How to Be Rich on Very Little Money

This is the second essay in our minimalism series, and like every Indian family gathering, we’re finally talking about money.

Minimalism promises freedom but this essay demands patience, its unapologetically long.

In the first essay, we argued that simplicity is a quiet revolution, a way of stepping out of consumerist madness and reclaiming our time, minds, and hearts. Now we turn to the question everyone secretly cares about more than enlightenment:

“Can I be minimalist and still like money?”

And the even juicier one:

“Can money actually buy happiness?”

Depending on which uncle you ask at a family function, you’ll hear one of two great philosophies of our age:

“Money is the root of all evil. Sab paise ke liye karte hain.”

“Arre beta, lack of money is the root of evil. Jab bill bharne ke paise nahi hote na, tabhi aadmi bigadta hai.”

Reality, as usual, refuses to fit neatly into WhatsApp wisdom. We see greed and cruelty among those who have far more than enough. We also see poor people who are unimaginably generous. Money isn't automatically evil; poverty isn't automatically ennobling. The relationship between humans and money is… complicated.

Like your relationship status with your job on LinkedIn: “It’s going well, but also killing me slowly.”

At Kahu, our aim is to reduce suffering for all sentient life, not to run an underground campaign to abolish currency and send us all back to bartering goods. We accept that money is necessary. We just care deeply about how it is used, and how much of our life we sacrifice for it. Minimalism, for us, is not anti-money. It is anti-delusion.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus has some surprisingly Indian-sounding common sense on this. He divided our desires into three kinds. First, there are natural and necessary desires like food when we’re hungry, water when we’re thirsty, rest when we’re exhausted, shelter from the rain. These are the basics roti, kapda, makaan, and if we’re honest these days ,a Wi‑Fi and basic healthcare.

Then there are natural but unnecessary desires. We still genuinely want these, but they’re not essential for survival like gourmet food instead of dal-chawal, a massive social circle instead of two good friends, romantic adventures like a long-running web series instead of basic companionship.

And then come the vain desires, the truly wild category. These are the ones that are neither necessary nor natural, and exist mostly because marketing departments and your peer group decided they should, like a ₹50k smart watch, a destination wedding in Italy “because normal shaadi is too basic”, three cars for two people, a walk-in wardrobe that requires a floor plan.

No human is born needing a luxury watch that can survive 4,000 metres under the sea when the deepest water they see is their bathroom bucket. That desire is manufactured by opinion, what society tells us is impressive, what our friends flex, what ads whisper: “You’re not complete without this.”

Epicurus points out that such vain desires are structurally impossible to satisfy. Your hunger stops when you eat; your thirst stops when you drink. But the desire for more luxury, more status, more “exclusive experiences” has no natural limit. The thrill dies quickly, and your brain moves the goalpost. Today it’s a fancy phone; tomorrow it’s a fancier area pin code. Meanwhile, you walk a permanently anxious path: fear of losing what you have, fear of not getting what you now think you need, fear of being outdone by the next guy.

As he put it, “Natural wealth is limited and easily obtained; wealth defined by vain fancies is always beyond reach.” In simple terms: the juice is not worth the squeeze.

This doesn't mean money is useless; it means we’re usually spending it with the wisdom of a sleep-deprived raccoon. A Harvard study suggests that instead of blowing money on a few gigantic luxuries, we’re happier when we spend it on many small, repeatable pleasures. The occasional chai at a street stall with a dear friend can do more for our long-term happiness than that one insane resort trip we took mainly for Instagram.

The big stressor, of course, is that most of us have to work to get money in the first place. For some, work is meaningful and energising. For many others, it’s more like: “I exchange my time and soul for a salary, and then I use the salary to briefly forget that I am exchanging my time and soul for a salary.”

That’s why another philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, is helpful here. He distinguishes between lower pleasures and higher pleasures. The lower ones are what he calls “movements of the will” i.e the rushed, stimulating, often exhausting fun: gambling, racing around, endless entertainment, constant sensory indulgence.

