Money and Wealth are tricky customers

 Hi little one,

I know I stopped writing for quite sometime, but that was partly due to work and partly due to your old man being lazy. I hope you grow up to be industrious unlike your Slacker No1 dad here. 

Today, I wanted to write about a very interesting and nuanced part of our lives - wealth. It has been on my mind for quite sometime and I am gathering my thoughts here. Wealth and the pursuit of it seems to be quite a fundamental goal in our lives once we turn adults. Often, this goal takes precedence over a lot of other things in life - peace, happiness and comfort to name a few. Whether, wealth accumulation or any of these other goals come first is a very personal question. We can think about it in the following angles.

1. A minimum amount of wealth is necessary, always. A safety net is a must and this take precedence over comfort, I would say. 

2. What can wealth get us that would make us happy ?  Many people love wealth for wealth's sake, I do not know how. But what are the things that wealth can get us that would make us truly happy - A home ? A new piece of furniture ? A perfume ? Think about these things before pursuing wealth blindly. 

3. Follow up question - What if those things require an extraordinary amount of wealth ? Well, then let's think about our happiness-it-brings vs wealth curve. On the x axis, plot the amount of money required, which is an objective amount. Now, we need to measure the amount of happiness, that particular thing would give us. To help us in measuring, think about the happiness that known things give us and place it on the y axis, then think about what half and then double the amount of wealth can fetch you and how happy that would make you. This can make our heads clearer about the happiness vs wealth equation.

4. Wealth is an opportunity cost for doing something else.

4. Wealth and time - Wealth is security for the future. A rough estimate of how much you would need is absolutely essential.  

5. Think about how our life would be measure beyond what we own, did we talk well ? Did we dance well ? Did we do something good for people ? These measures are important, because pursuing activities which wealth cannot buy is priceless. Nobody can help you become a better tennis player or a violin player by gifting you a million dollars. 

Yours always,

Dad

P.S - Think of everything which money cannot buy, many of them are priceless and you should have them in your life. 

Did you really forgive ? Do you really want a person to be happy ?

Hi darling,

It has been a few days since I wrote to you. Hope you are happy right now. If not, just remember that hate begets hate. The only way to end hate is love and compassion. It is true not only on a personal level but also between families, communities and even nations. Anyways, we often need to forgive someone, and sometimes it becomes really really hard to do just that. Sometimes, the people aren't even sorry. But, we often need to, for our own good. I just realized something about forgiveness and whether we really forgive someone or not.

Vengeance and hatred towards a person is like holding a burning coal in your hands waiting to throw it at that person. You burn yourself first. This is a remarkable insight from the Buddha. Forgiving the person is the only way to attain peace. I think if we really have forgiven a person and want a person to be happy, we need to answer the following question.

If you could control fate, would you always keep that person happy throughout their lives ?

If we are 100% sure that the answer to the above question is a resounding YES for a person, we truly want that person to be happy. If you are not so sure, then you still hold some grudges against that person. Often, we forgive a person, on the basis that I personally forgive you, but fate will take care of you. This is not complete forgiveness, this is partial forgiveness. You want that person to be hurt to teach him/her a lesson. You may have cooled down your flames of anger, but the hot ash is still there.

The same goes if you really want to know if you REALLY care for a person. Hope, this helps when you are in doubt over someone.

Yours lovingly,
Dad

P.S - For you, it will always be a BIG YES for me. Always :)

The lion is the king of the jungle. But, is it the happiest ?

Hi princess,

Every human being at some point of time in their lives, questions the meaning of happiness. So many brilliant thinkers, philosophers, artists, scientists and poets have constantly engaged with the question of "What it means to be happy? " If you are currently at the same stage, do NOT get anxious. Take a deep breath and read on.

Our modern society unable to comprehend the true meaning of happiness has designed several indirect or proxy ways to measure it. Wealth, fame and power are some of the yardsticks we choose to measure happiness. We are surrounded by advertisements telling us to buy that life insurance to lead a tension free life, to drink that can of coke to feel refreshed, to take a an exotic holiday, to buy that shiny car to experience pure control or even more ridiculously, to buy those elegant sanitation fittings to achieve some kind of harmony in life. All products and services give us temporary happiness and leave us wanting more of it. Although there is some correlation of happiness with these parameters, they do not tell the whole picture.

Wealth has a linear relationship with happiness, in the initial stages. But, after our basic needs as a person in a society are satisfied, I think it increasingly becomes less and less relevant. Fame may elevate our mental image of ourselves to great heights. But, when we come to realize that most of today's "fame" is fake, we see the impermanence of it all. As for power, Spiderman said it best " With great power, comes great responsibility."

We see so many powerful, famous and wealthy people lead unhappy lives, yet we do not learn.  Do not be "forced into happiness" by seeing people get new jobs, getting degrees from the best places, or getting married or having children. There is no single key or definition of happiness, it depends on us and us alone. You define your own happiness.

The lion may be the king of the jungle, but is it the happiest? Maybe we are not lions, but tortoises or owls in the jungle of life. There are happy tortoises and owls and giraffes and so on. You do not need to be a lion to be happy. 

I think whenever, you find questioning the meaning of happiness, do not look at the outside world. Ask yourself, ask inside. The world will give you all kinds of answers which won't make sense to you. But, your mind and your heart know the true answer already.

Yours lovingly,
Dad

P.S - You make me the happiest person on earth. :)