Brain: Asset, Liability, or Both?

When Earning Ends, What Should Thinking Do?

Most people spend their lives trying to retire early. A few retire on time. And an even smaller few retire—and refuse to replace work with anything at all. I seem to belong to the last category.

Yesterday, a friend and I were discussing retirement. He is planning to quit four or five years early. I, on the other hand, retired on superannuation almost six years ago and have chosen not to chase anything actively since.

My mother, who stays with me these days, watches my routine with visible discomfort: eat fruits all day, watch TV, not go anywhere, followed by sleep at night. and repeat the same unhurried rhythm every day. She would feel far better if I were “doing something” again—preferably something that looks like work.

I tried to reassure her. I am financially self-sufficient. My children care little about inheritance. My raw food habits and occasional workouts have kept me medication-free and physically stronger than many around me. My screen time is mostly educational, sometimes cinematic. Still, her worry—and my friend’s curiosity—pushed the conversation somewhere deeper.

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After Needs Are Met, Why Earn at All?

A question surfaced quietly but powerfully:

Once our needs are met—by whatever definition we choose—why must we continue to earn? And more disturbingly… why must we continue to think?

What exactly are our real resources anyway?

• Time?

• Money?

• Physical energy?

• Or the intelligence that drives all three?

I began to sense that the true resource is neither money nor muscle—but the brain itself.

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The Brain: Our Greatest Asset

The brain is our finest instrument. It trains relentlessly through experience. It builds careers, families, futures. It accumulates wisdom slowly, patiently—until one day it also begins to comprehend the edges of its own ignorance.

To know what we do not know may be the highest form of knowing.

But this instrument is expensive.

The brain consumes an enormous share of our biological energy. And as Jiddu Krishnamurti said, thought is time. Which means our very perception of time is manufactured by brain activity.

Each unnecessary thought, worry, projection, comparison, ambition—costs us energy. Perhaps even years.

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Why Silence Was Never a Luxury

This is why sages, across cultures and centuries, obsessed over silence. They saw clearly what modern life forgets: a noisy mind is a leaking battery.

Some meditate for hours daily to slow the drain.
A rare few retreat almost completely from stimulation, seeking radical stillness itself into Sajeeva Samadhi (retreating into an airtight room/underground and sealed permanently).

Not as escape.
But as efficiency at the deepest level of being.

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When the Asset Becomes the Liability

The brain is our greatest asset—when life demands building, striving, securing.

But when survival no longer requires 'conquest', the same brain quietly flips sides on the balance sheet. It becomes a liability. Life can be seen as a business with the Asset being our brain and it also showing up as a Liability on the other side of the Balance Sheet. 

Its endless commentary.
Its compulsive narration.
Its refusal to simply rest.

And that is the paradox I now sit with:

The brain that once built my life now asks whether it is time to stop building—and start being.