What "Getting On Happily and Skillfully with Money" Taught Me About Letting Go of Money Worries

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I read Kobayashi Seikan's Getting On Happily and Skillfully with Money, first published in Japan in 2007. Now that I have retired and live on a pension and drawdown from savings rather than a salary, I find I can read a book about money with a straighter face than I could have when younger. As a younger man I would have picked this book up looking for ways to earn more. What it actually offers, from cover to cover, is not a method for earning money at all, but a way of relating to it. Here is a personal record of what I have actually started doing after reading it.

Note: there is no official English edition of this book. All quotations below are my own translation from the Japanese original.

An illustration inspired by the stone water basin at Ryoan-ji in Kyoto, mentioned in the book — inscribed with four characters that together read "I am content knowing only what is enough." The water is drawn falling sparingly, almost reluctantly.

The happiness of knowing enough

The book opens by dividing what makes people happy into three things: possessions, circumstances, and the heart. It gives an example of two neighbours — one who saves ten times as much as the other yet feels no unease about it, and one who is thrown off balance simply by learning the other has a hundred million yen more. The difference, the author argues, is not in the sum but in how the sum is received.

"Happiness" is decided not by "things," but by the "heart" that decides to feel happy. — from the book

The passage that follows tells of the same stone basin at Ryoan-ji, said to have been donated by the seventeenth-century feudal lord Tokugawa Mitsukuni. Its design is a small puzzle: a square basin at the centre stands for the character for "mouth," and four characters carved clockwise around it — each combined with that central "mouth" — spell out, in turn, "I," "only," "enough," and "know." Read together: "I know only that I have enough." The book calls Mitsukuni a master not just of governance but of how to live, for carving into a single basin not the usual idea that happiness follows from acquiring something, but its opposite — that one is already amply provided for. Knowing what is enough is itself the root of happiness; without it, happiness cannot exist. I sat with that line, and with the four-character puzzle behind it, for a while. Life, perhaps, is not the ongoing project of adding things from the outside, but the sum total of how much one notices of what has already been given. I think this because I have watched, more than once, the gap between someone whose savings keep growing yet who never feels it is enough, and someone with far less who looks entirely satisfied. No amount of arithmetic explains that gap. Reading this book was the first time I had words for it.

Money that flows toward where it is welcomed

Early in the book, the author describes a habit of his own: choosing not the popular, thriving ramen shop with a queue out the door, but the quiet, unfashionable one nobody visits. The point is not to chase the best noodles, but to use money in a way that props up the person running the shop.

To be used so that it makes someone glad — that is the role money plays. — from the book

I have thought about why this idea landed the way it did. I have invested in shares and property since around 2015, and my decisions became noticeably calmer once I stopped chasing price movements alone and started paying attention to whether a business was actually welcomed by the people it served. Companies that are genuinely welcomed tend to build up profit slowly, in the form of results. Money, in the end, seems to converge — sooner or later — on wherever it is welcomed.

Putting down three kinds of rubbish

The book's first suggestion for letting money flow in without limit is, of all things, cleaning toilets. It tells of a man who kept at it until he was scrubbing public toilets across his neighbourhood, and of a whole company that took it up together and found their interpersonal troubles quietly dissolving along the way. The author then makes the point that no amount of water at the source will flow if the channel is blocked, and names exactly what does the blocking:

Three kinds of debris — "self-interest," "attachment," and "fixation" — are what block the infinite reservoir's water, which is to say, its energy. — from the book, "Putting Down Three Kinds of Rubbish"

Of the sufferings the Buddha described, the one I have only lately come to feel in my own body is old age. In my younger years I could only picture ageing as subtraction — the things I used to be able to do, going away one by one. A better comparison, I think, is the suitcase I pack twice a year for the move between Britain and Japan. In my forties I would stuff it with everything I might conceivably need, and haul most of it back and forth unused. Now that I can no longer manage a heavy case on my own, I find myself picking up each item before I leave and actually asking whether I need it. Old age, I have come to think, may be less a matter of willing myself to travel light and more a case of the body getting there first, quietly telling me I no longer have to carry so much. This is a way of seeing life that was not available to me when I was young, and I hope it can be a small handhold for anyone else finding old age equally disorienting.

