Money Isn’t What You’re Missing
Past a certain point, cash isn’t what your life is missing
What I’ve learned after years of studying money and happiness
Every other week, Paul Ollinger investigates how redefining success can help us lead better lives.
In the oft-quoted climax of the 1996 blockbuster Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise stares through teary eyes at Renée Zellweger, the love interest he’d almost let slip through his distracted, metaphorical hands.
His last-chance pitch to win her back: “You complete me.”
This sincere vulnerability captured her heart and five Oscar nominations despite — or perhaps because of — the fact that his revelation perpetuates a prevalent but childish fantasy: that each of us is an incomplete person lacking only a tiny gift from the universe to become our fully realized selves.
I remember watching this scene in the theater and thinking, “What a load of Hollywood fairy tale crap!” Yet in one area of my life, I applied Jerry’s flawed logic. I thought money would complete me.
Ever since I was a boy, I dreamed of being rich. Part of this fixation came from a desire to avoid the financial stress I sensed in my parents as they raised their six children. Another part of me wanted the material things we didn’t have, like a big house, shiny cars, and an Atari 2600. But most of all, I had mistakenly linked wealth to importance, and I believed that money would (cringe) “make me whole.”
Fast forward a couple decades when, as an early employee of Facebook, I earned millions in the company’s initial public offering. Thinking I had it made, I quit my job with no plan. I simply walked away from my career at age 42, figuring, “I’m rich — all my problems are solved!”
I could not have been more wrong. Since then, a big part of my life’s work has been to explore what wealth means, how it changes us, how it leaves us the same. I’m not just talking to millionaires here. This message is for anyone who is breaking their neck trying to earn money at the expense of more meaningful things, like our relationships and good work.
I’m not going to lie: The first three months of my new financial reality were fantastic. I took some great trips, exercised like crazy, and read many of the books that had been gathering dust on my nightstand. Most refreshingly, I lived those 90 days without the constant stress of sales quotas, office politics, and the zero-sum Darwinism of coach-class business travel.
But before long, I found myself feeling, well, lonely. I also developed the nauseating feeling that I had made a colossal mistake. Not only had I walked away from a lucrative job at an exciting company, but I had also detached myself from the brilliant and funny colleagues who had kept me on my toes. Now, instead of working as part of a team to help solve our clients’ problems, I filled my days refining my golf swing and grilling a lot of chicken. Unoccupied and omnipresent, I drove myself — and my wife — nuts.
One thing was certain: Early retirement wasn’t sexy or fulfilling. I didn’t feel important, and I definitely didn’t feel “complete.” I had gotten everything I ever wanted, but I just felt like a rich loser. It was all very confusing.
So I searched for answers. I read dozens of books about wealth and happiness. I sought out wisdom from the Buddha, the Gospel, and The Suze Orman. I eventually synthesized this quest in my now two-year-old podcast, Crazy Money, in which I explore the connection between money and contentment with the top thinkers on the subject.
Some patterns started to emerge. I learned about the hedonic treadmill, which is the process of mental adaptation by which we return to a base state of happiness after an exceptionally “good” event (like winning the lottery) or a very “bad” one (like losing one’s legs in a car accident).
Thinking, “I’m not a lottery winner — I earned my money,” I stumbled upon a Credit Suisse white paper concluding that professionals who stopped working post-windfall are often “blindsided by the resulting dislocation and feelings of loss and sadness and difficulty in finding new, fulfilling work.”
Still, I thought, “I don’t deserve to complain. I’ve got it made, right?”
Then I interviewed the famed financial therapist Brad Klontz, who works with ultra-high net worth clients. I asked him, somewhat facetiously, what billionaires could possibly have to worry about. He chuckled at my sarcasm, reminded me that the super-rich are still human beings, and added, “when you are already wealthy, and you are grappling with your own imperfections, you can’t indulge in the fantasy that money will make everything better.”
Said more simply, money won’t fix you. You have to fix you. And until you disavow yourself of the notion that wealth (or six-pack abs, or Renée Zellweger) will make you feel “complete,” you will be chasing a pipe dream. To be clear, I am not suggesting that money doesn’t matter. It does. Solvency is glorious and a goal to which we should all commit ourselves. But stacking Benjamins up to the ceiling will not change how you feel when you look in the mirror.
It’s comforting to attribute feelings of incompleteness to something we haven’t yet attained. But as long as we do so, we avoid taking responsibility for the shortcomings that keep us from feeling like our best selves.
What most of us are missing isn’t wealth, it’s perspective. It’s the acceptance that “completion” doesn’t arrive when your checking account hits a specific number or when you win another’s heart. Completion arrives when we accept the good things we already have going for us, and when we forgive ourselves for not being perfectly whole in the first place. That doesn’t make for very quotable dialogue in Oscar-winning movies, but it does lead to a much more satisfying life.