The higher pleasures, he says, are the pleasures of the intellect: thinking, observing, reading, listening to music, meditating, enjoying poetry, learning, creating, philosophising. These, in his view, are the finest sources of joy and also they are relatively cheap. They mainly require one thing we are terrible at protecting: time.

He writes that a truly “innerly wealthy” person doesn’t want the outside world to shower them with endless stuff; they want the “negative gift” of undisturbed leisure, which is the permission to be themselves every day, every hour.

Modern research backs this. A study from the University of British Columbia found that using money to “buy time” like paying someone to help with housework, taking a cab when you’re exhausted instead of insisting on martyrdom, or freeing yourself from a second job you hate tends to increase life satisfaction. Not because the cab is luxurious, but because you get back something far more precious: your time and energy.

In today’s language, we call this financial freedom. Not “Ambani level insane wealth”, but having enough money, and few enough expenses, to spend your days more or less how you’d like. For many people, especially in India, this requires not more show-off spending, but brutally simple frugality. If your life costs less, you can be free on far less.

Schopenhauer suggests we should see our money as a shield against life’s punches, not as a license to burn it as soon as it arrives. His view is: treat fortune as a bulwark against misfortune, not as an excuse to go berserk in every sale season.

Even when we do spend, where we put the money matters. Research by psychologists like Thomas Gilovich and Dutch happiness scholar Ap Dijksterhuis suggests that money spent on experiences tends to make us happier than money spent on things.

At first glance, this seems odd. A car or a TV lasts for years; a trip or concert is over in a few days or hours. Shouldn’t the longer-lasting thing give more happiness? Apparently not.

Gilovich gives three reasons. First, we adapt quickly. Your new phone thrills you for a week; by week three it’s just “my phone” and by month six you’re half-looking at the next model. Second, we raise the bar. Once the novelty wears off, you want a better version. So material consumption quickly turns into a treadmill: you need constant upgrades just to feel briefly good.

Epicurus already warned: “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not. Remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” We forget this so fast that every purchase feels obsolete the minute it’s unboxed.

Third, possessions invite comparison. Your car instantly shrinks when your friend arrives in something better. Your phone feels outdated the day after the launch event for the next one. The paradox of property is that its solid, permanent nature tricks us into thinking it will give equally solid, permanent happiness. But in reality, it mostly serves as fuel for status games.

Experiences, on the other hand, work differently. The joy lies in anticipating them, living them, and then re-living them in memory. They become woven into our identity: “I travelled alone for the first time; I watched that band live; I spent that summer reading under trees; I took my parents on their first holiday.” No one can downgrade your memory by buying a better version. You can’t really compare your trek in Himachal with someone else’s trip to Bali in the same way you compare iPhones.

Beyond experiences and time, there’s another surprisingly reliable way to use money for happiness: giving it away.

Every major tradition has this built in. In Indian culture we have daan; in Islam, zakat; in Christianity, charity; in Buddhism, the perfection of generosity called dana. These aren’t just moral duties; they are deep psychological technologies.

Professor Elizabeth Dunn’s research at the University of British Columbia shows that spending money on others usually makes us happier than spending it on ourselves but with conditions. In an interview, she notes three key ingredients: connection, impact, and choice. We feel the most joy when we give to people or causes we feel connected to, when we can see the difference our giving makes, and when we are not forced or guilt-tripped into doing it.

So slipping a note to support a friend’s animal shelter, funding a child’s education in a village you know, buying groceries for your building’s security guard’s family, these can create what scientists call the “warm glow” of giving. Postdoctoral researcher Mara van der Mollen explains that generosity has short-term emotional benefits and long-term social ones: stronger relationships, more support when you’re in trouble, and the simple fact that generous people tend to be liked more. And people with rich, supportive relationships are consistently happier than those who feel alone.

Of course, not everyone feels huge joy when they give. Childhood, personality, and family attitudes to money all play a role. But for many of us, money used in the service of someone else’s well-being ends up circling back as a quieter, more grounded kind of happiness than money blown on yet another thing for ourselves.

The problem is, our culture doesn’t exactly push us towards this kind of spending. The achievement-driven, consumerist world we live in treats money primarily as a scoreboard. Philosopher Zhuangzi saw this coming two thousand years ago. He observed that people chase what the world values i.e money, long life, reputation, achievement and run from what it condemns likr poverty, low status, being “no one”. As he put it, people become so anxious about protecting their life and status that “their concern for enjoyment makes them unhappy.”

