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In a Relationship With Money
There’s an old saying, “money doesn’t buy happiness”. People say it all the time. But is it true? Does money buy happiness or not? We spend an awful lot of time chasing after it, so it might be nice to know. Over the course of my 50 years on the planet, I’ve been poor as a church mouse and I’ve been quite affluent and yeah, money does buy happiness. It also doesn’t.
First, the affirmative. When I was a single mother, raising 3 boys, living in a mobile home, working in a coffee shop for something like 25 cents over minimum wage, it sure felt like money could have bought me a whole lot of happiness.
Let’s be brutally honest, being poor sucked. It sucked not being able to buy myself new clothes when I needed them because I had to get school supplies for the kids. It sucked getting phone calls from the power company threatening to shut the lights off if I didn’t pay up. It sucked eating macaroni and hamburger 3 times a week because it was cheap. It sucked not being able to give my kids the kind of life they deserved. Being poor did not make me happy.
The fact is when most of your time and energy are devoted to ensuring basic needs, there’s little time for happiness. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs demonstrate this principle. At the bottom of the pyramid are the most basic of needs. The…
