if our community did not accept us. Everything comes from here. It seems that this need continues to haunt us somehow, although we are aware that we will survive regardless of the acceptance of others.
A Healthy Relationship with Money
To combat the effects of an obsession with money and wealth is to have a healthy relationship with it. We have to decline the concept that money equals value. We cannot tie our self-worth in with money and possessions, or we will never be satisfied.
Having an unhealthy relationship with money breeds greed, and greed can lead to extreme actions such as committing crimes. Before the obsession with money takes you down a moral path, you may live to regret it. You must find a way to let go of the obsession with making money.
You also have to maintain a balance because you have to have the drive and some level of ambition to succeed in business and earn money. The point is, it is not suggested you give up the pursuit of wealth but rather pursue it healthily.
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