Can You Buy Happiness?

by Kristine Gasbarre

Last week I found myself at the house of a friend in her early forties whose boyfriend had just dropped the bomb that he was in love with someone else. When I entered her apartment, I thought Denise was trying to strangle herself with electrical cords. She was smoking a Marlboro and sobbing into the headsets of both her cell phone and her Blackberry, mascara running down her cheeks and staining her satin pillowcase. Those sheets were Armani; this had to be bad.

Denise is a woman who appears to have it all — a successful jewelry business (which comes with a four-thousand-dollar-diamond-studded Rolex), the perfect body (okay, so the boobs and tanorexia are fake) and connections to everyone who’s anyone from here to Milan. But as she guzzled the bottle of Prosecco I’d brought, she confessed that years ago she’d made a terrible life mistake. For too long she’d thought being your best self meant having the best of everything, and she realized too late in her life that it’s really relationships and family that bring happiness. Now how would she recover from this mess in time to find someone new and have babies?

I untangled my friend from the cords and assured her the mascara on the shoulder of my favorite Old Navy t-shirt was nothing. Then I headed home to investigate whether it’s love or money that brings permanent and unshakable happiness.

It’s no coincidence that American adults in our 20s and 30s, who’ve recently been labeled Generation Me, were the first cohort to be targeted as child consumers back in the 1970s and 80s. Saturday morning cartoons were punctuated with commercials of shiny happy kids playing blissfully around the latest talking board game. As we aged, the media became experts at creating marketing campaigns and cultural phenomena that kept us salivating for more. (Fellow New Kids on the Block fans, please rise.) If I had the new tape, I needed the figurines. I already owned the t-shirt, so when was the tour coming to town so I could wear it? (My own father, in fact, drove two hours the week before my 10th birthday so I could see the New Kids live. It was less that I was spoiled and more that all my internal organs would have shriveled and disintegrated if I’d missed seeing Jordan Knight live on that fateful evening in December 1989. When we ran into them having dinner at Denny’s after the concert, I was too shy to even utter an awkward, brace-faced hi.)

A famous song from the 1970s suggests you can’t always get what you want. Really? Because our generation does. My recent article, Why Am I Still Single?, discusses how consumer culture has made us narcissistic relationship partners, telling us that we should never have to compromise. Those jeans shrunk when you washed them? Sister, go get your money back! That friend chews kinda funny when you go out to dinner? Divert her calls! You’re not happy with that job? Change careers! Don’t let life’s little inconveniences make you suffer — kick those speed bumps to the curb and get to your happy place!