money can't buy happiness .........

To begin with, when one says that “money can’t buy happiness”, one means that happiness is by no means dependent on wealth, as it is understood that the word “money”, in this saying, should be read “much money”. Is being rich the necessary and sufficient requirement for happiness, that is the question. Let us ask various pupils from any secondary school about their conception of happiness. They will certainly give very different answers. Some may say “to succeed in life” and others may say “to love and be loved”, implying that they do not build their bliss on financial success. And to those answering “to have a lot of money” we could ask: “how much is a lot?” as it is a well-known fact that earning money drives you to earn even more. Françoise Sagan, the late famous French writer who was richer than most of us, was asked if she had ever been happy. She answered: “I might have, long ago, once or twice.” Is it that, instead of happiness, money and success bring frustration, or is it just that, though indispensable in our consumer society, money has nothing to do with happiness? Strangely enough, though money is an uncountable word, you can quantify what it refers to. A ten-pound note, materially if not psychologically, will be the same sum for a homeless and a millionaire. On the other hand, while you can say “how much money?” you can’t really say “how much happiness?” This means that this notion is both grammatically and philosophically an “unquantifiable factor”. To conclude, we could say that we agree with the afore-mentioned saying, not that, as they will say, happiness is priceless but because it is indefinable and intangible whereas money, despite Stock Market speculation, can be calculated.