He noted that the rich often make life intolerable by driving themselves mercilessly to get more and more money they cannot really use, exhausting themselves in their own service as if they were slaves of someone else. If he visited certain Indian corporate offices, he’d probably just nod and say, “Yup, same problem, fancier chairs.”

Modern data suggests he wasn’t exaggerating. Studies in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine and the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine have found that consistently working more than 40–45 hours a week for years significantly raises the risk of heart disease and cardiovascular problems. You can almost hear your arteries protest every time you post “Hustle Mode On” on Instagram.

Meanwhile, while some of us burn out in glass towers, others quietly demonstrate a different way. Henry David Thoreau famously left town to live in a tiny cabin near Walden Pond with only the basics: a bed, a table, a few chairs, and an alarming number of thoughts. He realised that once you develop a taste for luxury travel, fine wines, and expensive cities, simpler, easily available joys start to feel boring and “beneath” you. Paris becomes exciting; your own village, somehow, becomes a downgrade. He thought that was a terrible trade.

Thoreau wrote that the only travel truly worth it is the kind that reveals the value of home and helps you enjoy it better. He concluded, “The man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.” Epicurus said something similar: if you want to make a man happy, don’t add to his riches—subtract from his desires.

The nineteenth-century thinker Robert Chambers pointed out that reading had become “almost as free as air”. Food for the mind was everywhere and nearly costless if you knew where to look. In our era of online libraries, free lectures, and entire university courses on YouTube, that’s even more true. Schopenhauer would probably look at the internet (minus the comment sections) and declare it a paradise for those who love intellectual pleasures.

Epicurus adds another useful distinction: moving pleasures and static pleasures. Moving pleasures are active: the act of eating when hungry, travelling, chasing a goal, going out to satisfy a craving. Static pleasures are the calm contentment when a desire is already satisfied—the quiet feeling after a good meal, the peace of sitting in a clean room with nothing urgent to do, the soft joy of a conversation that went exactly as it needed to.

He argued that the highest form of happiness lies in these static pleasures: not in constant stimulation, but in the absence of disturbance. That doesn’t require a 5-star resort. It requires a stomach that is full enough, a mind that isn’t on fire, and a life that hasn’t been overcomplicated.

This brings us squarely back to minimalism.

Think of a duck drinking at a pond. There’s an old story about a Chinese recluse, Shuyu, who watched a mallard drink water. The duck drank only a bellyful, no more, no less and then waddled off unconcerned. It didn’t think, “Just to be safe, let me store twenty more litres in case of inflation.” It took exactly what it needed, and preserved its freedom of movement.

Humans, on the other hand, behave like we’re trying to attach the entire pond to our back. We overconsume, overload, over-own. We treat our possessions as extensions of our ego: “I have more, so I am more.” Then we wonder why moving through life feels like dragging luggage up a hill.

There’s a counter-movement to this madness: minimalism. People have practiced it for centuries under different names: simplicity, detachment, renunciation. The core insight is the same: possessions do not define who we are, and the endless chase for more distracts us from living fully.

Of course, minimalism has its own extremes. On one side, you have severe asceticism like young Siddhartha Gautama before he became the Buddha, eating one grain of rice a day, turning his body into a stick in an attempt to reach enlightenment. He eventually realised that torturing the body is just another kind of imbalance. Less is not always more; sometimes less is simply… less.

On the other side, you have what we might call “luxury minimalism” the influencer-friendly version. Think of a cavernous ₹10-crore apartment with a single designer lamp, one absurdly expensive sofa, and a single piece of “statement art” in the middle. Nothing cheap in sight, because the emptiness itself is being used to spotlight how expensive the few objects are. This isn’t freedom from consumerism; it’s just consumerism on a very curated diet.

Both of these miss the real power of minimalism. The point is not to go below what you genuinely need, nor to turn “owning few very expensive things” into your new status symbol. The point is to reach a baseline where your contentment is possible with minimal resources, and not held hostage by status, wealth, or how impressed other people are.

