Introduction
Why does building wealth matter in life?
For me, the answer is simple:
It gives us the freedom to live the later part of our lives according to our own values.
To make a living, people work, take on responsibilities, and function within organizations and society. Along the way, there are times when we set aside our own judgment, do what is required of us, and adjust our decisions to fit the circumstances around us.
Those experiences can also help us develop a deeper understanding of people and society.
But in the later stages of life, I want to use the experience, values, and judgment I have developed over the years to make choices I can genuinely accept as my own.
To do that, I need an environment in which my decisions are not heavily constrained by the need to earn my living.
In other words, I need a sufficient financial foundation.
By “sufficient financial foundation,” I mean enough economic security that I do not have to remain in a particular job or organization simply to maintain my standard of living, and can instead choose how I work and how I use my time.
When I was a teenager, I encountered an idea from Mencius through the writings of Japanese scholar Shoichi Watanabe:
“Without a stable livelihood, there can be no steadfast mind.”
What Mencius called a stable livelihood referred to a dependable material foundation: property, work, or another reliable means of sustaining one’s life.
In this article, I interpret that idea in modern terms as:
an economic foundation strong enough that you do not have to keep making choices against your own values simply to earn a living.
Building wealth, then, is more than increasing the amount of money you own.
It is preparing the conditions that allow you to live more fully according to your own values.
Chapter 1: Building Wealth Means Expanding Your Freedom to Choose
The real value of building wealth lies less in the size of the number on an account statement than in the range of choices that wealth makes possible.
When most of your living expenses depend on monthly employment income, decisions such as leaving a job, changing the way you work, or taking an extended break carry significant financial consequences.
Under those conditions, it can become rational to:
- adapt your judgment to the organization
- prioritize the work expected of you
- say what the situation calls for rather than what you actually think
- tolerate unreasonable circumstances
- place greater weight on how others evaluate you
These can all be practical forms of adaptation when maintaining your livelihood comes first.
With a sufficient financial foundation, however, the range of available choices expands.
You can continue working, or you can leave.
You can choose the higher-paying job, or choose work that pays less but has greater meaning to you.
You can spend your time on work, learning, hobbies, travel, creative activity, or your family.
The essential value created by wealth is that:
the part of life you can decide for yourself becomes larger.
Related article (Japanese) ➡ プロに仕事を依頼する時の注意点｜人はやりたくないことはやらない
Chapter 2: In the First Half of Life, Build Both Financial Security and Judgment
I think of roughly the period from age 20 to 60 as the first stage of adult life.
During these years, two forms of capital can be accumulated.
2-1. Build a Financial Foundation
The basic structure of wealth building is remarkably simple.
- Income: provides the resources from which wealth can be built
- Saving: transfers part of today’s income to the future
- Long-term investing: uses time and compounding to grow assets
- Insurance: protects the financial foundation from catastrophic loss
When you are young, the amount left over each month may be small.
But time is one of the most powerful elements in wealth building.
Even relatively small amounts, accumulated consistently over many years, can eventually become substantial.
Setting aside part of your income during the first half of life is, in effect, giving your future self more choices.
2-2. Develop a Way of Seeing the World
The second thing worth accumulating is judgment.
Work, relationships, mistakes, reading, travel, observation, and success all contribute to the standards by which we eventually learn to interpret the world.
Through those experiences, we gradually form our own answers to questions such as:
- How do people tend to behave?
- How do organizations actually work?
- What forces shape social change?
- What matters most to me?
- How much risk am I prepared to take?
Having money is of limited use if you do not know what you actually want.
At the same time, even a clearly formed set of values has limited practical force when the range of choices available to you is tightly constrained by the need to earn a living.
Financial security and judgment.
I believe developing both is one of the central tasks of the first half of adult life.
Chapter 3: What Mencius Meant by a Stable Livelihood and a Steadfast Mind
Mencius wrote:
“Those who can maintain a steadfast mind without a stable livelihood are found only among the cultivated.”
His point was that maintaining moral steadiness without a secure material foundation requires an unusual degree of cultivation.
Mencius originally made this argument in the context of benevolent government. His concern was political: a ruler should provide the people with a stable livelihood so that they could live within an ordered moral and social framework.
In this article, I take the underlying relationship he identified between material security and the state of mind and apply it to individual life planning.
The “steadfast mind” described by Mencius refers to a stable moral disposition: the capacity to preserve personal discipline and a sense of right conduct.
