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Money is a complicated subject.

There are people for whom money is really all they need and if they had that then they'd be set. But there's a lot of people where if you gave them a million dollars, they would just be dead within a little while. Some people would just drink or drug themselves to death almost immediately. Some people would take that million dollars and use it unwisely, so even with a million dollars they would eventually just be broke again.

It's like almost anything that people think will make them happy. It might, and for a certain percentage of people it will, but often the thing that everyone thinks is the problem is just one problem of many. Once the one problem is taken care of, suddenly the other problems end up just coming to light.

On the other hand, there are people who earn a million dollars and are just fine. They have great relationships with their family, they're active in their community, they are responsible with their money so they never run out, maybe they go off and find a nice girl and make a nice life for themselves. Maybe they already have.

You see it in a lot of things, where certain people think that if only they can get the one thing then all their problems will go away. A lot of fat people think that if only they'd be skinny, then they'd be happy. But then you meet a bunch of people who get bariatric surgery, and they go from being fat and miserable to being skinny and miserable because they're just miserable people, and afterwards they don't even have being fat too and justify how miserable they are. You made a bunch of people who think that if they can just get a really good job that pays well, all their problems will go away. A lot of those guys have X wives and substance abuse problems because it turns out money doesn't solve all your problems, not by itself.

Sometimes you even see it with people who earn enough money to not be worried about money anymore, and they just kind of stop. Guys with half their lives ahead of them retire and sit down in a chair and that's that... They don't do anything else ever because they have enough money, they have a house around them, they can get the food they need... But if you talk to them you know that they're not happy, because getting the base of your hierarchy of needs taken care of isn't enough.

It even happens to people who are really successful financially, that they retire and they don't know what to do with themselves. There's people who make their entire careers off of helping retiring executives come up with some kind of plan because they got so much stability out of their actual work that once you take that part away the money by itself isn't enough.

But if you have money, and that lets you take care of all of your basics, and then you go out and you work on your relationships with other people and building a community and finding a mission for yourself, at that point the money can't buy happiness, it could be part of the recipe.