The True Cost of Satisfaction Might Be Giving Up What You Didn't Want

Nathalie Lussier moved from NYC to Texas for a bigger, better suburban life—and then ended up back in her home country of Canada, living on a farm.

Many of us live assuming that our personal trajectories are ever up and to the right. 

We expect our bank balances, our businesses, our standards of living, and our influence to grow. The objective of growth is such a totalizing force that few of us stop to consider the costs of growth. I mean, the literal costs of growth. 

Sure, there are mental, physical, and social costs that often come along with growth. I might hustle myself into the ground and end up sick, depressed, and alone. But growth can be downright expensive, too. 

A few months back, I noticed a LinkedIn post from Nathalie Lussier, the founder of AccessAlly.

She described how she found herself on a treadmill with work. She noticed that the more she spent, the more she had to work. It was true for her when she lived in Brooklyn, but she really started to notice it when she and her husband, Robin, moved to Texas.

This is one of the traps of independent work that I don’t think we talk about enough. When you are paid a salary or for a certain number of hours per week, you have a pretty baseline idea of what’s in the budget and what’s not. But when you control your earning by the number of clients you take on or the programs you sell or talks you give, it’s very easy to always believe that an expense is in the budget—because the budget can always get bigger. 

Your consumption ends up setting the bar for your production.

Nathalie tells me her time in New York City shaped the relationship between work and spending for her. Tiny kitchens lead to big takeout budgets. Exciting events lead to mounting wardrobe and personal care costs. “You have to show up looking a certain way,” explains Nathalie, “with the nice shoes, and the nice purses, and all the things.” And all of that spending is more attractive—more easily permissible—because work is everything.

As they started to build their life in an area with much lower housing prices, Nathalie and Robin dreamed big. “We were like, ‘Oh, okay, we can have a really big house with a pool,’ and we kind of went all out,” says Nathalie. It took a few years for her to realize what those choices meant for their bottom line—and all the additional, ongoing expenses they accrued in the process.

They worked extra hard to afford a life that was, it became increasingly clear, not what they wanted after all.

If you spend more, you’ve got to earn more—that makes sense. But, less intuitively, the inverse is also true.

The more you work, the more you spend.

And the reason is quite simple. Regardless of how much you’re earning, when you work more, you have less capacity for everything else. Less time to cook, so more money is spent on takeout. Less energy for a hobby, so you de-stress with some retail therapy. Less quality time with your family, so you treat them to more extravagant vacations.

We cope with overworking by overspending.

Even in Texas, where the pressure to spend should have been much lighter, Nathalie describes how buying stuff was a coping mechanism. “You’re just tired and bleary-eyed,” she says, “you’re like, ‘yes, maybe this will make me feel better. This will solve my immediate dissatisfaction with how I’m feeling.’” It turns out our production can set the bar for our consumption.

The first time I noticed this was when I became a full-time mom for about a year in 2008. Because I wasn’t working outside the home, I had so much more capacity for, well, life. I didn’t care that I didn’t have money for new clothes or regular trips to Starbucks. I didn’t need to cope with the effects of overwork. I noticed this pattern again in 2022 when I took time off to write my book. My spending went way down because I wasn’t trying to make up for the mental and emotional rollercoaster that had been my work for 5 years.

But, once that relationship between work and spending is established, loss aversion makes it incredibly difficult to break out of it. Once you’ve set the bar for your consumption, the idea of cutting back can feel impossible. How could you go without the nightly takeout? Or the fancy skincare? Or the elite gym membership? Or every streaming service that the internet gods have given us?

“A lot of the things we buy are like that,” Nathalie tells me. “We think this will be the thing that will help me, or this will be the thing that eases the stress. And then you realize, it’s fine, but it’s not going to save me.”

Buying stuff is far easier than addressing the underlying issue that's causing the dissatisfaction in the first place.

