Can't Buy Happiness

When I first got married, my wife was still attending BYU. I was working 30 hours a week for a marketing research company, playing househusband (For those nine months, I did most of the housework), reading a lot, and lying around the house a lot. 

I didn’t mind being poor one bit. Just six months out of my Guatemalan mission, I felt like I was living in the lap of luxury in our scantily furnished, one-bedroom apartment. In actuality, our furnishings consisted of a small, beaten-up dining room table, an equally small dresser, a futon (our bed) that I had acquired as a teenager, and a half dozen plastic patio chairs. The bathroom was barely large enough to contain one person, and the kitchen was literally a converted closet, and I’m not referring to a walk-in. Take one step into the kitchen and to the left was the smallest gas oven I have ever seen, to the right was a mini-fridge, and straight ahead were a cabinet and a kitchen sink. You could literally access any location in the kitchen without moving your feet and without bending over. 

Looking back now, I’m sure that we would have been happy in any situation in our newlywed bliss. I’ve frequently reflected on that time since then. We didn’t have a television and still didn’t want one. We didn’t have much of anything, but we did have each other and a complete devotion to one another’s happiness. And we were happy, happier than we had ever been in our lives. These days, we often have our hearts set too much on the things of this world. We are still happy, but any true happiness that we feel doesn’t come from the things that we have but still from one another. It just goes to show that you can’t buy happiness. I’m not saying that money doesn’t make things easier or that the lack thereof doesn’t make things much more difficult. I’m just saying that while it’s necessary to function from day to day, the minute it becomes the goal of our existence, we will no longer be happy.