A Lesson About Money

Sometimes we have to pay a great price to learn a valuable life lesson. When it comes to money, the lesson could be very costly.

That certainly seems to be the case with formal NBA player David Vaughn, who once lived a life of many people’s dream. But after a few disappointing seasons he lost his passion for basketball, and everything went down the slope from that moment. After living in his car and streets for a year, Vaughn ended up in a hospital from multiple spider bites. Here is a quote from Vaughn in the article that I linked on Delicious.com:

“I went from the pinnacle of having it all, to the pits of having absolutely nothing, and seeing no light at the end of the tunnel,''

Like the author of Ecclesiastes, Vaughn had too many things for himself without knowing the purpose of having all. But when he lost everything, he learned a very valuable lesson: happiness doesn’t come with money.

Another good lesson about money could be learned from lottery winners who lost their fortune. Whenever I see a big sign that says $120 million, I’m tempted to buy (and I sometimes do) a lottery ticket even though I know how depressing the chances are. Just imagining myself being happy with the winning ticket in hand makes me happy, at least until the numbers are drawn. But, for many reasons, many lottery winners testify that the life after winning lottery is not as they dreamed it to be. Many people expect money to solve all of their problems but often, money itself brings more problems.

It is natural for us to envy and desire things that we don’t have. But we shouldn’t let envy to consume our lives because we will never be satisfied. Rich people have problems of their own, and if we can’t be happy with what we have now, we won’t be happy when we have more. The source of dissatisfaction and unhappiness is internal rather than external, and it cost a few million dollars for Vaughn and many lottery winners to learn this lesson. This rather seems counterintuitive because we have been told by the society from very early on in life that material goods make us happy. This argument is well structured because if we find ourselves becoming dissatisfied with something, the society tells us that what we have is not good enough. It will truly be a nightmare for big corporations if people suddenly become satisfied with their lives. But why is it difficult to be happy with what we have? I think we are not satisfied because we adapt to things very quickly and get bored easily. So we look for more things that stimulate us. And that stimulus has to be greater than the previous one otherwise, it won’t work. This stimulus that we get from material goods is quick and easy because it doesn’t require a long commitment or self-sacrifice like friendship does. But such feeling of satisfaction is short-lived and we go back our unhappy state.

Writing about money and happiness reminded me of a quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all 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.”,

and another quote from Ecclesiastes,

“whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income. This too is meaningless.” (Ecclesiastes 5:10).

Money has become a god for many people. And dissatisfaction will continue as long as people believe money will bring salvation from our corrupted state. Real change of heart can only come when our faith in money is replaced by faith in Christ.