> I'm happy when I'm not living in a ditch. When I'm warm in Winter. When I have food and I'm not afraid of starving to death. When I can afford to pay my rent or mortgage.
Yeah, but I'm even happier when that applies to others, too. I can't even imagine how grand life would be if it applied to every last person on the planet.
But how does money as such figure into that? The value of my money doesn't just depend on the amount of money I have, but also on the amount of money others don't have. If everybody had a billion dollars, it would be the exact same situation than if everybody had one dollar. That's why the whole money obsession seems a bit silly, to put it mildly.
> I'd be very happy spending my life trying to figure out how to benefit humanity with the $127 billion Bezos is sitting on.
If you totally ignore the accumulation part of it, and you pretend it's money that was magically "made" where there was no money, and then added as some kind of gift to the economy, then such mental gymnastics can be fun. I'm with Nietzsche though, the need for power which is implied in the need for money is based on inability, and by the same token, the lack of need for it based on ability and knowledge of self.
You can't easily be happy when you're hungry or otherwise suffering, true. But I'd say I mostly need health and agency, and even then my main happiness comes from the universe existing. If I got bored with my toys, I could just stare at clouds or the skin of my hand or a billion other things and be happy, at the very least content. Do people even know how cool and pretty a rain drop is? How many there are when it rains? And that's even before animals and people. I know this sounds like advice from a hippie calendar, but it's the best way I can describe how I actually do live my life "on the inside". Heather B. also put it well: "it's the simple things that please me" :)
Money is just a tool, like being able to measure weight or distances. It's that we pretend that doing useful things well is proportional to the amount of money someone "makes", and in turn that gives people the idea that just having come by money in any way at all bestows usefulness and importance on them. But they can't even convince themselves, and not me either. It's orthogonal. You need food, shelter, medicine, rights and respect, maybe books and a few other things, but nothing fancy, no jet planes; maybe that's not enough for everybody to be happy, but it'd be enough for a lot of people I dare say, because it might be enough for me. But in so far any of those are tangled up with money, which is just a symbol, a placeholder, that's just us being confused and kinda lame, but says nothing about money doing anything per se.
> This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
-- Douglas Adams