In practice, I have made the few minutes it takes each morning to place a homeopathic remedy on my tongue into a signal I give myself: don't hold onto anything more today. It is probably not the remedy itself that does the work so much as those few minutes themselves — a small daily rehearsal in setting down whatever from yesterday, or whatever on tomorrow's schedule, I am still carrying in my head. It feels rather like consciously, slowly opening a fist I had been clenching without noticing.

Drawn from the book's comparison of money flowing in to a reservoir behind a dam. The source was never dry — only the channel was blocked. Here, the blockage has just been cleared, and clean water is beginning to move again.

Money as a god of poverty or a god of fortune

In Karatsu, Saga Prefecture, there is a shrine called Hoto Jinja, known for lottery wishes. The odds of winning are said to be nearly double the national average, and visitors keep buying the small "Hoto bags" made as part of the island's local revival effort. The author offers this explanation for why:

Money does not circle back to someone who clings to it. The lottery does not favour the attached. — from the book, "The Island Where the Lottery Wins"

The difference between praying quietly while buying a ticket and calculating what one would do if it hit, he suggests, is exactly the difference between winning and not. The same section tells us that, depending on how a person uses their money, the very same god becomes either the god of poverty or the god of fortune.

Depending on how a person uses money, the very same god becomes either the god of poverty or the god of fortune. — from the book, "How You Use Money Turns the Same God Into a God of Poverty or a God of Fortune"

There was a stretch of time, after retiring, when my income shifted from a salary to a pension and drawdown, during which I would look at the balance in my account and feel a vague, unshakeable unease: will this actually be enough? Looking back, I don't think this was a feeling unique to me — it's one of the quiet, chronic worries a good many people in their sixties carry. After reading these two sections, I started redirecting my attention from the number itself to a different question: how could this money, spent today, make someone glad? The unease has not disappeared entirely. But the quality of the time I spend looking at that same balance has changed, unmistakably.

To live is to carry out what one is asked to do

The story that stayed with me longest is about a bicycle shop owner. As supermarkets and big-box stores began selling bikes cheaply, more and more of his customers came only for repairs, and his business grew harder to sustain. At first he panicked and thought about expanding. Then, noticing that the two Japanese characters for "for someone's sake," read the wrong way, spell "deception," he stopped trying to grow the shop and devoted himself instead to doing every requested repair with care. The result, unexpectedly, was that customers began travelling from further and further away specifically to have him fix their bikes.

To live is to carry out the things one is asked to do. — from the book, "To Live Is to Carry Out the Things One Is Asked to Do"

The life I lead now, splitting the year between Britain and Japan, was not something I designed carefully in advance. Family circumstances, finding someone I could ask to look after the garden, a request for advice on a sushi school — one request answered after another is what actually produced the shape my life has taken. The practical logistics of living in two places — moving what amounts to a house-move's worth of belongings twice a year, judging the right moment each season to cross — were not planned from a blueprint either. They were sharpened, gradually, each time I answered another request.

This blog, too, is a kind of request I've taken on for myself. No one asked me directly, but if writing lets me keep editing my own life even as memory weakens, that in itself feels like a request worth accepting. I'm not writing it hoping for a response — I simply think that having the record exist at all might, for someone, be a small light in the dark.

Because they are family, gratitude becomes possible

A woman in her forties tells the author she is exhausted from caring for her mother and finds herself complaining more than she'd like. He suggests she try treating her mother as though she were "the woman next door." What we could easily feel grateful for in a stranger becomes invisible, he points out, precisely because it has become so familiar within a family.

Because they are family, gratitude fades. Because they are family, gratitude becomes possible. — from the book, "Because They Are Family, Gratitude Fades — Because They Are Family, Gratitude Becomes Possible"

The author adds that he treats his own wife the same way — thinking of her as "the woman next door" so as not to lose sight of his gratitude for the meals she makes.

Living in Britain, I run into family members saying "thank you" to each other far more often than I would in Japan, where the aesthetic has long favoured letting things go unsaid. Moving between the two countries, I have come to feel that a relationship quietly thins out if either kind of kindness — the spoken or the unspoken — goes missing entirely. Splitting my year between two bases initially felt mostly like an inconvenience, but it seems to have produced the "woman next door" effect by accident: because each reunion comes after a real absence, gratitude gets spoken before it has the chance to become invisible through familiarity. A rich old age, I suspect, is sometimes propped up by exactly this kind of unplanned mechanism.

