"Money Can't Buy Happiness"

That's a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, particularly in the various non-mainstream subcultures I've been involved with. The implication, in those groups, is often that it's somehow weird and even unethical to desire financial stability. (In the more dysfunctional variants, such as among the Mage War Idiots, it was apparently considered completely ethical to mooch off of unenlightened relatives. It's easy to rail against The Man from your mother's basement, after all.)

There is a certain logic to this. Money can't buy happiness, and chasing riches (or even chasing a particularly strict idea of financial stability) seems to be the cause for regret for a lot of people. Too many people cling to jobs they hate so that they can afford the creature comforts that make their default stress level sustainable at all, and it becomes a treadmill they cannot depart. So, certainly I agree that the money-chase often has real costs to the other aspects of a person's life.

I also believe that just because something is new and expensive, that doesn't mean it's necessarily better. For example, I could probably devote an entire post to the issue of kids in foster care being given the newest and most expensive anti-psychotics as first-line drugs, and Medicaid picking up the tab for that. (And I will write that post, if people are interested in reading it.)

What money can do when used appropriately is buy peace of mind, which can create the space for happiness - or at least for contentment and lowered stress levels.

( A few personal examples of this from my own life. )