A couple weeks ago I was on vacation, doing basically nothing, which is my favorite way to spend a vacation. I ended up on the couch one morning with the Today Show on — which, full disclosure, I’m not really a Today Show guy. But there was a story that stopped me mid-coffee.

It was an interview with a man named Scott Vincent Borba. If you don’t know the name, you might know the brand: he founded e.l.f. Cosmetics back in 2004, starting out selling cheap makeup in dollar stores. Fast forward a few years and the man was worth a reported $3 billion. Red carpets, Hollywood Hills mansion, dated Demi Moore — by every normal measure, he had made it.

And then one night, hosting a party at his own house, he says he felt God tell him, plainly, that this wasn’t what he was made for. So he stopped the party. Told everyone to leave. Walked into his bedroom, packed a bag, and never went back into that house again.

He gave away the entire fortune. And then — this is my favorite part — he went back to a call he’d first felt at ten years old and had spent thirty years running from. Six weeks ago, he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest. From a beauty empire to a small parish where his one job now is simply to be present with people who are suffering.

I can’t stop thinking about that story, mostly because it’s so extreme it lets the rest of us off the hook a little too easily. Most of us aren’t going to have a $3 billion moment. But I think we all have smaller versions of it — moments where we sense, if we’re honest, that something we’re gripping too tightly isn’t actually ours to keep.

Here’s the thing that got me started on this whole topic in the first place: we are exposed to something like 10,000 advertisements a day. Ten thousand. Between the TV, the radio, Facebook, the billboards on the highway, the logos on people’s shirts — it’s everywhere, and we don’t even clock it anymore. It’s just the water we swim in.

I’m a Cincinnati Reds fan, so half the time the ads behind home plate are honestly more interesting than the game. But that’s kind of the point — this stuff is baked into everything we look at, constantly and quietly training us to want more. And it’s not even just the ads themselves. You go on Amazon to buy one thing and somehow that “customers also bought” list has you ordering three other things you didn’t know you needed twenty minutes ago. They even build you a wish list for next time. It’s relentless, and it’s really good at its job.

None of that makes advertising evil, by the way. My dad spent 45 years in the business. Companies have to get their message out. But the accumulated weight of 10,000 messages a day telling us our happiness depends on having a little more — that adds up. Slowly, without us noticing, it starts to shape what we think we’re worth.

Which is why I think our faith is genuinely countercultural here, not in a “us versus them” way, but in a real, structural way. Jesus — who Scripture says didn’t consider equality with God something to cling to — emptied himself. Became a servant. Took on a body that got headaches and upset stomachs and grief, the whole human experience, all the way to a cross. That’s not a strategy for getting more. That’s the exact opposite of everything those 10,000 ads are telling us.

I told a joke on Sunday about a guy at the gym who answers a call from a woman he thinks is his wife, and — feeling extra generous — greenlights a $5,000 purse, a $74,000 car, and her mother moving in, before realizing it wasn’t actually his wife on the phone. It gets a laugh, but underneath the joke is something true: it does feel good to be generous, even hypothetically. There’s something in us that responds to giving, even when it’s accidental.

I think about my grandmother a lot when I think about this. She turns 100 in two weeks. She grew up on a potato farm during the Great Depression, and her family did okay — better than okay, actually — while a lot of people around them had nothing. Instead of just being grateful and moving on with their lives, her parents opened their home. Strangers, family, people other folks avoided — they made room. My grandmother barely remembers much these days, but she remembers that. Ninety years later, it’s still one of the clearest memories she has. And now it’s been passed down four generations — to my mom, to me, to my own kids.

That’s the kind of generosity I actually want. Not the dramatic, walk-away-from-billions kind, necessarily — though God bless Scott Vincent Borba. I mean the kind that gets embedded so deep in a family, a church, a life, that it outlives you by ninety years and counting.

Winston Churchill said it better than I can: “We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” I believe that. I’m trying to live like I believe that. Some weeks I’m better at it than others.

So here’s my honest question for you, the same one I’m asking myself: in a world engineering ten thousand daily reasons to want more, what would it look like this week to actually give something away?