Financial Success & Happiness

Money and Happiness
In today’s world, money seems to have control over every necessity we need to live our lives in comfort, but does this give money direct control over people’s happiness? The answer is maybe . There is a complicated relationship between an individual’s financial success and their happiness that depends on the person’s personality, dreams, and ambitions, and perspective on life.

To start off, it would be helpful to analyze both financial success and happiness individually. Financial success, to the vast majority, would mean a lavish and “care free” lifestyle, which is achieved by hard work and effort or some stroke of luck. Happiness, as described by The How of Happiness, “is the experience of joy…combined with a sense that life is good”. Both of these have something in common, and it is that both success and happiness are determined by opinion, which allows for a large variety of results that people would call a success and many results that would bring people happiness.

Moving back to the relationship between financial success and happiness, an individual’s personality and perspective on life play a significant role in determining when they’ve reached each one of these. To see this, there are two examples showing opposite results with similar beginnings: Michael Jackson and Oprah Winfrey. In Michael Jackson’s case, his life started with a family in the working-class with a father that pushed his children to pursue music together. Eventually this would lead to Michael working on his own music and achieving incredible amounts of success in his life from his unmatched talents. It was only until becoming addicted to propofol that he faced serious obstacles that led to his demise at the age of fifty. As for Oprah, she started from a farm and slowly worked herself up starting from hosting shows on the radio to creating the most successful talk show in history and publishing four books. Both of these people were able to reach huge financial success in their careers (with Oprah still having it), but one of them spiraled into a self-destructive path and a horrible state of never reaching happiness. Michael loved to please others and wanted to be remembered for his generosity and how much he did for others, or more specifically, entertained others, but never really felt like he achieved that. This as well as other problems kept Michael from ever being truly happy despite all of his success, while Oprah on the other hand was able to do something she loved and give back to the public and enjoy her life despite the hardships she endured in her early life.

As seen in the case of Michael Jackson and Oprah Winfrey, money and happiness are not directly related to each other. This leads back to the topic of people’s perspectives and how their dreams and ambitions show a relationship between success and happiness. As mentioned before, Michael was never pleased with himself, which was one of the biggest causes for his unhappiness. To achieve a state of happiness, self-love is key. The manner in which people choose to see and handle a situation is far more important than the situation itself, which would explain how Oprah was able to enjoy her success while Michael fell apart. Beyond that, this could be applied to a population by asking lower class and upper class people about what they think of their lives. Interviewing a few lower class people yielded interesting results: a Thai cleaning-service employee making $3.85 a day considered himself poor while a beggar making much less than the employee mentioned did not consider himself poor. This is clear evidence that attitude and perspective has a much stronger impact on you happiness than money. One of the people interviewed, who was a prostitute, even answered that she wasn’t poor because she could work, showing that although their life wasn’t the best they still had some form of success and that is all that mattered to them.

The relationship between money and happiness becomes more complicated the farther it is analyzed, but following the three characteristics of people previously mentioned helps show that the relationship is all opinion based. There is no definite answer to how financial success and happiness relate to each other because it differs from person to person, but taking examples such as the ones discussed help to understand how different perspectives play a role in this question. In conclusion, money controls many aspects of everyday life because it is needed for all basic material necessities, but happiness and success are completely up to the individual’s point of view on life and only they choose whether they have success or happiness in their life or not. A positive point of view on life has a much greater impact on happiness than any money gained.