Can Money Buy You Happiness?
Humans live their lives in a rat race to earn money.
Go to school, study, get a degree, get a job, earn money, and be happy. They live in a world where happiness in a person’s life is often measured by the amount of cash he has in his bank account, the size of his house or the model of his car. Money is something that everyone crave for, and everyone fancy themselves into thinking that money can buy everything on this earth. Therefore, people would do anything and everything to get more money. Money for expenses, money for a house, money for food, and money for hospitals.
However, because nowadays people can almost do anything when they are rich, many people are blinded by their greed for money and misunderstand the fact that money can do everything for them and that money can buy everything. But are these the factors that actually decide whether a person is happy? Is a person’s happiness really driven by such materialistic items that money can buy? Money can sure buy a person luxury and all the comfort he need but it cannot buy happiness. Happiness is the mental state of well-being characterized by positive emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy; If happiness is determined by money, then it won’t be happiness anymore. Money, whatever way people think of it as, cannot buy time. Therefore, instead of putting all of one’s time into making money and wasting their precious time, people should start to do something they actually love to do with the limited time they got in their lives.
How can a person feel happy when most of his day is spent working his bottom off in an office? Earning money isn’t easy and it takes effort, hard work and a lot of time. It can consume so much of one’s time that one do not get any for the other things, things that might seem irrelevant but they actually give one pleasure. Hobbies are one of those things that would give a person pleasure and joy. Having a lot of money to spend over a spa therapy does tempt everyone but what if a simple walk in a park gives a person more happiness than a spa therapy? Spending money nowadays has become more of a show-off things for everyone, and many people only buy or earn money just to get either attention or to brag about. Even though a simple walk in a park might be the hobby of a person’s, that is something that the person cannot brag about, since everybody can do that.
However, spending money over a spa therapy would make them stand out more because only people who can afford it could do that. However, using their money in order to gloat in front of the rest of the society would not make anyone happy; both the person gloating and the people looking at the person gloating. This is because the person gloating is actually spending money just to show-off and is only doing it for the “spectators”, not for himself. Therefore, whenever he desires to do one of his hobbies that he actually likes, he cannot because he will think that it might ruin his reputation and make people think that he is just like them. So, just to stand out in a crowd, the richer people will both willingly and unwillingly do things that might be the best interest of the crowd, but not them. This would lead to them getting unhappier, since they are denying the things that actually make them smile and laugh and force themselves into pretending to like something they do not like.
Also, money does not get a person true friends. Life seems incomplete without a bunch of good friends. They can turn a person’s days from sad and gloomy to sunny, and the person’s life from melancholy to cheerful. A true friend can make the person burst out in laughter when he do not even feel like smiling. And what money in this world can get the person a friend like that? In fact, making a lot of money often attracts people who pretend being the person’s friends but all they care for is the money he spend on them. On the outside they might make the person feel like they are his genuine friends but sometime or the other the person will get to know the reality.
When something terrible occurs and the person looses all of his riches, the fake-friends of his are going to turn their backs on him and pretend that they never knew the person in the first place. Also, in a book called the Wisdom of Talmud, a cruel king orders a man to come to his castle. Scared out of his mind, the man asks his three friends to accompany him to the king. First friend, who the man cared for the most and thought as the best friend, declined. Second friend, who the man liked as a friend, said he could only accompany the man to the castle door. The third friend, however, gladly accepted and accompanied him.
In real life, the evil king represents death, while the first friend represents wealth, second friend represents family, and third represents the good deeds the man did throughout his entire life. No matter how rich a person is, they cannot bring their wealth to their afterlife. However, the person’s family at least goes to the funeral of the person, while the good deeds stay with the person till the very end. Therefore, wealth cannot does not make someone happy in the long run. Finding out the fact that the person’s friends were actually not his friends at all can never make any person happy. Lastly, money will never be enough.
One very important reason why money can never buy a person happiness is that no matter how much he has, it is never going to be enough for him. The person may think that he will really be happy when he buys that particular car, but once he has that, he wish for more. A year ago, a person thought that getting a few extra bucks of pocket money will keep him happy, but that was not the case at all. The person wanted more. Money sure can buy materials someone needs and items someone desire, but the gluttony won’t keep a person happy for a long period of time. Besides, there are no set amount for what is called “enough”.
If a person has 999 dollars, he could still get one more dollar so that he could obtain 1,000 dollars. And when he actually obtains 1,00 dollars, it is natural for him to hope for even more, like 2,000 dollars or something. Money is infinite, as governments from all around the world are still printing money continuously today. So, when will the person be satisfied with the money he got? The answer is obvious: never. When he obtains 9 trillion dollars, he would probably aim for 10 trillion dollars. When he obtains 10 trillion dollars, he would aim for 10 quadrillion dollars.
And so on and so forth. Infinite literally means impossible to measure or calculate. Therefore, since money is infinite, people’s greed for them is infinite too. So, if a person keep aiming higher and higher and never get satisfied for what he have, would he still be able to maintain his happiness? Money is something that people will need to get survive. It’s true that money is important and that people can’t live without money. They’ll die out of hunger or thirst.
However, just because they need the money desperately, that does not mean that they can buy anything and everything with money. Happiness, for example is one of the things that cannot be bought by money. Happiness could only be achieved if and only if the person is contributing his time or experience to something positive and make genuine friends and just being content with what the person has right at that moment. These three reasons and many more are the ways of obtaining true happiness, not money. No matter what the world insists, people need to remember that money is not everything and it is not the key to everyone’s problems and mistakes.
