It started with level 40 of a game that Mimah and I both play. She had reached it before me, and by then I had caught up with her again. I sent her a screenshot of the level. I had barely paid attention to the words on it. Mimah had.
“Anybody who tells you money can’t buy happiness never had any.”
She asked me what I thought about it. Whether I agreed. I knew almost immediately where the conversation was going. Mimah and I talk about money more often, about our future and about what it will take to eventually build a life together. I answered the way I genuinely feel about it. I do not believe money can buy happiness. Money makes many things easier, it creates possibilities and takes away worries, while happiness itself comes from somewhere else.
Mimah disagreed: “You can’t be happy without money.”
It became the beginning of a long conversation in which we tried to convince each other, asked questions, answered them and kept coming up with new examples. Looking back, what I find at least as beautiful as the subject itself is the way that conversation unfolded. We let each other finish. We listened. We teased each other. We tried to find the weaknesses in each other’s reasoning without trying to bring the other person down. We disagreed and at the same time remained close throughout the entire conversation. At one point I asked her what makes her happy. She said a lot of things make her happy. So I asked whether I make her happy.
Yes.
I thought I had a pretty strong argument there. After all, she had not bought me, and I had not bought her. We loved each other before there was a ring, before there was a wedding and before we had a home together. Love cannot be bought. Peace cannot be bought. Trust cannot be bought. Even Mimah agreed with that. That did not mean she was ready to give in.
Because how do I get to her in Kenya? With a plane ticket.
And how do I get that ticket? By paying for it.
Philosophically, I could still reason my way around that quite easily. A plane ticket does not buy happiness. It buys a seat on a plane. If I fly to Kenya and Mimah no longer loves me when I arrive, that ticket has brought me none of what truly makes me happy. I can buy a ticket, buy a ring, pay for a wedding and buy a beautiful house. I can purchase everything surrounding a life together and still be unable to buy what gives that life its value.
Mimah stood her ground. If we do not have the money to be together, what good is the possibility of being happy together? That is where things became more complicated. Of course we can continue to love each other when we have no money. I even believe we would. Yet imagine that we knew with absolute certainty that we could never meet again simply because the money was not there. She would remain in Kenya and I would remain in the Netherlands. We could call, send messages and see each other through a screen. The love could survive.
The question is whether we would also be happy. There, Mimah has a point I cannot reason away by simply repeating that love is not for sale. Money does not buy our love. Money can buy the possibility of living that love together. That distinction seems small until you consider the reality of the person you are having the conversation with. My relationship with money is different from Mimah’s. I can have very little financial room and still have a roof over my head, food to eat, a refrigerator and a freezer in which I can store that food. My life may become more modest when money is tight. Many things become more difficult. Still, many basic certainties remain. For Mimah, a lack of money has a much more immediate meaning. During our conversation she simply said:
“No money, no food. I’m sad.”
My first instinct was to respond philosophically. Food does not automatically make you happy, does it? If you have money and use it to buy food, that still does not mean you are happy. It is a perfectly tidy line of reasoning when you basically always have food. I have seen poverty up close before. Through Josie and her family in Brazil, I encountered a reality far removed from the Dutch certainties I grew up with. Later, in the Philippines, I saw again through Josephine’s family how different life can be when money constantly defines the boundaries of what is possible. In Kenya, I see those differences again.
I have always believed that I genuinely saw those differences. I still believe I did. Seeing something, however, does not mean understanding every part of it. Years ago, I wrote about another kind of certainty that hit me hard. A Dutch passport gives me a freedom that is anything but self-evident for large parts of the world. I can travel to countries where other people first have to prove that they deserve to be admitted. Not because I am a better person, work harder or have a greater right to freedom. I simply happened to be born with a passport that opens doors.
That experience taught me something about the arrogance with which we can so easily turn our own reality into the norm. And still, years later, the same lesson can return, disguised as a discussion about a sentence in a game. I find that confronting and beautiful at the same time. Because money can’t buy happiness sounds like a wonderful universal truth. I still believe in it. After my conversation with Mimah, I also understand more clearly that such a truth sounds very different when money is not primarily about comfort, choice or luxury, and far more often about food, security and possibility.
We had encountered a similar difference before, during a conversation on the night train from Mombasa to Nairobi. We were talking about entrepreneurship and about whom you are willing to sell something to. For me, entrepreneurship is connected to conviction. I want to know who I am doing business with, and I want to feel comfortable with what someone does with my work. If I do not, I want to be able to say no to the money as well. Mimah looked at it much more practically.
If someone wants to buy and is willing to pay, why would you refuse to sell?
At the time, I mainly saw a difference in entrepreneurial philosophy. Now I also see the luxury hidden inside my own position. Having principles is one thing. Having enough financial space to reject income because of those principles is another. That does not mean principles should depend on the balance in your bank account. It does mean that our circumstances influence the way we look at money.
The same applies to happiness.
For me, money is primarily a means that can make life easier. For Mimah, that same money can much more directly determine which possibilities exist in the first place. That means we can feel the same love and still answer the question of whether money can buy happiness differently. At one point during our conversation, I teasingly asked whether she loved me because of my money.
“Yes,” she replied, laughing. She loved me because I was a tycoon, a millionaire.
That was bad news for her, I told her, because I am neither.
She knew that, of course. And she still loves me. For me, that is precisely the proof of my own conviction. I did not have to buy her love. She did not have to buy mine. We made each other happy before all the material things surrounding a shared life had been arranged. Yet that is also exactly where her answer lies. Love can exist without money. A life together requires means. A plane ticket, a home, food and the ability to actually be together do not appear simply because two people love each other very much.
That is why, after our conversation, I am still not sure whether Mimah and I truly disagree. Money cannot buy what makes us happy. At the same time, a lack of money can prevent us from actually living the happiness we have already found. That makes the quote suddenly far less simple than it seemed when it appeared at level 40.
“Anybody who tells you money can’t buy happiness never had any.”
I still believe that money cannot buy happiness. I would simply be less quick to say those words now to someone who truly knows what it means when money is absent. And the most beautiful part of that discovery is not that Mimah convinced me, or that I convinced her. It is that she noticed one sentence I had barely paid attention to, asked me what I thought about it, and then kept talking, listening, questioning and disagreeing. I am proud of that. Proud of her, proud of us and proud of a conversation in which love proved strong enough to allow disagreement.
Mimah did not take away my conviction, she made it bigger.
