There’s a key principle that often gets lost in the din as our lives become more and more complicated: anything that is going to stay around needs to generate more than it consumes.

A friend once gave me the memorable advice that in life we need to be able to manufacture our own happiness. Too often we get our happiness tangled up in circumstances we can’t control, or in other people’s decisions. What’s worse, sometimes we feel like we need to leech happiness off of other people’s reserves: we deal with feeling down by finding someone to cheer us up. If I can generate happiness entirely on my own resources, I never have to wait for someone or something to refuel me. In fact, I can pour out surplus happiness into the rest of the world.

The same goes for work. A job is not a fundamental human right; it’s a simple reciprocal arrangement. You are paid a certain amount of money (or benefits, or fattened oxen) to generate an equivalent or greater amount of value.

I’ve found that, in the furious complexity of the modern world, it is tragically easy to lose sight of this very simple equation. We can effortlessly get ourselves in situations where we consume more time, money,  value, energy, chocolate, or Tamari roasted almonds than we are generating, and HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA.

If a business consumes more money than it earns, at some point it goes out of business. If a power plant consumes more energy than it generates, it is quickly shut down. (Also, the idiot that designed it gets fired.) If a food takes more calories to eat than it contains, then it is celery. Or cucumber.

Think for a moment. Think carefully. Would you want to be a cucumber?