What stayed with me was the larger structure of the idea:
the conditions under which people live affect the way they think, judge, and act.
When life becomes economically unstable, protecting one’s livelihood naturally becomes a priority.
You do not want to lose your income.
You do not want to lose your job.
You do not want to damage important relationships.
You do not want to lose your place within a group or organization.
Under such circumstances, decisions that prioritize economic survival over personal values become more common.
When I first encountered this idea as a teenager, I thought:
I want to build a financial foundation that will someday allow me to choose what I believe is right.
At the time, I knew little about practical wealth building, the power of compounding, or how the perception of time changes later in life.
But one idea remained with me very strongly:
material security supports independent judgment and inner freedom.
Chapter 4: In the Second Half of Life, You Get to Decide
The later part of life is the stage in which we begin using what we accumulated earlier.
And that means much more than money.
Experience, knowledge, judgment, the ability to read people, and an understanding of oneself all become resources.
Together, they allow us to decide how we want to use our time.
Work If You Want to Work
If you enjoy your work, continue.
You may want to remain connected to society, contribute to other people, use your professional skills, or simply continue earning income.
The reason is yours to choose.
You reach a point where you can decide for yourself why you work.
Choose Time Away from Work
Thinking, reading, travel, hobbies, creative work, exercise, or learning a new skill.
You can decide where your time goes.
Time itself becomes one of your personal resources.
Act on What Interests You
Try something because you find it interesting.
Go somewhere because you want to see it.
Learn a new skill.
Act out of curiosity rather than the need for external approval.
Make Decisions by Your Own Standards
With accumulated life experience comes a greater ability to accept responsibility for the consequences of your own decisions.
At that stage, it becomes possible to live with the understanding that:
you are the final decision-maker when it comes to how you use your own time.
A stable financial foundation reduces the pressure created by the need to maintain a livelihood and expands the range of situations in which you can act according to your own convictions.
Chapter 5: Financial Security Changes the Reason for Effort
Does having enough money make people stop trying?
For me, the more important question is:
Why are you making the effort?
When you must work in order to maintain your livelihood, much of your effort is driven by external necessity.
You work because you need the income.
You produce results because you need the evaluation.
You perform the work required of you because you need to keep the job.
Once financial security becomes strong enough, that structure begins to change.
You gain greater freedom to choose your reasons for working and making an effort.
You study because you want to know.
You create because you find it interesting.
You practice because you want to improve.
You work because you want to contribute.
You act because you want to test your own ideas.
The amount of effort may remain substantial.
What changes is its source.
The reason for effort moves from the outside toward the inside.
That is one of the most important effects of achieving financial security.
Chapter 6: Make the Most of the Years in Which You Are Free to Act
There is another essential element in wealth building.
Time.
By the later stages of life, your assets may have grown.
At the same time, the period in which you can act freely is finite.
Physical ability, judgment, energy, and health do not remain unchanged throughout life.
That is why there is great value in building a financial foundation during the first half of life and then using that freedom while you still have the ability to act fully.
Travel.
Try a new kind of vehicle.
Go out to sea.
Go into the mountains.
Write.
Learn something new.
Meet people.
Spend time thinking alone.
What you do with that freedom is determined by the values and judgment you developed earlier in life.
You use the time made possible by financial security for the things you personally consider worthwhile.
At that point, the two forms of capital accumulated during the first half of life finally come together:
financial security and judgment.
The ability to devote the time you have left to the things you personally consider valuable is, to me, one of the greatest returns that wealth building can provide.
Related article (Japanese) ➡ セカンドライフの4大難問は 退屈・寂寥感・生活資金・健康と死生観
Related article (Japanese) ➡ データで考える“楽しいセカンドライフ”の持続期間｜リアリスト向けシニアライフの基本事項
Conclusion: Building Wealth Means Giving Your Future Self More Choices
When I was young, the idea that “without a stable livelihood, there can be no steadfast mind” taught me something important:
the material conditions of life and the way we think and act are connected.
So during the first half of my life, I worked, saved, invested, and built a financial foundation.
At the same time, through work and life experience, I developed my own values and standards of judgment.
When those two things come together, the meaning of wealth building becomes clear.
Building wealth means creating enough financial security that you do not have to keep making choices against your own values simply to earn a living.
The assets accumulated over decades are more than numbers on a balance sheet.
They give your future self a message:
“You get to decide.”
For me, that is the greatest meaning of building wealth.
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