Priorities. No matter how you look at it, it all boils down to priorities. An online life, or a blogger’s life in particular, isn’t rewarding in its entirety. Sure, you get to meet a lot of people and make new friends and stay in touch with old ones. However, the fact of the matter is, there’s still an offline life that everyone has to manage, whether we like it or not.

Putting everything in the cloud is awesome, I must say. But that is just one small facet of a daily routine that eventually has to fill a necessity that comes with the territory of being alive.

Blogging for a living isn’t as rewarding as some might think. Yes, it comes with a sense of fulfillment whenever someone finds one of your posts useful. But the bottomline is that it has to answer one fundamental, metaphorical question: does it put food on the table?

A few birthdays ago, I wouldn’t mind mooching off of my parents to get by. But as time progresses, desires start to overwhelm practicality, and it may not be noticeable, but the hunger for that one gadget starts to eat you up from the inside. The solution is very simple, of course. You get a job.

Once you finally land a job that pays just enough for you to get what you really want, your priorities start shifting. The lifestyle you were accustomed to before starts changing, with or without your noticing it. What do you do then? You get another job that pays better, or you get a second job. Inevitably, with this change, your lifestyle changes too. Before you know it, you’re spending well above your means to pay, and you get sucked into more bills.

Reality checks may be a cliche, but it is a necessity for everyone to do this once in a while, like every month. A lifestyle change will definitely affect your priorities. A marriage, most significantly will. What mostly fails individuals whenever change comes is the inability to stay the same. The problem is that there is an inherent mentality to reward ourselves whenever achieving something. A job promotion compels us to buy a new something: a watch, a car, a wife, etc.

The question we always forget to ask ourselves when splurging is if we need it in the first place. If you said yes then justified it with a very lame, and obviously invalid reason of “it’s a bargain at that price,” then no, you don’t need it. In fact, if your reason has anything to do with its price, forget it. You don’t need it. Only free items are exempt from this reasoning, and those free items should be unconditionally free, meaning you don’t have to purchase anything to get a free item. Only problem is, nothing is free.