Stop Running the Rat Race! Happiness comes from within

You know when the universe wants to push you to do the things you never wanted to do, she sets your life ablaze. This way you would think the only way out is to succumb to your worst nightmares. So when Liza lay on her bed and recited those positive affirmations to herself, I knew the universe would take her up on her words. And then the universe brought her all the way down to where she was able to make money through other people's pain.

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I know what you're thinking. I should be reminding you how people make financial decisions or investment plans from a place of pain. They would rather be able to take away all their pains by investing today instead of experiencing them tomorrow. But in this case, Liza gave those who were already in pain and had the money to take that away, hope. They were able to delay those pains for as long as they kept taking those drugs.

And for someone who made money through commissions, it meant, every time a patient tried to stifle their pains, she made an extra. All she wanted was respect, money, and reputation as pointed out in different scenes in the movie. It was a win-win situation for everyone in my opinion until the addiction set in.

The addiction started not with Liza but with her boss, Dr. Jack Neel , the founder of Zanna. He wanted more. He suddenly said the numbers they were churning in were too modest and did not signify growth. To gain more, he asked them to persuade the doctors to prescribe their drugs, Lenofen, off the label. The drugs were originally for pain relief for those who suffered from cancer. But now he wanted the medication to be prescribed to everyone whether it was Migraine or whatever it was that caused the next person pain. It brought untold death to patients, even though quite a good number of them were addicted to the instant relief the drugs brought as the results of the fentanyl that was present in them and kept asking for more.

When Liza couldn't deal with the guilt anymore she went to the police. Confessd to everything the company did and mentioned names. Initially, she was supposed to testify in court against her bosses excluding herself from any form of blame. But once it was time, she couldn't do it. She confessed to everything in front of the judge and started her reasons which obviously started with money. Every one of them served terms in prison.

I wanted to talk about something else with this post when I started writing a few paragraphs in the afternoon. But this evening, I got on Twitter and found something remarkable and I decided to spin this from another angle.

You see there was this scene where Liza started questioning what changed with her after she got to the top. She realized nothing changed. She said she felt the same way, even though she thought at that point she should have felt different. It was clear that when people say happiness comes from within, it is the truth. It is simply that happiness doesn't necessarily come from success or money, per se, even though money makes life easier. You will first need to find happiness within you while money helps you break through the limitations that life would have given you if you had no money.

When we keep running the rat race thinking that once we arrive, we will be happy, we shit ourselves because some people who have gotten to the top had found that it wasn't really what they needed to be happy. This is why it might seem as though those who have very little have more happiness than those who have a lot.

I think at this point, using all the movies that Netflix has recommended to us around money and wealth, I know why those who get by with little have more happiness than those who have a lot. Sometimes it's because of how they got there. Some may have cheated their way. Some may have killed someone. Some may have betrayed another. Isn't the wages of sin death according to the scripture? Of course, it is.

So when they do all the bad things to get ahead, they soon find that no matter how much they try to be happy, it eludes them. And before you know they start spreading the message that money doesn't make one happy which of course they will get backslash from those who wish they could have even a glimpse of what they acquired over a lifetime.

Stepping down to Morgan Housel again, I feel, that when we increase our humility and lower our ego, we will be able to make money at the pace that is right for each of us, and then we wouldn't need to always watch our backs or sleep less at night. We will be able to find happiness in the process of building wealth. By so doing, we will be growing in the steam of those joyful moments and there's no way happiness will not tag along as we go. From here, our happiness will translate into our success.

Once this happens, we will no longer make money and spend it on drugs, food, drinks, toys, and every other thing the consumer economy throws at our faces, hoping to find meaning and happiness in them. Instead, we will find meaning in doing meaningful things with our hard-earned currencies.