[Who Am I] Money Is Happiness: A Podcast

 In humanities class, we have been talking about what we believe in. We have read about philosophers from Democritus and Plato, as well as many others. We talked to family members about what they believe in, and how that has impacted them in their lives. All of this has lead up to us making a podcast where we talk about what we believe in. Not to spoil too much, mine is about how money is happiness and how that is difficult to change. 

Lucas Hineline · Memo Voice 2f

Script:

Have you ever heard the phrase money can’t buy happiness? Well, I am here to explain why not only can money buy happiness, money is happiness, at least in this society. I would first like to say before I continue, I do not necessarily agree with all of these things that I believe in. I simply believe them to be true, based on what I have seen and past experiences. Now, I believe that money is happiness and ordinary people alone cannot change the world. These might seem like bad things, which of course they are, but I will also show you how there is a silver lining, an upside to all of this chaos. 

    Money is happiness because it is the embodiment of success. Almost no one is content with staying where they are, because they look at something and think “If only I had more money I could have that thing” and so they want and work for more money, and then they want that next thing and the cycle continues. The only way they are content is if they have enough money to do almost anything. Now, I hear you saying, “But all of these billionaires are still buying the next thing and getting more money so the cycle is still continuing” The reason this is wrong is that all of these people aren’t working for their money anymore. They all own trillion-dollar companies and hire people to do the work for them. Aside from a few marketing campaigns, they are not working. They are making more money than they can spend logically. You see these huge donations to charities and scientific research, but they are barely a drop in the bucket for what these people are making. Obviously, they don’t donate their entire fortune away, but that is common sense. They have achieved a point where as long as the industry doesn’t change and make their business obsolete they aren’t doing anything to make money. They hire people to hire other people to run the company and make big marketing decisions and make new products and do anything else the company needs to do. They aren’t doing anything for the thing that makes them their fortune as they have enough money to buy people to do all of that for them. This doesn’t connect with what Plato says, in fact from what we know about him it is completely wrong from his point of view. I disagree with his point though, and here’s why: He would disagree that money is happiness because according to him anything we can sense in any way is simply a reflection of what is truly in the intellect world that is only accessible through your own logic. This, of course, is hypocritical because the only way he was able to have these supposed deep thoughts is by being born into richness and having the wealth to not have to do anything and just be able to philosophically think. 

    This belief comes from the fact that I am at the highest, lower middle class currently and have been around the lower middle class or lower all of my life. They all have the same goal, to work their way out of poverty, or if they’re unable to, have kids who can and then support them in their later years. Money is the greatest motivator, as without it these people could just work enough so they and their families could eat, by gardening or farming or any of the other ways to make food yourself. But they want to not only be living, they want to be living successfully, so they work their whole lives, and have their children continue after their lives, all to get out of their relative poverty. This leads me to my next point.

    You alone, or even the majority of ordinary people, cannot change the world. Unless you have a position of power to influence people and a lot of them, or the right people, the ones in office, nothing you do can change the world. No matter how many times people talk about the shrinking middle class or the lack of large taxes on these billionaires, The amount of news stories, articles, and statistics I see these days about how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer is incredible, moreso as nothing changes. The rich continue to gain money, and the poor struggle to stay afloat as the system isn’t meant for them to succeed. A lot of laws are meant to keep these people in check, but if you’re a judge making an average of $255,000 a year, and someone offers to give you a billion dollars, or about 4000 times your YEARLY paycheck, and pretty much set you for life, in exchange for letting this rich person continue to run amok, most people would take the money. Even if you don’t, and have them lose in the courts, they can bribe so many different people that influence the decision that they can beat the system every single time. This, I think, is something that Plato would agree with. Not because of something he wrote, but by his own experiences, as well as his teacher, Socrates’ experiences. They both were shunned for not believing in the gods and instead trying to figure out how the world works themselves. Socrates was even killed for it. It wasn’t until years after their deaths that people began to realize what they were saying could be true.   

    Another example is climate change. The majority of Americans believe in climate change. But the past four years, it hasn’t mattered! You can do your part, but individual people are not the problem, so they can’t be the solution. The people who really count, the ones in power, in governmental offices, haven’t cared the past four years. In fact, they opted out of the agreements to stop it! And guess what? While other countries have made at least some progress since the Paris Agreement, the US really hasn’t. You may look at some graphs and think “oh the lines are going down” but if you do a little more research, first of all, it’s not nearly at a fast enough rate, and second, some fossil fuels, like natural gas, are going up, negating any improvement in other fuels. 

    This belief comes from my past classes. Almost every year we do a unit on climate change and global warming, but still every year there’s another unit on it. Why is that? Because they aren’t attempting to teach us how to fix it. This is one of the main reasons that I am excited to be at GCE because they are focused on these issues and have better solutions to them.

    So in conclusion, this podcast so far has been pretty disheartening. Money is happiness but the system makes it hard to acquire and keep money and that cannot be changed. But in a lot of ways, these are good things. Money is success and success is the greatest motivator. People grow up in poverty but study hard and get into college to escape and help their families escape. The only way a capitalist system works is if the core truths stay truths. The system is very corrupt, and if there was a clear better option we would have already taken it, but you do have the power to change it. If you really, truly, want to see change in this world, you must acquire a position to change it. You have to work through the ranks and gain an office high enough to where you can create the change you envision. That is the only way this changes. There are a lot of bad things in this world, and if you want to change it you have to work for it. Even if you don’t make your change in a lifetime, or a thousand lifetimes, perhaps you can make a change sometime in the future after you are long dead, like Socrates and Plato. Both of these beliefs I have are very negative. They, I assume, make you feel like you can’t do anything in life and should just give up. But this is how the world, at least what a 14-year-old guy thinks from an objective perspective while still being guided by his past experiences. This of course contributes to my personality, as I’m not as optimistic or completely sure that we will fix this as others, but I do know that from a logical standpoint if the right boxes get checked, we can fix this.