When the cart feels like triage, try the decade test: what keeps you standing wins. The list gets smaller, and your life gets larger than price.

The thought behind it

This one steps back until the current month becomes a rounding error, and looks at the decade instead. Money Mind is less about earning more than about noticing what each amount was quietly standing in for. Everything hinges on “5”, which is the part a politer version of this sentence would have left out.