Flipping through The Ultimate Book of Randomly Awesome Facts, I stumbled upon the following statistic:
The total amount of money in the world adds up to 60 trillion dollars. That’s a 60 with a whole lot of zeroes!
John D. Rockefeller was the world's first billionaire and, at one point, the world's richest man. Since he was a billionaire in the early 1900s (when a billion was actually worth something), he is still regarded as the wealthiest person in modern history. When a reporter asked him how much money it takes to make a man happy, Rockefeller famously replied, "Just one more dollar."
Michael Norton, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied the connections between happiness and wealth, published the results of an intriguing study. He and his collaborators asked more than 2,000 people who have a net worth of at least $1 million (including many whose wealth far exceeded that threshold) how happy they were on a scale of one to ten, and then how much more money they would need to get to ten.
Norton commented, "Basically, everyone says they'd need two or three times as much to be perfectly happy." Really? A millionaire needs two or three to be perfectly happy? Someone with 10 million “needs” twenty or thirty million?
Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was right when he said wealth is “like seawater: the more you drink, the thirstier you become.”
But lest we sneer at Rockefeller's ingratitude, we'd best inventory our own hearts. Greed and ingratitude are twin sins that find shelter in nearly every crack and crevice of our twisted souls.
In 1Timothy 6:6,7, Paul reminds us, "But godliness actually is a means of great gain when accompanied by contentment. For we have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it, either.”
How much money does it take to make you happy?