If you pay close attention to television commercials or online ads, you will notice that almost all of them Advertising that if you buy the right car, a bigger house, a new pair of shoes, your life will be safer, more secure and all delight and sunshine. This push toward blind consumerism ignores a well known, but rarely acknowledged truth that:

“The things you own end up owning you.”-Fight Club

The problem is – it is a vicious trap. Once we get what we wanted, we don’t stop there- we want more.Once we buy a new pair of shoes, we get adapted to the shoe. It has become the norm in our lives, and our level of happiness returns to what it was before we bought the shoe. Similarly We adapt to the new car, new house and we want another car, another house. We find ourselves willingly shopping for the next new thing and repeating the process. There is a scientific term for this tendency of people to return to the same level of life satisfaction that they had bought something: its called “Hedonic Adaptation“

Once our basic needs are taken care of, happiness is not something we can buy. Happiness is a state of mind.So we can we keep our mind content and grounded?
As a solution to that, I found a great tip from stoic philosophy book  Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 18, On Festivals and Fasting, which I refer to all the time. This letter stuck out to me because of one paragraph, that I think of all the time, and it is the following

“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’”

That is what I repeat to myself over and over again. The letter said to embrace poverty/minimalism once in while.

Seneca, also tells us that great soldiers have been practicing this for milleniums. A soldier needs to be practice regularly simulating the worst of situations even when there is no war. He says:

“It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence. In days of peace the soldier performs manoeuvres, throws up earthworks with no enemy in sight, and wearies himself by gratuitous toil, in order that he may be equal to unavoidable toil.”

These words struck a bell in my head and were imminently applicable to real life. For instance, once in a month I , practice prolonged 24 hour fasting. This exposes myself to the rather, often unfamiliar, sensation of real hunger.
My family owns a car, and i have a luxury to go to office by car. I also earn enough money to easily afford uber-rides to office and back to home .But, at-least a couple of days in a week i return home by public bus. This monthly hunger and weekly toiling in the public bus- has made some bigger changes in my life.

By exposing myself to small dosage of pain and discomfort i can train my brain for much more bigger unavailable pain and disruptions. This reminds me every day and every month that everything what i call my own , can be stripped away from me by life. This is what I have been so afraid of right? And it isn’t scary at all. I can survive all that. I do not fear my worst case. This thought is very liberating for me.
This also gives me a sense of fearlessness. I can pursue my daily activities : my job, my business, my passion- with a completely new sense of fearlessness. I can tell myself, I dont need to play safe. I can play on the edge- and even if i get knocked down , i can deal with it fairly well .
I also feel grateful for the abundance that I have.
 This practice also gives me new perspective on what’s most important in life- people , not objects. It taught me to pay more attention to people who matter to me, not the objects. Embracing poverty has made me much more compassionate, grounded, yet fearless as a person.