Money doesn’t buy happiness. It fleetingly produces amnesia, and acts as an anesthetic. When everything seems to be going wrong, if you are lucky enough to have some, you can use it to overcompensate. It is the morphine of distraction.

Nice place, fancy clothes, pretty baubles, and decadent dinners every other night. How many bottles of champagne did you have last month? Happy yet?

Money doesn’t fix things. When you have made a mess of everything money is the band aid on a machete wound. Maybe those people who have exorbitant amounts know how to use it properly. Maybe there is a trick. Maybe you are just tricking yourself.

So you have your kids in the best schools, and have the best baby sitters. They are well fed and nicely dressed. Except they are too young to care, and just like the kittens you brought home, all these things are more for you than them.

But money makes it all seem sorted out. You can’t buy happiness or fix your messes, but you can purchase the proper shams to cover it all up. Window tintings that reflect back what you want people to see along with a massive hand crafted Persian rug to sweep all the leftovers under.

And ta-da! The perfect home, happy children, great career, beauty, elegance, ultimate success. All yours for the low, low price of the inner workings of your soul.

Happy yet? If not, then just go on another vacation. It is within budget, and you have had only, what, five in the last two months? Isn’t that what money is for? To get (run) away for a few days? Then you will have happy vacation pictures to post online. Keep up those appearances.

Besides, that is why you work eighty hour weeks. It keeps you busy and buys all the happiness you could ever want in whatever spare time you may have left.

But there is a catch. While you are running around like a crazed lunatic you are actually accomplishing things. Money couldn’t buy any of it, but they are yours, and no one can take them away. Those are the little rewards you cherish in private. Too special to put on display, but rather quiet, happy victories that no one except you cares about. The little things that keep you going so you can continue performing a maddening never ending play with endless costume changes and elaborate props, fully funded with your own blood. But still, those tiny joys exist even in all the chaos. Happy now? Maybe.