I am sure we have heard a lot about this issue and after having a conversation with @everittdmickey and seeing @macchiata post I decided to write this.

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On one side we have people that loves money and in the other side we have people that hates money and blame it for all of our society’s issues.

Nevertheless, we must remember something important: money isn’t something with an intrinsic value, we could say it doesn’t even exists.

Money is nothing more than an abstract representation of the value we give and perceive from our goods and services.

In other words, having a lot of money is nothing more than having the opportunity to acquire a lot of goods and services, money itself doesn’t matter, what matter is our capacity to satisfy our needs.

This is why when someone hates money, he/she also hates every goods and services ever created by humanity, like our smartphones, cars, TV, computers... things like agriculture, the internet, music, the service provided by doctors or engineers, hating money implies hating everything we produce.

This also means saying you love money is in fact a meaningless statement, because what we love is not money, but what we can do with it.

So, does money makes us happy?

The romantic take on this subject is the typical answer we heard from our parents or other elders and it is “no, money doesn’t makes us happy”, however we need to understand our social conditions can blinds us and obstruct us from seeing reality as it is.

For example, depending on the family and cultural environment, it’s more common for a poor person to think “money doesn’t bring happiness” than for someone with good financial conditions.

And there is also a psychological factor on this: when a poor person says that “money doesn’t bring happiness” it’s a way to encourage himself and twist the reality in order to feel better about being poor.

What’s my answer to this question?

Well, money clearly is not the secret ingredient to be happy, we have tons of famous examples of Hollywood millionaires behind depressed and suicidal, nevertheless, a person in good economic position certainly has more possibilities of being happy with life, than someone with a constant struggle to make ends meet.

We can find people arguing there are a lot of millionaires having miserable life’s and poor people having happy life’s, but by that same standards we have much more millionaires having happy lives and much more poor people having miserable lives. So the correlation is there.

My conclusion

In order to be happy we need to have our needs met like having good health, enough food, good shelter and good company. And since having money makes it more easy to get those things, I believe having money while not being a guarantee to happiness, undoubtedly seems like a requirement.