There is a link between money and happiness. Since money was invented, it provides about 1% (one percent) of those who live on planet Earth some security to ensure they have less risk of going hungry, getting ill, living in squalor or being oppressed by the one percent above them.

For the rest of people on earth, money is more linked to unhappiness. This is because so long as only the very wealthy have supreme power and security, there must forever be a struggling class to prop them up. Money was invented by people called entrepreneurs, royalty and priests who may as well be called entrapment-teurs. They found creating money consolidated power, and thus control over others.

There is no black or white simple equation about money. However, it can easily be noted that for the first ninety-nine thousand years of Homo sapiens, people got by without it in much more equitable living circumstances. The idea of a resource being owned as property is the one absolute difference in organized, life- sustaining systems, that separates human primates from all other animals. Somehow, dolphins, chimps and even prairie grasses are intelligent enough to have steered clear away from it.

Money came about from barter, which at first was presumably quite straightforward. Take the following example: Mog: “I share hunted meat with you if you share cave and warmth with me.” Zoga: “Okay, I help clean and cook meat if you help protect any resulting offspring from cave-sharing.”

Mog: “Deal.” Zoga: “Deal.”  Oversimplified? Yes, everyone knows Zoga hunted and Mog helped remove bones from the cave, but the point remains. In many such instances, Mog and Zoga lived as happily ever after as ancient, twenty-nine year old geezers were able to live at the time. 

Later, came money. Money as credit is quite an abstract concept. And, it is money as credit and deferred debt which has caused the much lamented financial crisis in the world today. It may even be argued, that fossil fuel consumption wealth has hurt the world. A fossil-fueled economy, a kind of credit using stored carbon energy which built the industrial age and created extraordinary politics and corporate wealth, has affected everyone on Earth. It is responsible for climate change, and thus, much suffering in the world today. The suffering can come in the form of famine, or war or even super storms and floods. It is quite a long way from the easy to comprehend services for services barter exchange of Mog and his lovely wife Zoga.

Cyprus, as of this writing, is in particularly bad shape, but they are of course not the only nation to be suffering as a result of the abstraction called money due to banks, politics and credit. To be completely accurate, this is not the fault of money, but the fault of greed, acceptance of corporate and national carelessness and inattention to the many tendrils of monetary manipulation of the global age.

The link between money and happiness is real. Healthier, better educated and better fed and sheltered people are happier. However, once basic needs have been met, there is very little happiness that money provides in and of itself. Having connections, and a support system understood as the best things in life is what provides true satisfaction. Money, it can be said, offers only the need for more for those who are addicted to the endless enslaving cycle of debt and consumption that consumes the human spirit.

Nature on the other hand, a non-abstraction, provides genetic connection to each living thing and to the living systems and cycles that create living beings. When organisms recognize the bounty and cooperative systems of nature, they find the only true contentment there is to be found in a somewhat soulless world created by the abstraction known as paycheck, money, bread, dough and oddly the phrase “making a living.”

Making a living today consumes entire life-times of punching the clock, especially for those caught on a treadmill of debt who would rather punch the one percent of those for whom money can buy freedom, security and to some extent, even happiness.