Each day pays you in Life, or takes life from you. You learn, or you contract. Learning is the baseline. If you do nothing other than show up–if you keep working your shitty job, drawing your shitty paycheck, watching shitty TV–you STILL grow as a person. Not as fast as you would with focus and a plan, but you still grow. Just living is enough. Sufficient to yesterday, today, and tomorrow was, is and will be the evil therein. No need to seek trouble out. It’s already here, embedded in everything.
So normal life pays you slowly or handsomely, depending on the quality of the life “work” you do–how attentive you are, how curious, how generous, how kind, how thoughtful. People who live this way are the meek. They are not trying to conquer anyone or anything, or to control them outside a normal range of psychological need. Sometimes you go faster, sometimes slower, but you keep moving forward most days, and in aggregate can cover many, many miles without even realizing it.
But there is a way of living which COSTS you life, where you pay with your soul. This is the life of greed and cruelty. We all know these people exist. Call them sociopaths, evil human beings, demons, the sick rich, sadists.
This is the way of life which dessicates people. These are the mummies, the vampires, and varying unDead. The juice of life is gone from them, so they have to seek it out in others.
It is unnatural to pay in life. Our world is not set up this way. It is swimming upriver. It takes effort, in the long run, vastly larger than that of living in any degree of accord with the laws of Nature.
Goodness means getting paid in life. Your account grows a bit every day. Your spiritual wealth grows a bit every day, if you do nothing other than try and show up, try not to feel too sorry for yourself, mostly try and do the right thing, and mostly try and find what contentment and happiness you can, wherever you are, whatever you are doing. Living is accruing compound interest. The rate will depend on your effort, but it happens naturally for all of us, if we do not interrupt it.
Evil means paying life. It means working hard to become a worse person. It means pissing away spiritual wealth even as it is presented on a silver or gold platter. It means resentment, anger, unhappiness, loneliness, a deep guilt which can only be suppressed with an effort even by those we call sociopaths, and an inability to truly relax for long, or be contented with anything or anyone.