Can Money Buy You Happiness?

Can Money Buy You Happiness?

Let me examine the case “Can Money Buy You Happiness?” by analyzing the life of typical rich children.

The general belief is that the rich tend to pamper their children by buying them all sorts of “toys”, while the poorer children do not do this because they cannot afford to. It is usually presented in stories – especially in movies – that rich children are bad while those from poorer families struggle all their lives. Consequently it may be believed that children from rich families are happier than those from poorer ones. This may be the case in some instances, but is definitely not always true.

Children can be happy whether they are from rich or poor families. We hear of cases where poor families make all sorts of sacrifices so that their children – or one of them – can have a certain comfort. Fathers are known to work at extra jobs so that their children can have expensive toys for Christmas or for their birthdays. On the other hand, the children of the rich are not always given everything they want. Rich fathers are known to make their children work for a living and earn their pocket money. Other fathers have refused to give their children expensive toys so that they will learn the value of hard work. Hence it is not the riches of the parents that can make the children happy but what the parents do to the child.

Happiness can never be equated with having money or having rich parents for that matter. It is possible that poor parents have a close relationship with their child. In this way the child has something far better; it has love. Having enough love, the child will be happy – at least much happier than if it did not receive love. On the other hand it is possible that the child of rich parents has everything that she wants but does not get the love and concern that she needs. The parents of rich children are sometimes too busy spending their money and earning more. Often we hear stories of “poor little rich children”. Though many of the stories we hear are fiction, some of them are real indeed.

Sometimes the parents of rich children believe that their child will be happy if he is provided with everything he needs. They try to substitute money for love and care.  In such instances, the rich child can be very happy indeed. In addition, children brought up in this way tend to be very poor in relationships. They do not know how to value things like friendships. Such a child is poor indeed, in spite of being financially rich. Using money and surrounding himself with all sorts of toys the child is apt to grow up with the wrong sense of what is true happiness. There, one day when he realizes that money does not always buy happiness, he will not know which way to turn.

Here children from rich families may not always be happier than those from poorer families. In fact both are capable of being happy, with or without money.

MONEY   VS   HAPPINESS

An ancient Chinese saying says: "Find a job you; enjoy doing and you will not have to work a day in your life". The meaning is that you will be so busy enjoying you work that you will not consider it work at all. Certainly this is a realistic statement and we might add that a person who enjoys his job is likely to be a happier and better person than one who sees work as a drudgery or worse still as a necessary discomfort.

Time and again it has been argued by philosophers that the purpose of life is to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. Looking at it in this way, it is obvious that humans automatically look for what gives them pleasure. In that case, it might be true that we look for work that we enjoy. If so then it is advisable that we seek out jobs that we enjoy, though they may not pay very well, rather than choose a less enjoyable job which pays well. The argument here sounds simplistic: Is this always possible? Can we all find jobs that are enjoyable?

One certainty is that money is also important. There can be little happiness for a person who does not have enough money. For a person to enjoy life he certainly needs money and if the means of obtaining money is somewhat unpleasant - like working in a mortuary – or even difficult - like working as a manual worker, can we say that he should abandon his job and seek a job that he would enjoy? An immediate difficulty that comes to mind would be that if all of us seek only jobs that are enjoyable, there are jobs that no one will find enjoyable and no one would like to do these. What will happen to the country - and the world - if everyone wants to be a musician and no one wants to be a mortician or a coal miner? There certainly are jobs that no one can enjoy doing.

A good suggestion could be that we should learn how to enjoy what we are doing, rather than look for what we would enjoy doing. This may not be as unreasonable as it sounds. It is like saying that if you cannot marry someone you love, then learn to love the person you marry. 

Motivation by Money

It should be easy to love a job that gives you a lot of money. One could think of all the pleasures one could have and realize that it is the job that makes these possible and from there see that the job is enjoyable after all. A psychologist tells us that what gives us pleasure is a matter of programming. We have been programmed to listen to a certain type of music; like certain foods and even people. If this is true that it would be possible to programmed us to enjoy our jobs - whatever they are. So, if there is a well-paying job that we cannot see as enjoyable, but which gives a great deal of money, we can see it as enjoyable.

Hence we could say that though it is true that enjoying a job is more important than money, it would be wonderful if we enjoyed the job and earned a lot of money from it. Enjoying ourselves is a matter of attitude: "We can find enjoyment anywhere if we look hard enough. But if given a definite choice that we can only have one or the other, I would agree that enjoying a job is more important than money.