How to Enjoy Money, Happiness and Purpose

Money, Happiness and Purpose

COVID canceled my family’s annual camping trip this year to Glacier National Park. But Montana is a very big state with a lot of hidden jewels to uncover, so my wife took the picture above of me this week enjoying the incredible beauty of the Pintler Wilderness.  This 10-mile hike, in the middle of a pandemic, was the perfect setting for some serious reflection on how money, happiness and purpose can be aligned to create a virtuous cycle in our lives.

The Intersection of Modern Comedy and the Bible

One of my favorite streamed comedies I have enjoyed due to stay at home orders is called “The Good Place.”  While filled with comedy, the show also asks all the right philosophical questions over its four seasons of exploring life after death.  Hopefully this will not be a spoiler, but the show effectively demonstrates that the pursuit of happiness, with all the resources necessary to fulfill every dream, ultimately ends in unhappiness and a desire to end life as we know it. It reminded me of the conclusion of the ancient philosopher who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes. He also explored a hedonistic life without a purpose from God and concluded:

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Everything is meaningless!”  Eccl 12:8

So, whether we turn to modern comedy, the Bible, or even our own experience, we know that the pursuit of happiness, apart from an overriding purpose in our life, will bring us to the opposite of what we pursue.

Commands to “Love God,” and “Love our neighbor,” concentrate our life on something bigger than ourselves. This outward focus brings not only meaning to our lives, but also to the place of money and happiness in our lives.

Happiness and Money Research Findings

But can we increase our happiness even if we don’t have an overriding purpose in life?  Sure, in the short run, it’s been widely studied and documented that by using our money wisely, we can ramp up happiness in small ways. Maximizing short term happiness is not the ultimate “good life” we should aspire to. We’ll get to the “good life” in the last section, but the relationship between money and happiness is also worth a look.

We all love to be happy! And that’s not wrong as far as it goes.  In fact, I think that’s why there has been so much effort by economists and psychologists recently in studying the relationship between you, your money and happiness. If there are things we can change in the way we use money to enhance our life, we should benefit from this research. Let’s look at some examples of these insights:

1. Refuse to compare your wealth with the perceived wealth of your neighbor. Happiness guru’s have found that when we see our neighbor driving a new car, we assume it shows she’s making more money than us and it can breed discontentment, envy and unhappiness. The realty may be that she borrowed to buy that car and is robbing her future self by prioritizing instant gratification. But the point is, you punish your own happiness when you compare your life’s perceived shortcomings to your neighbor.
2. Shorten the time you spend commuting to work. Even the most level headed among us are capable of extreme frustration at the unknown driver ahead of us doing stupid things or inevitable delays that we can’t control. Commute time is highly correlated with unhappiness. Walking from my bedroom to my office is definitely a plus these days for me! COVID’s impact on requiring more people to work from home has been an unexpected silver lining of happiness.
3. Pay others to do things you don’t enjoy. Some DIY advocates love the joy of spending hours learning something new that others make a career out of. However, for those things that you don’t enjoy doing, try to find the money to pay a professional to do it. Research shows your happiness level will improve as you unburden yourself of high stress DIY projects.
4. Give generously. I love to cut a check to my favorite charities. It’s well documented that those who practice gratitude and express it by giving back to others less fortunate than themselves are also happier.  

I could probably list 20 more money and happiness findings. Maybe I’ll do that in a later blog. But the larger point today is that these techniques are all just Band-Aids on a cancer if we don’t have an overriding sense of a calling to service to others in our lives.

The Virtuous Cycle of Meaningful Work (Purpose), Money and Happiness

I don’t want to oversell this final point.  There will always be times when our life purpose does not connect to happiness. For example, I doubt those storming the beaches of Omaha to free Europe from Nazi tyranny would ever use the word happiness in connection with that meaningful work.

No, those extraordinary times when we are called on to give up our temporal happiness to achieve a higher purpose are real and important. I don’t want to overreach on the point of this blog post because sacrifice for others may bring short term pain, not happiness.

However, in normal times, I have seen that being engaged in purposeful work is a not only a predictor of a happy life, but also a powerful motivator to a disciplined budget. George Kinder is a financial planner who wrote about how important it is to ask clients purposeful questions before starting on a financial plan.

Kinder’s method asks show stopping questions like, “if you just found out you only have 24 hours to live, what regrets will you have?” By identifying core desires in life, he found it easier to develop a financial plan that clients passionately believed in because it was connected to more than growing net worth. It was connected to their life purposes. Cutting excess spending is not as hard if connected to a life purpose. Suddenly fiscal discipline is not a bad word when it is a part of living a more meaningful life.

Working hard at something we are passionate about and that we believe is a purpose for our existence is shown by the happiness researchers to bring great pleasure. Is anything more intuitive than that? We find a calling that we enjoy. We invest in that calling to be good at it so we can serve others. We eliminate things in our budget that prevent us from achieving our goal. And we find all the sacrifice we made was worth it when we are rewarded for our work monetarily and in finding we are happy because our work is benefiting others. It is indeed a virtuous cycle!