True Misfortune Isn’t Having No Money. It’s Having No Choices.
True misfortune isn’t having no money.
It’s having no choices.
This is what I felt most strongly while traveling around the world.
A life with money but no choices is painful. A life with little money but real choices is rich.
The reality of “no choice,” seen on the road
On my journey, I visited poor countries.
I also traveled through regions in difficult situations, like Palestine and Israel.
What I felt there was that wealth and happiness aren’t decided by the amount of money alone.
Where you live.
Where you go.
What work you do, and what future you aim for.
Whether you can choose those things by your own will.
That seemed to shape the richness of a life more than anything.
With money but no choices, life is hard
No matter how much money you have, imagine you can’t go where you want to go.
You can’t say out loud what you want to do.
The path you can walk is decided in advance by the circumstances you were born into.
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If a life like that exists, I think it’s an unhappy one.
On the other hand, even without money, you might be free to decide where to go tomorrow and what to start.
Through my travels, I felt in my body that a life full of choices is, in itself, a happy one.
Measure happiness by the freedom to choose
The economist Amartya Sen argued that we should think about a person’s well-being not by how much income they have, but by how much freedom they have to choose the life they value.
What I felt on my journey was very close to that idea.
Those of us born in Japan have many choices.
A Japanese passport lets you visit more countries visa-free than almost any other in the world.
You can choose your job, where you live, and how you live.
That seems obvious, but it is never something to take for granted.
Notice the choices you already have
There will be days when you worry about not having enough money.
I’ve had those times, too.
But if you have the freedom to make your own choices right now, that is already a great fortune.
Having choices and not using them is a waste.
Today, try counting just one of the choices you have.
I write one short essay every day, originally in Japanese. If this one stayed with you, subscribe to Daybreak Notes, or support my writing on Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee.
