An Empty Box: The Problem of Associating Money with Happiness

We humans are the only species who ask a question as silly as "What is the meaning of life?"

There is no standard answer to this one. Asking a mother, she says the meaning is to raise children. Asking a priest, he says that the meaning is to praise God. Asking an infant, provided it could talk, it would likely say the meaning is to suck on mommy’s breast. The reality is, with so many different answers, combined they give us the only logical answer: that life has no inherent meaning.

Then why do we live on? Animals don’t know the question, so they live on out of their instincts and out of not being able to contemplate the idea of suicide. But we as sentient beings, although heavily driven by our instincts, do make a conscious choice to live on.

If we examine things through this lens, then the answer is clear: we live on because we pursue happiness. Because who would want to live on if there is absolutely no happiness whatsoever in their life. Ah, happiness! Another frame, like meaning, that is an empty box into which you can throw anything. Because happiness means different things to different people. A businessman is happy when he makes a profit, a musician is happy when he makes a good song, a farmer is happy when the yield is abundant.

I trust that very few would disagree if we put things into this frame of examination.

So happiness is why we live, and it is an empty box that can hold any meaning you want it to hold. Now, if you allow me, I would like to take you in a time machine to the beginning of time in the scope of human history. When the human race was born, we were no different than animals; we acted purely based on our instinct, hunting and eating raw food like any other species. That changed when we started forging weapons and tools and finally figured out fire—the technology that made the entire human civilization possible.

Since then, we started to form language and a sense of time to grasp abstract ideas, and we began to become human beings. But remember, we were crawling in the darkness like worms for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years before that point. So, the purity of the human side—our consciousness, which is represented by toolmaking, language, art, and ideas—was at a minimum. The intention, which is the desire driven by a conscious mind, was largely aiming to satisfy what the body needs: nutrition, warmth, shelter, safety, and passing on genes.

To survive that perilous nature for hundreds of thousands of years, we had to build ruthless mechanisms of survival. Our minds developed an insatiable crave for sensory needs and a highly defensive ego, tools designed solely to keep a fragile animal alive in a world of constant threat and scarcity.

Within the tribal structure, the ego evolved as a critical psychological mechanism for individuals to navigate social hierarchy and allocate scarce resources. Your status in the tribe directly dictated whether you ate first or starved, and your ego was the hyper-vigilant software tracking that status. This brutal history trapped us in an evolutionary scarcity mindset loop. In the wild, our ancestors had to operate under the absolute assumption that resources were permanently limited, meaning that any moment of abundance was fleeting and must be aggressively hoarded.

Even today, this ancient ego continues to overrule the human subconscious. The subconscious mind handles our baseline survival, but the loud, protective demands of the ego dominate our everyday impulses, constantly convincing us that we are under threat if we aren't actively climbing the social ladder. These deep-seated mechanisms become deeply problematic the exact moment basic survival needs are no longer a problem.

In primitive society, people craved food and shelter and constantly strove for it. As society progressed, money was invented—not as a psychological fix to fill an emotional void, but as a direct product of human progress. It was a brilliant, neutral tool designed to carry out and scale material production activity, making the logistics of sensory fulfillment vastly more efficient. With its arrival, our biological cravings and eager desires were then naturally and smoothly shifted from raw, physical materials to money itself.

The tragic reality is that humans inherently do not have a built-in mechanism to fight boredom. In the wild, boredom did not exist because the environment constantly forced us to act, run, or hunt. When modern civilization eliminates those physical threats, we are suddenly left with a massive vacuum. Our ancient, insatiable survival drivers—the protective ego and that frantic scarcity loop—are still running on full blast, but with nowhere to go.

To see this psychological blueprint operating at its absolute extreme, we do not need to look downward into poverty, but upward at the modern billionaire. They serve as the perfect living specimens of this biological glitch. Look closely at the faces of the ultra-wealthy plastered across our screens—the hollow eyes, the perpetual tension, the defensive, restless expressions of people who possess everything but enjoy nothing. Despite commanding fortunes that could fund entire nations, they remain hopelessly trapped in an infinite, painful loop of chasing higher net worth and fluctuating stock prices. To the conscious observer, their greed is not a sign of power, but a manifestation of profound misery. They are billionaires precisely because their internal scarcity loop is broken; their survival brain treats a single-digit drop in a stock chart with the same mortal panic that a caveman felt when the winter food supply rotted. Having neutralized every physical threat on Earth, their untamed tribal egos have transformed the global economy into a brutal, high-stakes game just to outrun their own internal boredom.

The absolute truth about money remains unchanged: it is a social technology, a ledger of traded value, completely devoid of emotion, consciousness, or spirit. It was built to trade grain for bronze, not to validate a soul. Yet, our bored and restless survival minds look at this mathematical ledger and project our evolutionary desires directly onto it.

