What Money Can (and Can’t) Do for Happiness
Congratulations are in order! We’ve made it to the end of January! Huzzah!
Every year around this time, I’m convinced hibernating bears have the right idea about how to get through this month: find a warm dark place, surround yourself with food, and nap your way through (waking up occasionally to eat the snacks you packed).
One of these years, I may actually plan ahead for a Grizzly Bear January, because (despite my best intentions) I consistently take the first month of the year at a full sprint. This year has been no exception. Between going full time with the How To Adult School and studying for my CFC this spring, I’ve been burning the midnight oil all month. (Okay fine, the 6pm oil. It’s so dark by then it feels like midnight.)
The upside is I’ve been able to spend many hours mulling over and honing my core ideas about the psychology behind personal finance. The working title for these thoughts is: Musings on Money & Happiness. Today, I want to share another small thesis from that ongoing exploration:
How do we learn to use our money as a TOOL to build a happy life? (Rather than expecting it to spontaneously create happiness on its own.)
In the introductory piece of this series, I wrote about how a baseline of daily happiness comes from having enough money to meet your basic needs. Today I want to look beyond that foundation and discuss how having more money does not inherently create more happiness — even though most of us are deeply conditioned to expect that it will.
Many people reach certain financial milestones and are shocked to discover that very little actually changes. We assume happiness will simply arrive once the number gets big enough without ever stopping to define what it is that makes each of us personally (and uniquely) happy.
If we haven’t done that work, we become very easy to influence. Enter: advertising and social pressure. Society is more than happy to step in and assert what we should be doing with our money to be happy. We spend accordingly; and when that doesn’t work, we spend more on the next thing. When happiness still feels elusive, we reach for a familiar conclusion: I must just need more money.
Rarely do we stop to consider another possibility: that we may already have enough, we’re simply using our money on the wrong things. We’re spending in ways that don’t meaningfully support the life we want to live.
If money is a hammer, most of us are using it like we’re playing a game of whack-a-mole. We’re reactive, chaotic, and wildly impulsive; swinging at whatever problem pops up next. What we actually need to learn is how to use our money the way an artist uses their tools. This time picture your money as the hammer gently tapping a chisel that’s sculpting your unique life. It's thoughtful and precise, while creatively building something beautiful.
If you want to build a life you genuinely enjoy living, this is the practice: learning to use money as a refined tool, rather than a blunt instrument.
Which raises the obvious question. How do you actually learn to do this?
This is where I tend to step slightly off the track of traditional advice. I don’t think this work can be done through dreaming, vision boards, or goal setting alone. This work requires active experimentation. It requires spending real money in your real life, then taking the time to reflect on how those choices actually affected your day-to-day experience. To apply this, you have to start following some version of a monthly expense tracking practice.
The words ‘expense tracking’ can make people tense up (as does anything that conjures visions of spreadsheets), so let me re-frame. I'm not talking about ‘budgeting’. It’s not about restriction, optimization, or efficiency. As it pertains to this concept, think of expense tracking as a personal exploration practice. You try things, you record and observe the results, then you keep what works and discard what doesn’t. Over time you will see patterns start to emerge. These patterns will clarify what you uniquely value spending your money on, not what society tells you to do.
You still plan and set intentions, (heck, I enjoy a good vision board as much as the next person) but you also spend time gathering real information from your own life. You track where your money goes, then reflect on whether those expenses are worth repeating as you continue shaping a life you enjoy waking up to every day. By doing this, you'll slowly start feeling in control, and will come to understand how money is simply a tool available to us in our lives.
The new year is always a good time to try a different approach. Try a few months of expense tracking just to observe and learn about yourself. If it’s helpful, I have a free tracking framework and spreadsheet you can use, no pressure.
For some people, this exercise leads to spending less. For others, it may lead to spending more money, more intentionally. If you stick with it for a while, it will shed some light on how you can craft a life that incorporates more of what makes you happy. It could mean protecting time for weekends hikes. It could mean changing jobs, even if the pay stays the same. It could mean spending more on food that genuinely supports you and your family's health.
There’s no ‘correct’ outcome. What matters about this practice is shifting how you understand money and its relationship to your happiness. In a world that constantly insists you need more (more income, more upgrades, more everything), perhaps the work is simply learning how to use the resources you already have to create something you love every day. Something that feels like your life.
As with everything I write in the Musings on Money & Happiness series, I’d love to hear what this stirred up for you. Feel free to hit reply and share your thoughts.
See you next week!
Cory