“The faculty of communication would not gain ground in evolution unless it was by and large transmitting true beliefs”.
Daniel Dennett
How many times have you heard the phrase: “money can’t buy happiness”? It’s repeated so often that it probably goes in one ear and out the other.
It’s like telling someone to drive slower. They might not listen at first, but wait until they get a $250 speeding ticket. They might listen then.
So its not surprising that when someone tells us that money can’t buy happiness, we don’t listen, we figure we’d rather find that out on our own. We think it would be different for us. We still buy our lottery tickets, and we still dream about winning big and having all our problems melt away.
The idea is so prevalent in our culture that were reminded of it everywhere. Most villains in our stories are motivated by the pursuit of money or power, and things never turn out well for them.
We even see celebrities, who appear to have both, commit suicide.
It’s also mentioned in the Bible:
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”.
Mark 10:25
Still we don’t listen.
We ignore empty phrases like this one because they are thrown at us without any context or explanation. We don’t think about what they mean, and we don’t always ask why.
In the 16th letter of his book, Letters from a Stoic, Seneca quotes Epicurus, whom he quotes frequently:
“If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people’s opinions, you will never be rich.”
Epicurus
No matter how much we fill our lives with extravagance and material possessions, whether to impress other people or whether we think we are satisfying our own desires, we will never have enough. Seneca adds: “all these things will only induce you in a craving for bigger things.”
He summarizes his idea with a metaphor. “When a person is following a track, there is an eventual end to it somewhere, but with wandering at large there is no limit.”
What do we see around us today?
The internet offers limitless possibilities, we can talk to anyone, do anything, see anything, learn anything.
We are buried under an abundance of freedom and choice. We have businesses with their hands in our pockets and their propaganda in our heads.
Massive companies spend billions of dollars a year and employ armies of people, who’s full time jobs are to figure out how to sell us things.
Were caught in the middle of a tug of war over our attention.
We can even suffer from something called decision fatigue. The more decisions we make in a day can cause our brain to be tired. Our self-control wears down and we either behave recklessly or choose to be idle and resentfully accept the status quo.
Seneca then asks us: “whether (this journey) is capable of coming to rest at any point; if after going a long way there is always something farther away, be sure it is not something natural.”
The Scottish economist, Adam Smith, “The Father of Economics”, and author of The Wealth of Nations, wrote this in 1776:
“The desire for food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach; but the desire of the conveniences and ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and house hold furniture, seems to have no limit or certain boundary.”
Adam Smith
Sound familiar?
Fun Fact! Adam Smith was a philosopher before he was an economist. He was educated at the university of Glasgow and he studied under Francis Hutchenson, a leading member of the christian stoicism movement. Hutchenson even wrote his own translation of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
We don’t have to take the word of Seneca or Smith as gospel though. The truth has habit of always revealing itself.
Studies have shown that people who make $50,000 a year are happier than those who make $10,000 a year, but those who make $5,000,000 a year are no happier than those who make $125,000.
“It is the poor man who’ll ever count his flock”
Ovid
So maybe next time we hear the phrase “money can’t buy happiness”, we will know why. We might think twice before making an impulsive purchase. We can ask ourselves questions about why we want something.
Is someone trying to sell me something I don’t need?
Does the thing I want have a limit? Is the journey capable of coming to an end at any point?
Will it create more anxiety with it in my life?
Will I be upset if the things stops working or breaks?
We can also try to remove negative things from our life instead of adding new, positive ones. We can choose not to desire things. We can focus our energy on helping others, or setting goals for yourself.
Here are a few more quotes that I couldn’t fit in, but are too good to leave out.
“Desire is just an excuse to be unhappy until we get what we want”
Naval Ravikant
“To the best of my judgement, when I look at the human character I see no virtue placed there to counter justice, but I see one to counter pleasure: self-control.
Marcus Aurelius
Thanks for reading. What do you think? Do you agree with me? why or why not?
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