Name the one thing that, if you could get it tomorrow, would make you totally happy. If you’re at all like me, you probably had no trouble thinking of something. Or, actually, if you had a problem, it was limiting yourself to just one thing. And therein lies the key, actually, to our unhappiness. Somewhere along the line, we bought into the idea that if we could only get a little more we’d be happy. A little more money, a little more vacation time, a little better car or house, a little better job, a fancy new gadget… any of these things – depending on who you are – will make you happy. But it’s a lie. A lie constructed by our...

The relationship between money and happiness isn’t a new topic for this blog and its readers. We’ve discussed before the relationship between happiness, money, and memory and, in particular, our inability to predict what will make us happy because of the fragility of memory. We’ve explored the peculiar power of our cultural narrative that having more stuff makes us happy when, in fact, what we need and want so much more than “more stuff” is time enjoy what we have. And we’ve seen how money can, in fact, make you happy when you spend it on others. In this vein, I recently came across a brilliant little video that summarizes a lot...

The following video shares a portion of an audio interview with the late philosopher Alan Watts that is set creatively to a variety of images. In it he invites us to take seriously a very interesting and, I think, important question: “what would you do with your life if money was no object?” When he starts it seems like a nice question to ask. Like, “wouldn’t it be nice if this were the case.” As he moves on, observing that we can easily end up spending lots of our time on things we don’t enjoy, it becomes an important question. And then when he imagines the way we are teaching our children to choose things they despise by...

One of the things we lose from an insatiable desire for more is time. Or, more specifically, time for rest. As I mentioned in last week’s post on the same subject, and as crazy as it may now seem, early proponents of capitalism imagined that eventually we would become so efficient that the demand for our work would shrink and our leisure time (understood as time devoted to pursuing culturally enriching tasks) would grow. A recent study from UCLA, and as reported in the Boston Globe, indicates that’s far from the reality most U.S. households experience. In their book Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century, the researchers describe their...

I’ve been reading a fascinating book of late by just this title: How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert and Edward Skidelsky. This team of a father who is a political economist and son who is a philosopher has shed some very helpful light on my questions about money, happiness, and the Christian life. While I’m only about a third of the way through the book, one very interesting discovery for me has been to learn that the first proponents of capitalism actually viewed it not as the salvation of humankind but as a necessary evil to be endured until humanity evolved. I found this incredibly interesting, particularly given...

Michael Norton holds a Ph.D. in psychology and puts his training to work while teaching at the Harvard Business School. In this fascinating TEDTalk, he shares with us a variety of experiments that convinced him and his team that you can, in fact, buy happiness. But only when spending your money on others! What I found rather astounding about this was not, actually, Michael’s conclusion. I’ve experienced that before and so, I bet, have you: the great feeling that comes from buying someone a gift, however small, or making a donation to an organization that will make a difference in someone’s life. When my kids and I...

Earlier this spring I read, and very much enjoyed, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. Despite what the title might sound like, it’s not a self-help book. And, to tell you the truth, it’s not really about happiness. It’s actually about what makes us unhappy. In particular, it’s about why we are often so poor at predicting what will make us happy. The answer, it turns out, has a lot to do with our memories and, especially, the fragile, even malleable nature of our memories. I don’t know about you, but I tend to think of memory as something akin to a video camera, silently recording all of our experiences. It might be hard to...

Near the end of July I’ll be participating as one of nine keynote speakers at a conference called “Rethinking Stewardship” at Luther Seminary. I’ll be joining the likes of Chris Farrell (of Minnesota Public Radio and APM’s Marketplace Money) and Nathan Dungan (of Share, Save, Spend) to talk about new approaches to stewardship. Our understanding of stewardship is that it’s not simply asking people for money but helping them relate to money in light of their faith – something almost every Christian I know has stated as a desire. How, that is, does our faith in Christ inform our lives as economic as well as spiritual beings? How...