The narrative "Money can't buy you happiness" which has been fed to us and has become a dogma in every culture, amongst people of each and every socio-economic level is wrong. Money might not hand over happiness to you, but it gives you the possibility to have happiness, that freedom to make choices which can make you happy isn't something that you'll get from anywhere else.
"Money can't buy you happiness. You need to follow your passion" - Everyone In search of this mysterious thing called passion which is nothing but consistent practice done by individual that over a period of time, generally before they are 18, they start associating it with their identity and think that it is something they are good at ahem familiar with ahem so they'll pursue it as a career instead of researching their expected returns. Most people on these paths are clearly doomed. Are you about to explain how John Mayer, or some other artists followed their passion and became successful? Well, let me tell you that they were following their passion along with some job like working at a gas station which was paying their bills to follow that passion. Surely, they weren't making much but they were getting enough money to buy them time to follow the passion which might or might not have made them successful.
Dreams don't pay the bills. Am I sounding old school? Well, try doing that, I don't know if it would or not but Money does. It's the only way in this world to get your basic human needs met unless you're ready to live the life of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Even worse is telling young people to throw away their option to choose freedom that money provides for the "perciveable" freedom that following your passion as your sole career comes with and leads you down to misery.
I am fairly certain that the Stoics considered money to be a preferred indifferent, meaning that all things being equal, it would be better to have it than not have it (like health). I agree that money isn't something which inherrently makes you happy and theirs more to happiness like health, friendship, love, etc. But if you think about health, you can't have good health if you don't have money to buy good quality food, and lack equipment or membership to gym to stay fit just because you have limited money or maybe they are simply out of your reach. You can't maintain friendship or any relationship if you have to think about spending on every dinner or movie night. You'll be stressed to death if occasional splurge is something you can't even think about. In all of these cases it's not like that money handed over happiness to you, but it at least gave you the freedom to make choices that can make you happy. There are people who will eat junk food with all their money and ruin their health or be jerk around people even though they have money. So be it. They'll not be fullfilled in that aspect of life.
Submitted August 24, 2020 at 08:51PM by amsmu https://ift.tt/34uFalm
