Money can buy happiness

Whoever said “money can’t buy happiness”, must have either misunderstood or didn’t know about the causal relationship. Whether money buys happiness or not it doesn’t buy unhappiness for sure! We must have heard various prejudices since childhood such as “Money isn’t everything or Many poor people are happy and rich are not.” Let’s not be myopic and take a look at the other side of the coin; there are as many rich people who are happy as there are poor and vice-versa. Having said this, it can be safely concluded that happiness doesn’t have to do only with riches otherwise we could find a pattern among so-called happy people of the world.

I hear people say that they don’t want money rather they are looking for happiness. Awww… what’s wrong with the preceding statement? (any GMAT guy around?) It assumes that people can choose either money or happiness but not both which is unlike the way it works in real life. Now if we have 2 options and we are free to choose either 1 or both of them then what we choose depends upon our mindset and various other social influences; Sheena Iyengar would definitely agree to this.

The fact that we can choose both money and happiness is, more often than not, ignored; I believe this is mostly because of the lack of understanding that money is just a symbol of exchange that tends to make life easier. If Joseph Murphy were to comment on this, he’d say there is no virtue in poverty and it’s a disease like any other mental disease. Choose money as a part of balanced life which includes happiness and peace of mind.

Linus Torvalds’ fans might say, “Talk is cheap, show us the proof.” Well a worldwide survey of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries that included questions about happiness and income revealed that life satisfaction certainly does rise with income; also a recent research by National Academy of Sciences says people’s emotional well-being — happiness — increases along with their income up to about $75,000!

There is little wisdom in the old saying cut your coat according to your clothes. The new world would like to get more cloth to have a bigger coat!!

Age is a State of Mind

How do we measure maturity? By number of years we’ve been there or the number and variety of situations we’ve been in?? I believe in the latter but there are people who choose to disagree, not because they don’t understand my point but because they’ve been made to think the other way round. May be they didn’t get the freedom to explore life when it was their turn or may be they just want to play safe! Yea, this gives me another reason to laugh; my mind always rejects the notion of playing safe. Do we ever play safe by not having a kid because pregnancy involves a lot of risk!

What's Your Mental Age?

I’ve seen 24 springs and I still believe that age (maturity) is the state of mind; how else do you expect some young people to remain calm in toughest of the situations and so-called “matured” ones to make mistakes!

When you apply for graduation course, 16 years of education is required;  when you want promotion, there should be minimum number of months at a particular level. How does that matter when you are mentally prepared and intellectually eligible??

Didn’t they say, “It’s all in the mind!” Having said this, I don’t intend to undermine the value of experience. I just want the caliber to be considered by what we’ve done given the opportunity and how much are we able to apply that in different situations rather than in some numbers which makes no sense howsoever.

How old do you feel today!!