Money And Happiness Don't Always Go Together

Imma Puig has a degree in Clinical Psychology and is a teacher in the Human Resources department of the IESE business school. However, her real claim to fame is that she has been managing the egos of the Barcelona Football Club players for the last 15 years.

She has something quite interesting to say about it. Despite their fat pay checks, she says, they go through the same emotional ups and downs as we do. Money and happiness don’t always go together.

In her time working with players like Iniesta, Messi and Suarez, she’s been surrounded by people who earn in a year what the rest of us mortals will not earn in a lifetime. She has come to realize that our bank balance doesn’t help at all with how we manage our emotions.

To see just how much is happening to people in their relationships, you have to get to know them. And that job is like climbing a mountain. There are two paths: a long easy one, and a shorter more difficult one.

Jealousy, envy, anger, and sadness affect both the rich and the poor. We have to understand personal relationships, emotional control and progress if we want to figure this out.

Money and happiness don’t always go together

We live in a society where there are perhaps too many people who are always doing “amazing”. We love projecting an artificial image of ourselves that defies all emotional logic. It is virtually impossible that we’ll be wonderfully successful in money, beauty, health and love all at the same time. False happiness is the saddest thing there is. The link between money and happiness is often a myth.

Many people go to therapy because they still feel sad even though everything is going well. They feel a void in their lives and they just don’t know why or what it stems from. Many of these people are unaware that sadness is a part of our lives. It has survived centuries of evolution because it has an important job.

On the other hand, there are people who don’t have a perfect life by anybody’s standards. Nor do they have very much in their bank account. Yet they don’t feel that void that the others speak of.

There is no one on earth, no matter how much money they have, who can always be happy and completely free of problems. It is often the other way around. The more money you have, the more problems it gives you.

In this sense, perhaps true success consists of achieving what you really desire, and happiness in desiring what we want to achieve. Again, the link between money and happiness is a tenuous one.

Feelings aren’t linked to our bank balance

Make no mistake, having a bit of money in the bank can certainly help. But the truth is that most human beings would prefer love over money any day, as long as all their basic needs are met. Money and happiness? More like money or happiness in many cases.

There are people who always seem to be living on the crest of the wave. We admire these successful people. Yet they go through the same difficult situations, like the loss of a loved one, as those who aren’t doing so well in life. Successful people can also be sad, lonely, discouraged and even depressed.

We can’t link our feelings to our bank balance. Just like we can’t link money and happiness. All it takes is watching people who have amassed great fortunes to see that money doesn’t protect anybody from psychological or relationship problems. In fact, the number of celebrities with big problems is very high.

It’s easier to see that idea that fame and money bring happiness is questionable when we look at just how many well-known celebrities have had depression or other disorders. In this respect, having a bank balance many of us would dream of doesn’t mean that they have emotional balance. In many cases it is even the complete opposite: total emotional instability. As we can clearly see, our feelings aren’t linked to our bank balances.