It is easy for people who have money to say that happiness is not found in wealth. Of course you would say that. Look at the car you drive. Look at the house you have paid off. It is fairly easy to tell someone that money does not matter when you already have enough of it. But what about someone who has no money? How do you explain to them that they can be content with life?
How do you explain it to a woman who puts an item back on the shelf because she has worked out that she cannot afford everything? To a father who tells his children he is not hungry because he knows there is only enough food left for them? To someone who has worked for years yet still has to decide each month which bill to put off? Do they need another lecture about how happiness cannot be bought?
Probably not. It would mean much more to them to walk into a shop, just once, without doing the sums. To pay a bill when it arrives, rather than when they manage to borrow the money. To have their car break down without it becoming a family crisis.
There is a kind of exhaustion that people with enough money often forget. It is not the exhaustion of work. It is the exhaustion of constantly calculating. How long until payday? How much does the school trip cost? Can the repair wait until next month? What if someone falls ill? What if the landlord raises the rent? Someone who lives this way does not think about money because they are greedy. They think about it because almost every decision depends on whether there is enough of it.
Then someone who is financially secure comes along and explains that the most important things in life are free. Love, family, friendship, peace. All of that is true. But love does not pay the rent. Friendship does not buy medicine. And peace is fairly hard to find when, before going to sleep, you are wondering how you will pay tomorrow for something that was already overdue yesterday.
I do not think wealthy people have no right to talk about happiness. Nor do I think their experience is worth less because they have money. Someone can have immense wealth and live unhappily. They can have everything money can buy and lose relationships that money cannot restore. They can spend a lifetime earning and never learn to enjoy what they have gained. But there is a difference between concluding that money is not enough for happiness and claiming that money does not matter. The first comes from experience. The second, said to someone barely making ends meet, can sound like a failure to understand their life.
Because money does not just buy things. Sometimes it buys the ability to say no. To turn down a job where you are humiliated. To leave a relationship you remain in only because you have nowhere else to go. To refuse some of the terms someone imposes because they know you have no choice.
It buys time. The ability not to work a second job after your regular working day. To spend a weekend with your children. To see a doctor as soon as you feel something is wrong, instead of waiting until the problem becomes serious.
It also buys something we talk about much less often. The right to make a mistake. Someone who is financially secure can make a bad decision and carry on. They can try to start a business, lose money and try again. For someone else, the same mistake can mean years of repaying debts. That is why people are not equally free to take risks, even when they have equal courage.
And perhaps those who have succeeded should remember that more often. Not to apologise for their success. Nor to diminish the effort they put in. But to avoid treating their own financial security as a universal human experience.
It is easy to advise someone to leave an unfulfilling job when you know you could live for a year without a salary. It is easy to say that people should follow their dreams when you do not have to choose between a dream and the electricity bill. It is easy to recommend a simple life from a home that lacks nothing.
But poverty should not be romanticised either. There is nothing noble about constantly fearing that you will be unable to provide for basic needs. There is no special wisdom in deprivation you did not choose. And there is no reason to persuade someone to be content with circumstances that strip them of dignity every day.
Of course, money is not the answer to every question either. Once basic needs are met, once a person has security and some freedom of choice, other questions begin to emerge. How much is enough? What is worth sacrificing for even higher earnings? How much time do we want to spend working? What is left of success if we no longer have anyone to share it with? Those are important questions, but they are not the same as the question of how to survive until the next payday.
And perhaps our biggest mistake is trying to answer both with the same sentence. Happiness is not about money. Perhaps it is not. But someone who has enough money to stop thinking about it often forgets just how much that security has changed their life.
They forget how much easier it is to be patient when you have no debts falling due. How much easier it is to be generous when giving does not put your own family at risk. How much easier it is to talk about inner peace when external circumstances do not require you to fight a new battle every day.
That is why I would like us to be more careful when telling people what ought to make them happy. Some people really do need less ambition and more time to live. But some need a higher salary. Some need to learn to enjoy what they have. Others need a chance to finally have enough. We cannot prescribe the same attitude to money for everyone, because we do not all start from the same place.
So the next time you hear someone say that money does not matter, do not immediately assume they are wrong. Perhaps they have simply reached a point in life where they have stopped noticing how much it means to have it.
And if you are the one who has reached that point, try to remember what life was like before you could stop doing the sums. Because for some people, money really will not bring happiness. But for others, it could bring their first peaceful night in a long time as soon as tomorrow.
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