Ang Peregrino By Eric S. Santillan

When Money DOES Buy Happiness

Money can’t buy happiness. Or can it? The TierneyLab blog from The New York Times recently conducted an informal survey. Readers were invited to list the ten most expensive things (products, services or experiences) that you have ever paid for (including houses, cars, university degrees, marriage ceremonies). Then, list the ten items that you have ever bought that gave you the most happiness.

You are then supposed to count how many items appear on both lists.

TierneyLab examined the responses. And the results are fascinating. Things appearing much more often on ‘expensive’ lists than ‘happy’ lists include: children, marriage ceremonies, divorces, taxes.

Items that were on more ‘happy’ lists than ‘expensive’ lists included: meals with friends, pets, hobbies, books, music, artwork.

And, finally, there was some overlap where things were both expensive and happy/fulfilling. These include: houses, higher education, travel, electronics, certain vehicles.

The results are by no means scientific, but it does make us think. Are the intangible things (things like love, charity, fulfillment, world peace, etc.) over rated? Have people changed so much over the years (i.e. become more “shallow”) that material things are now able to bring us fulfillment?

Well, we have centered our lives over money and finances that it does seem the two are correlated. The more money you have, the more happy you “can” become. But even as we point that out, we see a lot of exceptions to the rule. We see people who do not have savings in the bank give off the most genuine smiles to us. We see people who are filthy rich wallow in self-pity and die of loneliness. To say though that money and happiness are NOT connected to each other is an irresponsible sweeping statement.

Laura Rowley of MONEY AND HAPPINESS hits it on the head: “Money is a tool that ultimately expresses our core values. Beyond basic needs, money helps us achieve our life’s purpose and support the things we care about most deeply. It helps us get some of life’s intangibles – freedom or independence, the opportunity to make the most of our skills and talents, the ability to choose our own course in life, financial security. The people who invest the time to figure out what they truly value and then align their money with those values have the strongest sense of financial and personal well-being.”

I would like to think that the most important commodity you can buy with additional wealth is not any material thing; it is choice. If you have P1000 in your pocket, you can decide between going to an expensive restaurant or buying take-out fastfood for lunch. But if you have only P100, lutong bahay is your bestfriend. Or if I have a car, I could go buy groceries in the groceries offering the best prices, instead of making do with the nearest grocery store to my house. Poverty, then, is not just the absence of money, or cars, or houses, it is the absence of choices and opportunities.

Battling poverty is not just about giving money to the poor. It is about giving them better choices than what they have now.