Santa Clara Meditation Living – What is your salary? Are you happy with it?
I have no salary because I am a housewife, sharing my husband’s salary. Therefore, based on this I’ll explain my views.
My husband is a sewage treatment engineer for a large company in Korea working for the past 15 years. Due to the pandemic the economy shrank leading to challenges in the workforce, inability to hold one position for a long period of time. So, we are grateful he has maintained a secure position for an extended duration. Fifteen years ago when he began his career his monthly salary was $2,300, which is the actual amount after taxes that he is currently being compensated. His annual salary combined with the bonus after taxes is $71,000.
This is a huge amount of money. In 2020, the minimum cost of living for four families in Korea is $2,513 per month, so my husband has a high-paid salary. This is enough money for a family of four raising two children.
Am I happy? I’m happy.
I am now living satisfied with my husband’s salary, and I am grateful for it. But it wasn’t like this from the beginning. I will explain how I live a happy life in terms of economics.
- Organize things you don’t use in your home
It’s a little weird to say, but I started to find my happiness by organizing the house. Take a look inside the house where you live. The bedroom closet, living room, kitchen, children’s room, warehouse… there are so many things right? Most of them are things you don’t use. We just accumulate them thinking I’ll use it someday.
While living with my husband for 15 years, we frequently argued because our personalities differed, leading to a life full of stress and depression. I was becoming a monster and could not recognize this person. Since I could not physically throw my marriage in the trash, I decided to throw tangible, inanimate, useless objects away. As I looked through all the rooms in the house, hidden closets, boxes I found adolescent clothes, broken toys, kitchen utensils that I never used, and various computer-related accessories. As I began to throw away all the superficial items I realized my stress faded, feeling an intense sense of relief. Last year, during COVID I sold items that were unused for over a year through a second-hand market application. As I look back at the app, I am proud of the accomplishment selling roughly 570 items. The money I earned was about 4,000 dollars. It was great to be able to earn pocket money, organize the house, and have short conversations with neighbors.
- Throw away your negative mind
While organizing and decluttering my house relieved some stress, there was a limit to its frequency. So I chose to throw away my negative mind with meditation. I initially threw away dissatisfaction, hatred, and expectations toward my family. My hope is for everyone to reflect on this. If the space where you sleep, eat, and rest is filled with mentally uncomfortable and negative thoughts, will you be able to succeed economically? As for myself, home is a place to rest and to do work, which caused me to have many thoughts about my family and have a lot of stress. Through the help of meditation I have thrown away my mental trash.
- Join forces with your spouse
This is possible only when the above negative mind is thrown away. There is something like this said among married people in Korea. ‘The biggest enemy who ruins financial investments is the spouse.’ Do you agree? I also fully sympathized with this statement.
Are you not looking at your husband staring at a computer monitor and thinking, ‘I can’t save money because of this husband who is not interested in financial investment and only watches movies after work.’ But before that, you have to look at yourself first. Maybe the reason why I don’t collect money even though I work hard is because of myself. In my personal experience, when I pulled out the monthly expenditures, I was too generous for myself, harshly strict on my husband and children, and I was forcing savings. If I change first, my family will trust and follow me.
- Find what you can do well
I like to write essays about everyday life. So, I share with people in Quora how I changed after meditation. I don’t know how grateful I am to have something I like. When my head is full of negative thoughts, anxiety about the future, and gossips about people who have nothing to do with me, I become indifferent to myself. Regardless of my income, the partner who I will need to fill the time in the future together is myself. Rather than aiming for one shot in your life with real estate, stocks, funds, coins, auctions or lotto, try to beautify yourself, the asset you already have. Are you going to leave the Earth where environmental pollution is getting worse and build a second Earth on Mars? Or would you pass on to our descendants a good planet to care for and care for our planet? I would of course choose the latter.
Thank you for listening to my short but very personal story. Finally, I close the article with a quote from my favorite author, Dostoevsky.
“It is amazing what one ray of sunshine can do for a man!”
― Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
