There is no direct answer to the question in the title. If your money would make you happy would depend on the kind of money you make. What kinds of money is there?

Did you know that money is of two kinds? I will tell you. This is my theory and this is how I look at money. There is a certain kind of money I do not enjoy and even you do not enjoy it, but you don’t know that there is a different kind of money and if you figure out how to make that, your life will take an altogether different meaning.

There are essentially two kinds.

1. Mercenary money

Mercenary money acts as the purpose of the activity and the only purpose. People who are mercenaries have essentially nothing else to motivate them in life, besides money. Whatever they do, they do it for money. They have no mission or purpose.

The problem with this kind of currency is that it doesn’t satisfy you inside. You may make a lot but you will not feel good about yourself. After sometime, when you have enjoyed the benefits that mercenary money accords to your life, you will realize that mercenary money is not really worth it.

When people work only for the cash, consciously and unconsciously, they are doing themselves a massive disservice. The problem with the society is it sucks life and makes people who are making mercenary life respectable.

People who buy one thing to another to catch up with the Joneses become a part of their problem. There are a lot of problems with mercenary money.

A. It makes you feel that it is the purpose of life

Mercenary money brings your mind to the illusion that money by itself is the purpose of life and then your life starts revolving around it. Our lives revolve around whatever we think is the purpose of life. If we think money is the purpose of life, we do everything to make more money and hoard. Countless millions of people around the world are dying homeless and hungry in a world which is driven by money and people hoard money for generations of their progeny.

B. It makes the world a rather superficial place

Mercenary money makes the world a superficial place. What we need as human beings is not superficiality but depth. In order to build depth, we need purpose, meaning and understanding of why we do what we do. Unfortunately, the problem with a mercenary based society is that it takes away the depth makes us rather a superficial set of people.

C. It makes you compete with everyone else

Since money is a tangible measure which leads to other tangible good like houses and cars, the run for it makes you compete with everyone else who is only running after money as well. It is an endless race which is rightfully called the rat race. A rat race is a meaningless race where everybody runs against each other to find nothing really significant at the end of the race.

The winner of the rat race gets emptiness in reward.

D. It makes you blind to your inner world

When you are focused on making money as the key objective in life, it makes you blind to your inner world, and you only focus on the exterior. You stop caring how you feel inside since feeding the externalities of life becomes your true objective and start living a life trying to impress other people who are trying to impress you. You don’t pay attention to how you feel and rather use pretense to tell yourself and others that all this materialism is making you happy, when it isn’t.

E. You forget that money is a means to an end and not the end

This is one of the most important distinctions one needs to understand about money that money is a tool for life. It is not the end to life. The end is meaning, joy and happiness and money is one of the tools to achieve that end. Money is like a tool just like other tools for life.

However, it may be the most important tool since you can buy other tools with it.

F. It takes you away from your happiness

Mercenary life takes you away from your happiness rather than close to it. It makes you feel that you can buy happiness, when you can’t really buy it. You can buy a house, but you can’t buy relationships. You can buy things, but you can’t buy love. Mercenary money can’t buy love or happiness and so it takes you away from things you should really care about.

G. It makes you a prisoner

Mercenary money makes you a prisoner of itself. It makes you stuck in the rat race and thereby preventing you from doing the things that truly matter to your life. You become a prisoner of the comforts it buys and you feel that that is what life is about.

To conclude this section, mercenary money is vicious and takes your life in the wrong direction. Unfortunately, most of the world is headed in the wrong direction, and you don’t want to be one of them. You want to make the right kind of money, which is missionary or passion money.

2. Passion or missionary money

What’s passion money for fuck’s sake? Okay, this kind of money is the outcome of self-awareness, of passion.

To arrive at your passion or your mission in life, you need to make a conscious effort to understand yourself. You need to understand your strengths and weakness, your desires, your unique gifts to be able to make passion money. Not even 10% of the world makes passion money and that’s why most of the world is a miserable place.