In a society like ours, where “holy” often means “wealthy,” the mall is the temple and shopping is the main ritual, anyone who dares say “I don’t need all this” will be seen as a heretic. If you don’t display the right brands, live in the right area, or host the “right kind” of wedding, people look at you with mild concern, as if you might secretly be failing at life.

Lao Tzu warned long ago: if you overvalue possessions, people begin to steal; if you loudly display your treasures, you breed envy. The modern version of this is: buy very expensive things, then live in fear behind CCTV cameras, security guards, and gated communities, forever afraid of loss and judgement. The more you have, the more your stuff begins to own you.

Minimalism quietly asks: why do you need to own everything you enjoy? Why a thousand-square-foot private garden if there’s a park down the road? Why six bedrooms for two people when most of your life happens in one or two rooms anyway? Why fill your cupboards with clothes you never wear when your favourite outfits are on repeat anyway?

Thoreau moved to a small cabin partly to prove to himself that life itself is not a hardship if we live simply and wisely. A minimalist life, properly understood, lowers our living expenses so we don’t have to work like donkeys just to break even. It frees time to enjoy what is already available all around us: trees, sky, conversation, music, thought, community.

Some minimalists go all the way, like Diogenes, who famously lived in a barrel and threw away his cup after seeing a child drink with cupped hands, saying, “A child has beaten me in plainness of living.” Most of us are aiming for something less dramatic: not a barrel, but a life where desires are aligned with what is simple and sustainable.

Epicurus’ hierarchy of desires is a practical guide here. Focus on satisfying natural and necessary desires like food, shelter, human connection, which are usually simple and limited. Be careful with natural but unnecessary desires; enjoy them without letting them run your life. And treat vain desires like wealth, fame, power, the constant need to be seen as “successful” ,as suspicious at best.

As he reminded his students, “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not. Remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” There is immense joy in “having little” when that little is enough.

There’s another story about Shuyu. Emperor Yao, impressed by his wisdom, offered him the throne, essentially saying, “Please rule everything.” Shuyu, who lived quietly by the riverside, refused. He said he did not need “all under heaven.” He pointed out that when the tailorbird builds her nest deep in the forest, she uses only one branch. She doesn’t insist on owning the whole tree, forest, and nearby mountain.

He understood what many of us are slowly discovering: power brings responsibility, stress, and constant attention. Ruling an empire would destroy the simple, peaceful life he treasured. So he declined the ultimate promotion.

Minimalism in this sense isn’t laziness; it’s clarity about what you truly value.

So, after all this, where do we land on the question: can money buy happiness?

From a minimalist, Indian, Kahu-style perspective, the answer is: yes, but only if you stop asking it to do jobs it cannot do.

Money can help you meet your natural, necessary desires: food that nourishes you, a safe place to sleep, healthcare, a fan that works in May. Beyond that, money can buy you time: fewer hours spent in soul-sucking work, more space in your day for creativity, rest, and relationships. It can buy you experiences that become part of who you are instead of just what you own. It can help you bring relief and joy to others through generosity, strengthening the fabric of your relationships and communities.

But money cannot save you from the emptiness of chasing things with no natural end point: status, luxury, envy-fodder. It cannot cure the misery of defining your worth by what you own. It cannot grant you peace if your desires keep expanding faster than your bank balance.

Minimalism doesn’t ask you to hate money. It invites you to want less so that you need less, and to spend what you do have in ways that actually reduce suffering for you and other sentient life. It frees you from being a permanent servant to jobs, trends, brands, and expectations, and turns money back into what it was supposed to be all along: a tool.

At the Kahu Advocacy Foundation, our interest in minimalism is exactly this, to see how aligning our desires with what is simple, sufficent, and kind can reduce suffering for all sentient beings. When we keep our pleasures cheap, our needs modest, and our generosity alive, we discover that being “rich” is actually quite affordable.

The world will keep shouting that more is more. Our quiet counter-offer, in this second essay and in our work at large, is that sometimes less is not just more, it is freedom.

KAHU ADVOCACY FOUNDATION

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