Happy...

Let's play a game. Imagine you had enough money to never worry about money again. Your bills are covered, your daily expenses are covered, there is enough to travel and go to shows and buy things that you want versus just things that you need. There is even a big enough cushion that if, heaven forfend, something happened and you had a health issue you could cover that without worry.

Would you be happy?

I would be. I know that.

Part of why I know that is that I'm basically happy now. I know, I'm really angry right now as well, but my baseline personality is happy. Even when I'm really angry about the current world events, I'm still pretty happy.

Now ask yourself if you think the current crop of billionaires taking over the United States are happy.

I don't think they are. They don't act happy anyway. They act like they have a reason to be aggrieved. Like the world owes them something. Which, what? I'm sorry if your net worth is in the billions nobody owes you shit.

I've talked before that it feels like to get to that point you have to have a broken brain. Like whatever piece in your head registers "enough" is missing. Because even though they all have more money than they could ever spend they only want more. They are working on destroying the United States as we know it so they can get more.

Why? Do they think that it will make them happy? It won't. If they aren't happy now, as billionaires, there isn't a dollar amount that's going to make it happen for them.

There are studies out there that show that yes indeed money can buy happiness. But only to a point. Once you are comfortable if you continue to pursue making money over everything else it makes you unhappy. The point of having money is to use it. To enjoy it. And if you have a lot of it to use it to make other people better off. Thank you, Mackenzie Scott for showing the way (my case in point about how you can't possibly spend it all once you reach a certain level, she gave away $2 billion last year and has given away over $19 billion since 2017 and is STILL worth around $31 billion). Thank you Mark Cuban for focusing on better health care for all of us instead of trying to lay claim to Greenland. And yeah, he bought a sports team first, but that's fun. That's something that made him happy to do. Use your money to do things that make you happy.

And I think that's a big problem we are facing right now. The oligarchs that are taking over the world are fundamentally unhappy and what they think will make them happy is more. More money. More resources. More power. More for them and less for us.

And it won't.

So they will just keep pursuing more and more and more until there is nothing left.

And they will still not be happy.

Don't ever lose sight of what makes you happy. Don't ever think that you are five pounds or 5 million dollars away from happy. Find your happiness right now and hold on to it tightly. Yeah, having enough money so you don't have to worry about money will help you with happiness. I've been poor and I've been comfortable. Comfortable is much better. I'm not going to pretend it's not.

But I was happy no matter what. It's just easier to focus on the happy parts when you aren't struggling with those bottom levels of the hierarchy of need.

And if your happiness depends on making sure you have more than everyone else, that you control everything, that you always get more...then spend some of that fortune on therapy and learn how to become a decent human being, because you're broken.