Walking back from the cafeteria today, feeling bad that I just paid $7 for an overpriced sandwich and feeling poor, I started thinking about why that’s made me feel this way. I thought back to a blog entry by Ben Casnocha I read this morning where he links to Andrew Sullivan’s This I Believe: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness essay on NPR. In it, Andrew says:
I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; […]
It occurs to me that while I’m not tremendously wealthy in monetary terms, I think I’ve figured out how to make money. While I often struggle to pay bills, I’ve always been able to make enough to never have to “go without” the essentials, and even many luxuries by common standards. What I’ve never really spent much time doing is figuring out how to enjoy money. I don’t mean spending it — trust me, I think I’ve got that one mastered, too. But, I mean, how to spend it so that I feel good about it, not badly about it like I did just a few minutes ago. Since I’m new to this, I really don’t have much to say about it, but I know everything starts with mindset. So, I’m going to start changing mine.
This might be an overpriced sandwich, but it’s the best overpriced $7 sandwich I’ve ever had.
Tags:
money,
food,
happiness,
paradigm shifts
Programmer, husband, father, singer, guitarist, tinkerer, reverse engineer, strange, and living in New Jersey. 
You paid $7.00 for a sandwich. O do hopeit was the best sandwich ever. The next timemy wife complaons about something I bought I’ll tell her she has to learn to enjoy spending money.
Can money buy happiness? I don’t think so because happiness is not for sale in the first place. Money is something we have to manage it with discipline or it goes out of bounds. It is like our ego, money has turned to be the self centered priority of our lives and has consumed almost every activity that we no longer have time for our love ones. Japanese executives are so workaholic that they spend 18 hours a day to attend to their business and barely have time for their families. Others would say money is like sex if you have it you seem to take it for granted but if you don’t have you crave for it. Happiness on the other hand refers to the inner psyche of a person -it means having self-esteem otherwise his level of happiness wanes. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for self-realization and actualization are applicable when a layman seeks for happiness. The more he is respected and has self-conquered himself the more he becomes happy. Benjamin Franklin once said Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it makes one. However, I fully believe that God wants us to be happy, abundant and rich because he himself is abundant, he created the universe, the stars, the solar systems and the earth so it is a sin to become poor because it is the absence of abundance that God wants us to have.