Texas didn’t magically transform their spending habits from those of fancy urbanites to those of laid-back lower-budget suburbanites (if that’s even a thing…). But it did start to change the way they spend their time and the hobbies they were interested in pursuing. 

“We got the gardening bug in Texas in our first year,” recalls Nathalie. They started with tomatoes (“the gateway vegetable”). And they made a bunch of mistakes, including locating their garden about as far away from their house as they could. Then, they planted some trees—and all of them died. 

That’s when they decided to really figure out what they were doing. Eventually, their successes piled up. They had a peach tree, an apple tree, and a thriving garden. Then, Nathalie set her sights on chicken.

Cue the disappointment sound effect: “Where we lived, we’re not allowed to have chickens.”

“But down the street,” she tells me with a bit of latent frustration, “basically across the street from where we lived, you could [have chickens].” So not fair. “I could hear the chickens from our neighbors sometimes, and I’d be like, ‘Come on!’”

Time for chickens, time for change.

This is when Nathalie and Robin started to plot their next move. They started to think about more acreage, better zoning, and a simpler life. After some careful consideration, they decided to move back to Canada, where they’re both from and… buy a farm. 

Their farm isn’t all off on its own in the country somewhere. “We’re sort of in a neighborhood,” she says, “so we’re super lucky we get to have good internet.” Behind their home, there’s the chicken coop, a 100’x25’ greenhouse, two barns, and the pond. Chickens, ducks, and geese roam around noisily. There are dairy sheep and some boarded horses. 

She tells me that the greenhouse was new last year. Their goal is to have homegrown vegetables all year round. The greenhouse uses a “climate battery.” “Basically, there are pipes that go underground, and then we circulate air—the [daytime] heat inside the greenhouse goes underground, stays there until the night time when it’s cold, and then it recirculates the hot air from the day time” back into the greenhouse above ground.

Of course, it’s not like Nathalie’s move was to a cabin in the woods off the grid—which is what I just suggested to Sean this morning. Running a business and a farm takes resources. It takes money, but it also takes time, attention, commitment, and social support. It’s not “simply” living somewhere beautiful, it’s a massive investment in non-income-earning work. Nathalie and Robin work at least one hour every weekday on the farm. On the weekends, depending on kids’ activities, they might do more like three or four hours of farm work. The workload on the farm varies by season and project, of course. But they’re committed to not only making it work but making it sustainable.

And that’s key—especially for two people who didn’t know the first thing about farming when they got started. Nathalie grew up driving past farms—but certainly not on one. Robin is from a dense city in China and didn’t know the difference between a cow and a horse until he got to Canada. They’ve learned much of what they know about farming from books, Facebook groups, local friends, and, of course, YouTube videos. Nathalie tells me that as she learns, especially from YouTube, she’s always identifying new projects she wants to add to the farm. 

So, I had to ask how she experiences the difference between the treadmill-like more, more, more she felt in NYC and Texas and the neverending ideas for projects on the farm.

“My mom actually commented about this to me,” exclaims Nathalie. “Basically my mom said to me, ‘You have more stuff outside than you have inside.’” The ‘outside stuff,’ Nathalie continues, “it’s rewarding, and it’s rejuvenating, and it feeds us.” The animals and plants that coexist with Nathalie on the farm have their own lives, their own “unique journey.” “I’m just part of the equation,” she says.

The ‘outside stuff’ has its own vitality because of the care and maintenance that’s put into it.

Our modern consumer goods just don’t have that kind of dynamism. Nathalie adds that inside stuff “is actually depleting to clean it, maintain, store it, organize it.” It’s not that the ‘outside stuff’ is easy or effortless—far from it—but there’s a relationship, an exchange.

Now, it’s not like Nathalie and Robin could make this move without also making a move when it came to their relationship with work. For Nathalie, that wasn’t only a matter of setting better boundaries or creating more predictable revenue. It was an actual change to how she did business—and what that meant for her customers and employees. Instead of the “go, go, go” super ambitious approach she’d taken for years, she embraced a new business model and new way of working.

