The honest part is that I did not arrive at any of this by reasoning. I arrived at it because my options were removed. For years I assumed that wanting a better life for myself was the same thing as having a purpose, and I was wrong about that in a way I could not see from the inside. A person with a paid-off house and a safe family can hold a materialistic purpose for a very long time without it failing, and I would not have learned this if my father had not been taken.
So when I tell you a higher purpose outperforms money, I am describing what happened to me and not running an experiment. I did not have the version of my life where I chased a BMW and found out whether it worked.
And I am still inside the thing I am describing. I want more money than I have. I notice myself wanting it for reasons that would not survive this chapter. The reset is not something I did once in 2011 and finished.