Here are a few reasons why you should consider making passion money.

I. Work doesn’t seem like work

Imagine you get up in the morning and you feel excited to work. What a beautiful world would that be? You look forward to work life since you do something that turns you on. Work doesn’t feel like work anymore but rather it feels like play. You look forward to it, since you enjoy it and want to do it. In fact, you love it so much that you can’t not do the work that you love so much.

II. Your time will take a different meaning

You will not hate Mondays anymore and look forward to all days of the week since you enjoy what you do, and weekends are another useful break from the schedule that you enjoy. Your time would take a different meaning since you would be moving from one state of happiness and pleasure to another.

III. You will find meaning in your work

When you make passion money, it is an output from it and you do it because you think it is meaningful work, which makes the world a better place in a small or a large way. You find meaning in your work and it doesn’t seem empty anymore, like it used to, when you worked only for the cash.

IV. You would want to make money to use it in your purpose

Money is not a good or a bad thing. It is a tool and the usefulness or the uselessness of money is determined by how you use it. When you make passion money, you would want to use it as fuel for your purpose. People who make passion cash are driven by purpose.

V. You will make the world a better place

Passionate people make the world a better place. Just look around your heroes. They entrepreneurs, the writers, the comedians. They are all passionate people who do stuff they love, and make the world a little better than they found it. Wouldn’t you want to do it as well?

VI. Less passion money would make you happier than more mercenary money

In the beginning, when you start your attempts to make passion money, you will not make a lot of it. It takes time, passion, consistency and persistence to turn your passion into a vocation so that you can make some off it.

But, as someone who has experienced it, I guarantee that you would find more joy in money that you make doing something that you love than the money you made without any emotional attachment, even if there is less of it.

It just feels amazing to know that you could just do something that you enjoy naturally and make some income off it. The thought itself makes you a better and a happier person. It frees you from the shackles of painful and monotonous work.

Most people do not try to find their passion and follow it because they are not willing to invest the effort it takes to do the work. It is not easy to make your passion your vocation, but it is definitely worth the effort.

VII. You would enjoy the things you buy with passion way more than those bought with mercenary work

Why is that so? When you buy things with passion , you have already taken care of your inner world. You don’t feel miserable inside and hence you are not buying things to cover up for the misery inside. Anything you buy with passion would make you happier because you know that you made that with work that doesn’t even feel like work.

VIII. You would not be driven by materialism

You have already rejected the idea of mercenary life and hence money by itself wouldn’t drive you. Rather, you would be driven by things that are way deeper than a life driven by mindless materialism.

IX. You would be happy

Like I say all the time, happiness lives inside of you. When you make passion money, you would be driven by yourself, your strengths, your sense of purpose and meaning. It would make life a different and a deeper experience for you than for people who live for it and live a mercenary existence. Since I can’t give you a better reason than your happiness, this is where making passion money would lead to- your joy.

To conclude, I would urge you to find your passion, no matter what your stage of life is. I would urge you to understand yourself and spend time in introspection and self-reflection. When you do that, you would find your passion and your purpose. Once you find those, you can start moving in that direction. It’s a different kind of a life waiting for you. A life where money is only a tool to make the world a better place and not the destination. A life where your days have joy because you do work that you enjoy and are passionate about.

So, stop making mercenary cash. Move in the direction of passion, of love, of meaning and of happiness. When you make money doing what you love, that money is way more valuable than mercenary money because it brings joy, meaning and happiness to your life. It takes away the pain of work and makes work worthy and enjoyable. Wouldn’t you want that?

Thank you for reading.

The purpose of this blog to help you find your happiness. Please read the other posts on the blog, and follow so that you get updates when new posts are published. Please share any posts you like with your friends so that they can also find their happiness. If you have any feedback for me, please leave it in the comments and I would be happy to work on it. If you would like to support my writing and this blog, you may please send a donation through PayPal here.

I appreciate the time you spent in reading the blog and wish you happiness.

Love,

Amarvani