How to Buy Happiness With Money

[Laughter] What would you do if you won the lottery? Personally, I'd pay off my debt, quit my job, and move to Japan. It's a fun scenario to think about, even if it's never going to happen. Statistically, you're more likely to give birth to quadruplets or be crushed by a meteor than win the lotto. That is, unless of course you're Evelyn Adams.

In 1985, Adams won a 3.9 million jackpot from the New Jersey State Lottery. Just four months later, she won again, bringing her total payout to 5.4 million—nearly 15 million in today's money. Adams was basically the first person in American history to ever win multiple million dollar prizes. Basically overnight, she went from working in a convenience store to being worth more than some CEOs.

With her newfound wealth, Adams paid off bills, set up a college fund for her daughter, bought a car, and lavished friends and family with gifts. You'd think a story like this would come with a happily ever after finale, which should be very wrong. Soon after winning, Adams noticed her privacy rapidly disappearing. She felt that she couldn't go anywhere without being recognized.

While some people celebrated her good luck, others resented her for it. Still, word came to her asking for money; she put a stop to her plans to go to school and study music, made several bad business deals, and ended up giving away a substantial portion of her wealth. By 2012, she had lost her entire fortune after gambling away the last of it at the casinos in Atlantic City. Today, she lives in a trailer park.

Adams would later say about her experience: "I won the American dream, but I lost it too. It was a very hard fall; it's called Rock Bottom." The story of Evelyn Adams isn't unusual. Multiple lottery winners have found their supposed good luck quickly turned sour as the sudden influx of cash ruined their lives.

I guess the saying is true: money can't buy happiness. Except it isn't scientific; research has demonstrated a positive correlation between wealth and individual happiness. The key, it turns out, is knowing how to use that money to buy happiness and not just having it. But to understand this, we need to answer the question: what is happiness?

You'd think it would be fairly simple to define, but from a psychological perspective, happiness is actually quite complicated. There are hundreds of different neurotransmitters that contribute to our unique understanding of what feels good. Each one plays a specific role and is responsible for a range of different emotional experiences.

But by far the most important of these are dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. Dopamine is strongly tied to our reward center. Serotonin helps us relax. Oxytocin helps us bond and form relationships. Taken together, these three molecules can be called the "Big Happiness Trifecta," a potent chemical cocktail responsible for feelings of excitement, bliss, contentment, and every other positive emotion.

Neurochemistry aside, our subjective interpretations of happiness can roughly be divided into two categories: pleasure and purpose. Pleasure is the short-term, day-to-day happiness that we get from a good meal, spending time with friends, or going for a jog. We might refer to this more simply as "mood." Purpose is the harder to define sense of fulfillment we gain when we feel that our life has meaning.

This delineation goes all the way back to Aristotle, and scientists today still use it as a way of evaluating an individual's overall happiness. There's a significant difference between pleasure and purpose, and just because a person has one doesn't guarantee the other.

Take a new college student, for instance. They may experience frequent daily pleasure in the form of spending time with friends, attending social events, and enjoying a much greater level of personal freedom and independence. Yet this same person may struggle to figure out what exactly they want to do with their life. This causes them stress and contributes to low levels of life satisfaction. Conversely, a successful CEO or entrepreneur can feel that sense of purpose in their work while having low amounts of daily pleasure, the burden of running a massive company weighing on the...