After years as a coach, consultant, and online course creator, Nathalie founded a software company—AccessAlly. “I think that’s when I sort of matured,” she explains, noting that, “I also had kids at the same time so I kind of had to have those actually strict limits around work” and not being online all the time. She describes her relationship to work today as “much healthier.”

I’ve often noticed that people completely reevaluate their relationship with work when they become their own employees—as in, they’re building a company rather than “just” working for themselves. Further, this is typically accompanied by a shift from loose, contractor labor relations to more durable employee labor relations. Nathalie confirms that this structural change was part of shifting her own relationship to work.

Building a company, rather than a personal brand, means that, while she’s still heavily involved in marketing and operations, others have significant responsibilities, too. Plus, customers are transacting with Access Ally rather than expecting Nathalie to answer support emails. She’s detangled all the “weird associations” that come from being too “self-identified with our companies.” She and the team “get to do great work for people, and we get paid for it. It doesn’t have to be then end all, be all of our entire identities.”

At this point, you might be wondering whether two entrepreneurial hobby farmers would figure out how to turn their passion for farming into a business. “I really don’t want to make the farm into a business,” Nathalie emphatically states. She says people love to share ideas for how she could monetize the farm but she resists. They sell eggs at the roadside just to get rid of the surplus when the chickens are laying five or even ten dozen a week. But otherwise, the farm is its own thing—not a money-making proposition.

The urge to monetize every aspect of our lives is part of what Byung-Chul Han calls the psychopolitics of neoliberal capitalism. We internalize the logic of the market and then make life choices based on exchange value. I think stepping away from this mindset brings with it a sort of loss aversion effect, too.

It’s not just the aversion to a loss of potential income or opportunity.

It’s an aversion to the loss of a structure that orders how we live. The logic of the market and the neoliberal system feels like a stabilizing force or at least something fairly predictable. 

But only because it’s the only system we know. 

Instead, the market and the neoliberal order are profoundly destabilizing and unpredictable. They help create the ambient anxiety that lurks throughout the 21st-century economy. 

When we disconnect from those systems in the ways that we can, we have the chance to embrace self-realization with others, to create a working community that provides real freedom.

For Nathalie, that has meant getting clear on what enough looks like. “You see all these numbers,” she says, “how much money people are making with their business or their launch or have stashed away in their retirement accounts—and I realized like, ‘What do I really need?’”

‘What do I need?’ is essentially building the pizza from scratch.

It removes or, at least, remediates the influence of advertising, status symbols, and peer pressure. You can put as much or as little on your pizza as you’d like. Sure, it’s hard to give up the extra pepperoni once it’s already on your pizza. But if know you’re actually happier with a veggie pizza from the get-go, it’s not hard to say “no.”

Nathalie admits that they certainly have new bills to contend with—grain, hay, building materials, etc. But they don’t need as much now. They go to the grocery store less, they buy less ‘inside stuff,’ and they consume less media. They focus on the basics and then pour their energy into the farm.

They take a modest salary each from the business ($80k per year) and some distributions “every now and then” when the business is doing well. “That in itself is enough to sustain us,” she tells me. They have enough. They earn enough. Nathalie doesn’t feel the pressure she used to feel to be regularly doubling revenue, growing the team, or building new products to sell. She recognizes that sure, the company could be bigger—but they’re accomplishing what they set out to accomplish with new features and happy customers.

“I enjoy running [the company]. I enjoy our customers, I enjoy the work that we do. I'm not going to overdo it. That's more sustainable, and that's kind of that enough point if that makes sense.”

Yes, that makes sense.

Growth isn’t the only goal.

We don’t have to let the threat of losing something we never really had dictate how much we earn or how much we spend. 

We don’t have to behave as temporarily embarrassed capitalists.

It’s not a compromise. Not a loss.

It’s an incredible opportunity to embrace what actually satisfies us.