7 Habits That Allow Money To Buy Happiness
Not directly, but money can lead to some level of happiness.
Wealth and self-help have an unusual relationship with one another that isn’t talked much about. Yes, self-help will bend over backwards to talk about how one can accumulate money. People will throw investment strategies, budget plans, money mindset tips, and so many other things at you.
Some will have the gall to ask for money to get access to those things or an enhanced experience.
But one thing that strikes me as odd is while there are a lot of those kinds of things out there, there is a considerable lack of articles talking about how one can responsibly spend their money or generate happiness from it.
It’s a problem even for those making the big bucks out there by exploiting workers. These billionaires have insane levels of wealth we can only imagine and yet they’re so unhappy and miserable.
Of course having some amount of money in the bank is good to have, but wealth accumulation isn’t the key to happiness nor is it the end goal. It requires a variety of habits that allow you to nurture your wealth and convert it into something that can make your life into something meaningful.
Something more meaningful than number go up.
Gratitude
Whenever it comes to a social standing, this habit usually pops up in these lists. Gratitude plays several roles here since it allows us to feel contentment with our standings while curbing cravings from specific dopamine hits.
This is notable for those looking to build wealth reasonably since it mitigates you falling into the trap that billionaires got themselves into. That being wanting to see the number go up.
But those are the obvious roles.
The biggest role gratitude serves is that it prepares a road map for ourselves. If we’re not finding happiness with building our wealth, we need to find other things to express our gratitude for.
This transitions us from saving up to survive to spending in order to thrive.
The idea isn’t to spend all of your money in one go, but to spend it wisely and in a way that elevates your life further. Gratitude can provide a nice opportunity to that since it gives you the time you need to think things over.
Investing In Experiences
Another pretty obvious one but a reasonable conclusion from gratitude is getting into the habit of investing in experiences. The good thing is regardless of your social standing, you can always do this. The only difference is more money will allow you to do bigger and grander things.
As I’m sure many others who bring up this point will address, the idea isn’t to hop from one big experience to the next but to space them out. You want to be creating memories for these experiences so sharing them with other people makes it more meaningful as well when they are shared with close friends, family, or partner.
Backing Good Causes (Or Creating Your Own)
Philanthropy is another common route that people with money go down. Even though charities, and billionaire philanthropy can often times be sketchy, doing thorough research into finding good causes to support is worth considering.
The other option is to form your own that addresses a specific issue.
One of my uncles was a popular cellist. When he passed away, he created a fund that would offer a full scholarship to a cellist player with budding potential every year.
It’s not much, but I have no doubt that it can make a significant difference in one’s music career. Not only that but it can be easily set up for any cause.
Using It For Growing In Other Areas
When it comes to these kinds of money talks, a lot of the writers will talk about how accumulating wealth will allow you to address bigger money issues. Things like saving for a house or a car or saving it for a rainy day.
But I think that’s too narrow.
Just like money can obviously address those kinds of things, money can be filtered into so many other aspects of our lives. You can use it to learn a new skill or hobby which can enrich your life in many different ways.
You can use money to get into groups and meet new people to form deep connections.
I think this is an area that people don’t do enough of or they don’t lean into it as much. If you have the opportunity to grow in other facets of your life, definitely take advantage of it.
After all, while we can’t be amazing at everything, we can at least be decent at most everything.
Being Financially Literate
One particular avenue you can grow in would be financial literacy. Being familiar with the technical side of money aside from building it up will ensure you can stretch money farther. This is on top of being familiar with the various financial instruments and how they work.
Using It To Be Smarter About How You Work
Hustle culture and wealth accumulation goes hand in hand and as a result a lot of hustle bros creeds tend to be counter productive. Sure, I can see reason to spend some long nights working on a project.
But only in its beginning stages.
Once it’s firmly established, you don’t need to spend several long nights working on it. You’re fine to just let it cook and work on it for a few hours every week.
In the end, when you work to build your wealth legitimately you’ll likely pick up a few work-related quirks that don’t serve you all that well in higher positions.
In a sense, you can use the money you’ve made to buy into things that remove you from work. Spending money dining out or delving into some other activity can help you take your mind off work and more focused on living.
That or you could spend your money on helpful productivity tools that get you to work better than before.
Nurturing And Creating Relationships
Money has a way of bringing us together. On one side it can obviously lead to one exploiting the other for financial gain. Whenever someone wins the lottery, family members of the winner tend to lean into that member to help them address financial woes in some cases.
It can also be used the other way around where someone with a lot of money gets others to help them build up their wealth even more — like a billionaire exploiting their workers.
But in between those circumstances rests more of a synergistic relationship. Where one person lends a helping hand to bring that person up to their level. A sort of meeting halfway type of thing.
An example of this is in Magic: The Gathering. It’s a card game I love, but due to budget issues I can’t always afford the cards I play. So I make printed copies of those cards and explain that I have some of them in there.
Meeting halfway is being tolerant of that.
All in all, it’s a habit that allows people to foster relationships together since it elevates someone to the position where they can do that. Not every person can afford dining out all the time, but you can grow closer to that person if you decide to cover for whatever they buy once in a while.
Similarly, being okay with fake cards in a casual game of Magic allows you to form a deeper connection with the person. As long as said person isn’t proxying thousands of dollars worth of cards that is.
The biggest issue I see when it comes to wealth is we become hoarders of it. It’s addictive to see the number go up and it also instills in us a certain level of comfort and confidence in ourselves.
It simply feels good.
But I know that there is a cut off point. We know that there is a cut off point as we see more rich people being completely out of touch with reality.
We’re at a point where we need money in order to function as a society, but in order for us to thrive we need to change how we spend our money and being mindful about how money affects us. Making small habits like these can help with that so much more I believe.
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