“Chase a bag,” “Stack your paper,” “Get bread,” “Make some P’s” – today there are so many different ways to say the same thing – “Get money.” Like Drake questioned in When To Say When, “Isn’t that what matters in this world that we livin’ in?” It sure seems like it. Everywhere you go, whether on social media or in your friend group, it seems like everyone has the same life objective, and that’s to make as much money as they can. Money is what puts food on the table, but let’s face it, not many of us college students and young adults are dying of hunger when we talk about “chasing a bag”. It means more than avoiding nights of going to bed hungry. Sometimes it means more than helping out our loved ones and buying a house for our mothers. Oftentimes, it seems like chasing a bag is just us establishing money as the holy grail of life. It is our justification for our actions, our status, our identity – altogether our happiness.
But here’s the thing, we know that money doesn’t equal happiness. Don’t we? I mean we’ve heard it over a thousand times. J. Cole has made about 3 albums on it by now. There is more to life than chasing money, and mo’ money is mo’ problems. We know this, but do we actually believe it? It feels like we always draw parallels between our happiness and the amount of money we have in the bank anyways. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should all be fine with being broke and that we shouldn’t be happy when that direct deposit hits. All I’m trying to say is that living a life consumed with the chase for anything temporary and not holistically good can lead you down a slippery slope of depression and a life of bad habits.
Although money can be used for good and to solve a lot of our problems, we must understand that we will always have problems for as long as we live. There is nothing money can do about that. You will always have problems. Jeff Bezos has problems, Kylie Jenner has problems, we all have problems ladies and gentlemen. So why do we still chase after that money? Maybe because the chase seems to be the most productive thing we can turn to as we run away from our problems.
You’ve heard the phrase, “FBGM” – I hope that was clear. An alternative to this phrase is “FNGM”. Get it? Cool. We hear this concept in our conversations all the time. “Bro I ain’t worried about nothing but my money”, “Imma just focus on getting a bag.” It seems like sometimes we focus on getting a bag so we don’t have to focus on how messed up our lives are. We aren’t chasing a bag, we’re running from the problems that had nothing to do with getting money in the first place.
We don’t encourage running on this platform – in any form. We hardly even work out. Jk, jk. My point is we need to be honest with ourselves. Is chasing money what we want to be the story of our lives? Do we want to continue to chase happiness even though it’s technically within us? If my life has a holy grail, I don’t want it to reside in money, women, accessories or anything else that comes and goes. I want it to reside in me. Don’t you?
