Hey Doc, I hope you won't mind I used your post as an opportunity to practice my writing skills. Forgive me the length of my response :)
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Smaug the dragon, what a great metaphor. I feel like I know him, he’s inside of me too!
My dragon is different than yours although, interestingly, he responds to cars. In fact, I would say cars are the most outwardly visible manifestation of my lack of inner peace. But, again, in the totally opposite direction. For whatever reason, I instinctively shun fancy cars. I think, “What an idiot” so quickly that I have never been personally tempted to purchase a fancy car.
That was the problem.
Until recently, I was driving a 2004 Toyota Prius with a Salvage title, body damage, stained cloth interior and other signals that it wasn’t a “nice” car. I ultimately sold it for $2,400 on Craigslist, to give you an idea of its value. The problem was that I’m a lawyer who owns his own business and practice and people have certain expectations. The signal I was sending was that I was struggling to survive. In fact, I’m just a mustachian stacking chips under the radar. But it was causing some issues with referral sources.
So, I buckled and bought a car that I thought would satisfy the other people but I refused to spend a lot of money. I spent $7,000 on a 1991 Mercedes Benz SL300 Convertible – that a previous owner put SL500 AMG stuff on. It is slick.
I started driving around having car heads talk to me about how cool my car is. Client’s looking at me and giving compliments. My 75 year old grandfather with Alzheimer’s saying, a little too loud, “He must have a bunch of money with a car like that!”
Each “complement” was like a knife to the heart because I felt so uncomfortable in the vehicle. Smaug the dragon was just burning up my inner peace with thoughts about this car. “You look flashy,” “You look like the idiots you derided,” “Now they think you are going to rip them off,” “You look like an ass-hole attorney who thinks he is important.” I hated the car because it occupied so much mental space. I just wanted the peace of not caring about my car one way or another.
So, I decided to sell the car and I’d buy a “new” cheap car. My wife hated this plan, by the way. I put it on Craigslist. I just wanted the same $7,000 I spent on it.
Months passed: Not.A.Single.Call.
It was then I realized, no one wants this car for even $7,000. It is objectively not an expensive car. The guys buying new Mercedes won’t buy a 26 year old Benz! Why am I beating myself up? It is just a car.
So, I let it go. I’m not attached to having a fancy car, like you or your doctor friend (who is a whole other level of delusion). But, I needed to lose my aversion to a fancy car. It’s the same thing, just the other side of the coin. The key is avoid attachment and aversions and just be in the moment, calm and peaceful.
Because, here is the thing, if the person driving the car really is at total peace with the vehicle, meaning they can afford it, they are not trying to make other people jealous, they can drive the fancy car as easily as a junker then they should drive it. Not that they can, but they should. Following that peace it all we need to do in this life. We should follow it.
As an aside, I have been driving the car and, not coincidentally to my mind, I was hired by a doctor who is a fanatic for Mercedes. He hired me to represent him on a clear multi-million dollar law case. The biggest of my career and I’ve won some big cases. I would not have received that opportunity if I had persisted in my aversion to fancy cars – which is just as bad as an attachment to fancy cars.
Going back to the beginning, you can tame smaug the dragon and attain inner peace. I know it for a fact. If you keep working on it, as you clearly described, he will not wreak havoc on your retirement. In fact, once he knows the inner peace so thoroughly and completely that he wants the peace as well, he will begin to protect it with same power and force formerly used to destroy it.