Freedom × Happiness × Greed

I was watching videos on the internet, people talking about happiness on podcasts, saying that money brings happiness and that, if you're still not happy, maybe it's because you don't have a million in your bank account.

I see this as a misconception. A desperate need for attention disguised as certainty. The person speaks forcefully in front of the cameras, enjoying the feeling they provoke in the other listeners who agree with them. But I think that, deep down, there is a mask.

If money brought happiness, the dead would come back to life.

I think that's why coffins don't have drawers.

If money were happiness, why do people fight so much when someone dies over the assets they left behind? It's curious how these fights seem more vicious. They use their liver more than their brain. They forget that there is a proper way to settle things.

I bet someone is going to tell me:

— If money doesn't bring happiness, then give me your money.

But that's not happiness.

It's greed.

And after all, what does money provoke in us for there to be this fixation on calling it happiness?

Perhaps it is precisely our own delusion.

Money is good, yes. I have no problem saying that. The problem is believing that it can buy what isn't for sale.

Money brings responsibility. Many times, it trades simple problems for complicated ones.

People who never spoke to you begin to see you differently. Some come closer. Some show interest. Some start to like you.

But what kind of love is that?

You can buy companionship, attention, comfort. You can even buy a kind of love. But that love comes with a contract, even if the contract isn't written down.

And when the money runs out, you are dismissed.

And we still complain about being dismissed.

We complain about the very rule we intuitively accepted.

Maybe money doesn't buy happiness.

Maybe it buys something much more dangerous:

freedom.

Money buys your time.

It buys the possibility of saying no.

It buys the possibility of choosing where to live, what to do, whom to help, when to stop, when to start again.

You can turn plans into concrete things. You can help people. You can change destinies.

And that is precisely where we begin to confuse freedom with happiness.

Because freedom gives us the feeling that we can control destiny with our own hands.

Money becomes a tool for measuring how much freedom we can have.

And before we realize it, we are no longer trying to be happy.

We are trying to control reality.

One day I saw an influencer saying that, if he had a trillion in his bank account, he would change the world.

I kept thinking about the size of that desire.

How much money does a person need to have before they believe they can change the world?

And the plan would have to be pretty horrifying for someone to believe that a trillion would be enough.

I'd say many people know the story of the God of the Bible: the creator of the heavens and the Earth, of the universe and of life.

And, according to the biblical narrative itself, he tried to change the world more than once.

And yet, the world remained the world.

Then a human being appears before a camera, without much expression or gesture, saying that, with enough money, they will be able to accomplish what even a figure considered divine could not accomplish within that very narrative.

I wish that human being good luck.

Perhaps they still confuse money with wisdom.

Money can buy access to knowledge.

It can buy people who know things.

It can buy laboratories, books, companies, researchers, time.

But it cannot buy wisdom.

And knowledge does not necessarily bring money.

Much less happiness.

Happiness may perhaps lie precisely in the things we fail to notice while they are happening.

It is in what has passed.

In what we feel after it has passed.

In a moment we did not plan.

In a conversation we did not know would be important.

In someone who was there and one day stopped being there.

In an ordinary afternoon that, years later, we realize was one of the best afternoons of our lives.

Happiness doesn't announce when it arrives.

It doesn't send an invitation.

It doesn't accept planning.

And perhaps that is precisely why we try to control it.

We want to schedule even happiness.

We want to know how much money we need, how much success we need, how many people need to admire us, what house we need to have, what car we need to drive.

As if happiness were an equation.

But perhaps it isn't.

Perhaps happiness is what happens while we are busy trying to control life.

So, if at some point you realize that you were happy without having planned to be...

Consider yourself lucky.

Because we can buy freedom.

We can accumulate money.

We can feed greed.

But happiness...

It seems to have the terrible habit of appearing when we're not looking.

We already have a trillionaire in the world.

He makes rockets fly backward.

He builds machines capable of putting people into space.

But he still gets beaten up when he tries to change the world according to his own vision.

Poor soul.

Maybe he has too much money to realize one simple thing:

the world was never for sale.

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