The roses that fetch a higher price

The book tells of a couple, the Ks, who grow roses in Hiroshima. Their roses come out vividly coloured and full-petalled, and sell at auction for two or three times the usual price. Asked why, they gave this explanation:

After saying "thank you" to the roses every single day, Mr. K's roses grew into what the market calls "gorgeous" — vivid in colour, full-petalled — and began fetching two or three times the usual price. — from the book, "The Roses That Fetch a Higher Price"

I have no intention of taking this as proven cause and effect. A habit left over from medical school makes me suspicious of stories like this on principle. Even so, since I started saying a few quiet words to the English roses in my own garden each time I deadhead them, what has changed is not, as far as I can tell, the roses — it's the resolution of my own attention. Speaking to them forces a few extra seconds in which I notice a leaf curling from thirst, or the first sign of greenfly. Whether "thank you" changes the flower itself, I cannot say. That it changes the quality of my own care, I can feel plainly while working in the garden. Living in the present, it turns out, may simply mean the accumulation of minutes like these.

An English rose from my own garden, drawn not as the flower itself but as the few minutes' worth of quiet attention that go into deadheading it — the secateurs and the watering can laid beside it.

Closing: casting light

Near the end of the book is this line:

Cast light, and it grows bright. — from the book, "Casting Light"

Not treating darkness as an enemy to be driven out, but simply turning light toward it. Neither money worries nor the anxiety of ageing can be uprooted entirely. But knowing what is enough, spending money so that it makes someone glad, answering requests one at a time, and treating family with the same care one would give a neighbour — these are small lights I can cast starting today. I suspect this single point, stated in different ways throughout the book, was the only thing Kobayashi Seikan was really trying to say.

The book discussed here:

Kobayashi Seikan, Getting On Happily and Skillfully with Money (Japanese edition, Daiwa Shobo) — no English translation exists

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The world Kobayashi Seikan lived in

An impression of Kobayashi Seikan giving one of the 300-plus lectures he delivered each year through Japan's long post-bubble stagnation — a speaker's silhouette against lit windows at dusk, offering a measure of value other than money in an era when the old economic answers had stopped working.

Kobayashi Seikan (born Masahiro Kobayashi) was born in 1948 in the Fukagawa district of Tokyo. He graduated from the Faculty of Law at Chuo University, and by his own account had already developed a keen interest in human potential, ESP, and paranormal phenomena as a student, pursuing his own independent line of research into what he called "the study of the mind." The late 1960s, when he was at university, were years when student movements swept through campuses across Japan, existing authority and institutions being questioned down to their foundations. I imagine that the atmosphere of that period — everything settled being reopened for debate — helped prepare the ground for a mode of inquiry that never quite fit within any established academic discipline.

His writing and lecturing career took full shape between the 1990s and the 2000s — years that line up almost exactly with the long stagnation that followed the collapse of Japan's bubble economy in 1991, later known as the "lost decade" or "lost two decades." As a way of life built on the assumption that land and share prices would keep rising quietly collapsed, and many people in Japan carried real anxiety about money and the future, Kobayashi argued for something running against the grain of the time: that happiness is decided not by how much money one has, but by how one relates to it. This particular book was published in 2007 — on the eve, as it happens, of the global financial crisis the following year. It was written, in other words, right at the hinge point where an era in which economic growth was assumed to answer everything was quietly coming to an end.

Delivering more than 300 lectures a year, describing himself as holding doctorates in psychology, education, and sociology, and also working as a lyricist and singer, he lived a life that refused to be pinned down by any single title. He continued lecturing while managing diabetes and kidney and heart conditions, and died in 2011 at the age of 62. He is said to have believed in reincarnation, yet he told the people who consulted him that "whoever you were in a past life, what you need to do now is the same" — cautioning against attachment to past lives as much as to anything else. His repeated advocacy of small, ordinary actions anyone could start today — cleaning toilets, saying "thank you" — seems to me to reflect a consistent conviction that it is the accumulation of concrete daily practice, rather than grand theory, that actually changes a person. For that reason he seems to have had a surprisingly practical streak, always trying to tie what sounds like spiritual talk back to something concrete and demonstrable. Behind the language of spirituality, from what I gathered researching him for this piece, was someone with a rather down-to-earth, practical eye.