Opinion
Money alone won’t buy happiness, but here’s what can
Paridhi Jain
Money contributorYou can have money, and still not have a good experience of money.
You can have six figures in savings – and still struggle with spending guilt, overthink every purchase, worry about not having enough, and feel frustrated your assets aren’t growing faster.
You can have six figures in investments – and still worry about whether you’ll have enough for retirement, lose sleep over news headlines, and anxiously check your portfolio all the time.
Your bank account doesn’t govern how well-off you feel. You can have lots of money, but still worry about not having enough. Credit: Simon Letch
You can have a six-figure salary – and still feel like you’re not getting ahead fast enough, like you should be further ahead, compare yourself with people earning more.
This is the bit we usually miss in conversations about money.
The dominant focus tends to be: what are the practical tactics, strategies, tools, systems that will let you acquire, grow, hold on to more money.
The default assumption is – “more” will fix it. You just need more, then you’ll feel the way you want to feel – happy, relaxed, successful, confident, secure, free.
So, you put your head down, focus on the future goal, and keep hustling – telling yourself your current dissatisfaction is just the price you have to pay for the gold at the end of the rainbow.
On some level, you know it’s an illusion. You see miserable millionaires – and just turn a blind eye. That won’t be me, you tell yourself.
We keep chasing the illusion partly because we don’t know what else to do. We hope fulfillment is around the next corner – maybe with the bigger house, or when we hit ‘financial independence’ and can quit the game. So, we keep postponing fulfillment to a future date.
Here’s the piece of the puzzle you’re missing – having money, and having a good experience of money are two different things.
One is about your financial reality. The other is about your experience of your financial reality. The first takes financial skill; the latter takes emotional skill.
Your bank account doesn’t govern your experience of money – your thoughts about money do. Changing your experience of money requires rewiring the feelings and beliefs you have about money to create a new mental and emotional relationship to it.
How do you change your experience of money?
The first – and the hardest step – is to start creating space between your money, and your experience of it. We tend to assume that our experience of money is being caused by the external financial reality. We think – “I’m stressed because I don’t have the money I want, and therefore if I had money, I wouldn’t be stressed.” However, it’s helpful to start viewing these two things as separate events that are happening: “This is happening, and this is how I feel.”
This tiny space between the external circumstance and your internal response, is where your power to change your experience of money lives. This space enables you to start a process of enquiry: Why am I feeling this way? Where did I first learn to feel this way about this? Is there an alternative response or way of feeling about this circumstance?
What does this look like in practice?
I know. Easier said than done. This sounds like a cop-out that seems divorced from reality. It’s kind of hard to ‘create space’ when your investments have halved in value during a recession.
But if it helps – I’ve tried it. And it works.
I remember deciding I no longer wanted annoyance to be my dominant experience of paying taxes. I noticed the emotional response. I enquired where it came from and noticed all the messages I’d absorbed that told me that paying tax was something to resent. I rewrote the narrative towards one that shifted my experience to acceptance, not annoyance. The financial reality – my payment of taxes – didn’t change as much as my experience of it did.
I remember deciding I no longer wanted guilt to be my dominant experience of spending money. I noticed my emotional response every time I spent. I enquired where it came from, and noticed all the narratives I’d absorbed that told me spending money was something to avoid, eliminate, restrict. I changed my narrative towards one that shifted my experience to enjoyment not guilt. The financial reality – my spending – didn’t change, but my experience of it did.
You don’t just want ‘more money’. You also want a different experience of money.
That feeling of freedom? That feeling of safety? That conviction to make bold moves? Those things don’t come from having money. They come from changing your experience of money.
This is the key to not just having wealth, but feeling wealthy.
One is about your external reality, the other is about your internal reality. And when both match? That’s when wealth stops just being numbers...and starts feeling like freedom.
Paridhi Jain is founder of SkilledSmart, which helps adults learn to manage, save and invest money through financial education courses and classes.
- Advice given in this article is general in nature and not intended to influence readers’ decisions about investing or financial products. They should always seek their own professional advice that takes into account their own personal circumstances before making any financial decisions.
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