This is where money enters the picture as a dangerous illusion. Because our intentions have historically been tethered to serving our sensory organs and appeasing our tribal ego, any feeling of under-satisfaction gets flagged by our brain as a survival crisis. We look at the empty box of our unthreatened, bored life and assume we need to fill it with material things. Gaining money gives us the tools to indulge our senses and feed our ego, creating a brief flash of relief that we mistake for genuine joy.

But this happiness is entirely false because it is purely purpose-driven. Once you reach the financial goal or buy the object, the survival brain checks it off and immediately demands the next target to stay occupied. It is an endless, exhausting loop of chasing a moving baseline, running from a boredom we were never biologically programmed to handle.

Look closely at the examples we used earlier: the businessman is happy when there is a profit, the musician is happy when there is a good song, and the farmer is happy when there is a good yield. But the profit can turn into a loss, the good song can become completely unpopular, and the yield can completely flop the very next year. This instability is exactly how we know that any happiness built on the fulfillment of intentions is an illusion.

Chasing happiness by fulfilling the scarcity loop is a definitive dead end. Because the loop was forged in a world of physical deprivation, its mechanics are entirely additive—it operates on the permanent, flawed premise that you are always one acquisition away from being complete. When you feed this loop with money or material objects, you are trying to satisfy a biological alarm system that was never designed to be turned off. The scarcity mindset simply resets its baseline after every victory, shifting the goalposts and leaving you with the exact same inner void, only with more expensive distractions. You cannot buy your way out of a psychological mechanism whose very survival depends on never being satisfied.

Here, a critical loophole must be preemptively addressed. One might naturally ask: Does this mean we are supposed to abandon the pursuit of sensory satisfactions and ego entirely and exist in a state of abstinence 100% of the time?

The answer is an absolute no. We cannot escape our biology. We are still animals, we still carry real physical needs, and we must fulfill the core pillars of our earthly existence: we must eat, we must sleep, we need entertainment to appease our senses, and we crave love to rid us of our ultimate loneliness. The objective is not to become a lifeless statue or deny our humanity. The true pivot happens when these baseline needs are met and we are inevitably confronted with that crushing modern vacuum: boredom. In those specific moments of stillness, instead of reacting defensively by jumping back into the cheap, frantic game of chasing endless dopamine hits to stimulate our senses, we must learn to consciously step over into the realm of pure observation, a place that transcends our senses and ego. It is an active choice of redirecting our energy when the survival alarms are no longer necessary.

True, lasting happiness requires learning to tap into this state.

This concept of pure observation lies at the absolute heart of ancient Taoism. Long before modern psychology mapped the traps of the consumer mind, Lao Tzu explicitly detailed the futility of overstimulating our survival instincts. In Chapter 12 of the Tao Te Ching, he wrote:

"The five colors blind the eye. The five tones deafen the ear. The five flavors dull the mouth. Racing and hunting madden the mind. Precious goods lead one astray."

Lao Tzu saw that chasing endless material wealth and sensory gratification doesn't fulfill consciousness; it overloads it, driving the mind into madness. His solution was simple: the sage attends to the inner belly—our baseline, necessary essence—and rejects the superficial demands of the eyes.

To practice this inward turning, Taoist philosophy developed a meditative state known as Zuowang (坐忘), or "sitting and forgetting." Zuowang is the deliberate act of letting go of body awareness, shedding societal conditioning, and forgetting the artificial boundaries of the ego. It is the practice of completely emptying the mind until nothing remains but the clean, silent ledger of awareness itself.

The profound beauty of this perspective is perfectly captured in the most famous parable from the philosopher Zhuangzi: the dream of the butterfly. Zhuangzi tells a story of how he once fell asleep and dreamed he was a butterfly, flitting and fluttering about from flower to flower, completely happy doing as he pleased, entirely unaware that he was a man named Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly, he awoke and found himself solid, unmistakable, and human again. But he was left with a radical question: was he a man who had just dreamed he was a butterfly, or was he a butterfly currently dreaming that it was a man?

Between a man and a butterfly, the ego demands a rigid line, a definitive definition of status, ownership, and reality. But through pure observation, Zhuangzi effortlessly dissolves the barrier. He realizes that both the man chasing financial targets and the butterfly flitting through the air are merely passing transformations of a single, unified reality.

When you look at your life through this Taoist lens, you stop trying to fill the "empty box" of happiness with achievements or possessions. You realize that the businessman's loss, the musician's unpopular song, and the farmer's failed yield are just passing weather patterns in a grander transformation of things. By stepping into the role of the silent witness—sitting, forgetting, and watching the dream unfold—you realize you are not the actor frantically trying to buy a better script. You are the awareness behind it all, resting in a quiet, unattached freedom that money can neither measure nor buy.