If we look back to the lives of our grandparents and our great grandparents it is obvious that they grew up without much. Many of the things that we have today they could only dream of. Even with not having much they still enjoyed a certain happiness. A certain peace of mind. Both my grandmother, great grandmother, and even my mother grew up without money. My mother had to share a home in the country with eight other siblings, but as I heard countless stories of them growing up I always heard about how happy they were and how much fun they had.

Today in the age of social media and fast living there is so much complaining. “I hate my job!” “I hate this car!” “Why can’t my kid be better at this!” “I wish I had more!” All of this complaining when we live in a world that has everything. Everything at the touch of a button. We have access to any and everything and yet we are unhappy.

How does that work?

Our parents, grand parents, great grand parents grew up with nothing and still found happiness. We have everything and are unhappy.

It has to do with money and priority.

They did not have a lot of money and at times none at all. What they did was focus on what matters. They focused on what made them happy. The family may not had the money to go to the movies, but that didn’t mean they could sit on the porch together and share in each other’s company. There may have never been enough money for new clothes, but you still realize even with your brother’s hand me downs you still had more than most people in the world.

Our parents, grand parents, and great grand parents with little money found joy in life.

Fast forward to today

We are more educated, have more money, bigger cars, bigger homes, bigger closets, bigger vacations, just bigger and yet our happiness meter is near empty. Many people feel even with all of this they feel if they had more money then they would finally achieve true happiness.

The answer is not more money.

The answer is focus.

Focus on happiness.

What makes you happy?

Really take the time to think about it.

If you take the time to think about it you will tap in to real joy. Real peace. When you find your answers then it is time to figure out how to put your money where your happiness is. In the past you may have thought that a new car would make you happy, but instead it caused stress because of the payments.

What you really wanted at the time was the ability to get away when you wanted to and relax if needed. You thought that $25,000 car would solve that need and make you happy, but what you really needed was to buy you a used car without car payments and use they extra money each month to grow a travel fund.

Your happiness come to find out was in exploring new places. Now going forward you can focus your money on saving for travel around the world.

There is no reason that we can’t do everything that we want to do. Everything that makes us happy, that gives us real joy. We have so much more than our parents and grandparents and all we need to do now is tap into their mindset and focus our money in that direction.

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