New Book Alert: The Long Game is AvailableMy new book, The Long Game, is available now. The book contains reflections from 30 investors who’ve survived decades of market cycles. You’ll learn how to tune out the noise that makes you second-guess yourself, handle the fear and greed that hurt your decisions, and stick to principles that actually compound wealth over time. Click here to get your copy.Click Here to Order NowThere is an old story about a man who catches a bird and puts it in a beautiful cage. He takes such good care of the bird, that after some time the bird stops trying to escape. After some more time the bird forgets it is in a cage. And then, one day, the man leaves the door open by mistake, and the bird does not fly out.I used to think this story was about the bird. Maybe you also started imagining it in an open cage and wondering why it would not fly out.But this is not really about the bird.It’s about us. About me, and about you. And it’s about the “gilded cage” we find ourselves in, made up of our possessions, material comforts, portfolio size, and the “number” that will supposedly decide if we are finally financially free.Now, the strange thing about the cage we live in is that we are not put inside by someone else. We walk in. One step at a time. Each bar, by itself, looks like a reward, and a sign that we have finally arrived in life.We collect these bars one by one over the years, feeling pleased with ourselves each time. And it’s only much later, standing in the middle of all of them, that we notice they have arranged themselves into walls.Sadly, more than feeling the pain of being bounded by the walls of our own cages, we are pained by seeing the bigger and brighter walls of other cages around us. So, we want to shift and move to a bigger cage.Now, there is one specific bar in this cage that I keep thinking about, because we have been told for years that it is actually our door to freedom and happiness.I’m talking about the financial freedom number, or the amount we are told would be “enough” before we can finally sit back and live the life we have been postponing.The math is simple. Calculate your current annual expenses, inflate them at an assumed inflation rate till your retirement age, and multiply that number by 30 or 35. That’s your number. At least that’s what the spreadsheet shows me, with no emotions attached.Now, a few years ago, this number was small. It then became bigger, and bigger, and bigger.While many of us blame the financial industry and influencers for inflating the number, I believe no one is inflating it for us. We ourselves are.Every time our lifestyle expands a little, the number expands with it. It’s simple math.The number is just a mirror, which shows us the shape of the life we have already chosen to live. And then it asks us to multiply that shape by 30-35 years of retirement, and we are shocked at what comes out, as if we did not build the shape ourselves.So, we run, with our heads down. We tell ourselves we’ll fly out of the open cage the day we hit the number. But the number is not standing still. It is running too. And it is running because we are running. We chase it, and it grows. We grow our life, and the number grows in response. This is not a race we can win by running faster.So why is the cage so hard to see from inside, as a cage?I think part of it is that everyone we know is in a similar cage. And when every cage looks the same, the bars stop looking like bars. They just start looking like life.Part of it is the way these cages are sold to us. Always in the language of freedom. Buy this and feel free. Save this much and you have arrived. Hit this number and life will finally feel like your own.The story is told so often, by so many, and so well, that we end up paying a premium for the very things that hold us down. And we feel good about it.And part of it is that some of us already know we are in a cage. We just don’t want to turn our heads up and look at it. Because looking would mean asking some uncomfortable questions about the last 15-20 years. It is easier to plan the next life upgrade, open the calculator one more time, and recalculate the number. We call this progress.Now, the visible cost of the cage is money, and we talk about that all the time. But we rarely talk about the bigger cost, simply because you cannot put a number to that.That cost is the life we forgot to live.Everything in the cage pulls us slightly out of the present. More we own, more we worry. Worse, the number we are running towards asks for some of our future, lent forward in advance. A little here, a little there. And the now, the only place life is actually happening, gets thinner and thinner as a result.And then one day, somewhere in our fifties, we look up and we realise that the things we were going to do once we were “free”… maybe the book we wanted to write, or the music we wanted to learn, or the philosophy we wanted to actually understand… were never things we needed freedom for. They were things we needed presence for. And the years in which we could have been present to them have already passed, in pieces, into the chase.This is the real bill, in the form of a life lost in chasing a number. And it does not come on a statement.Going back to the bird in the story, the one who did not fly out when the door was left open, it was not a stupid bird. It had just forgotten. It had been fed on time, kept safely, and hung near a sunny window, and slowly the sky stopped being a real place for it.It became an idea… something that happened to other birds, in other stories.Most of us are not fully in the cage yet. There is still a small pull towards a different kind of life… a life that’s smaller, simpler, and lighter.That pull is the part of us that still remembers the sky, and that we are still free to fly.I do not know what to do with it either. But I think it is worth not ignoring.New Book Alert: The Long Game is AvailableMy new book, The Long Game, is available now. The book contains reflections from 30 investors who’ve survived decades of market cycles. You’ll learn how to tune out the noise that makes you second-guess yourself, handle the fear and greed that hurt your decisions, and stick to principles that actually compound wealth over time. Click here to get your copy.Click Here to Order NowThe post The Gilded Cage appeared first on Safal Niveshak.