Money is - only money. We do need some money to cover our basic needs where goods and services are translated into monetary terms, but we might be surprised at just how little we do actually *need*. Perhaps we have forgotten how to separate need from want.

Before labour-saving electric devices and television, the primary entertainment across most classes was dancing and live music we produced ourselves - still is, across many parts of the world where the bottomless hollow hunger for an infinitely receding image has not yet set in. It was no nostalgic ideal existence then, before antibiotics and sulfa drugs and under work conditions that ... still quietly exist, even in developed countries: but neither was there anything of this current, lifestyle-related epidemic of obesity and hypertension and cardiovascular events and diabetes II and autism and emotional and attention disorders.

The potential for happiness is inherent in us already. We don't need money to purchase it. We have but to accept it, in ourselves.

But as so many people have quickly discovered, unhappiness seeps in all too readily on the coattails of comparison. We often don't think of ourselves as poor until we see how our neighbours are living. A new bar has been set, one that can never be achieved; and thus what once was perfectly adequate, can never be seen so again.

Although we will kill ourselves willingly, trying for it anyway.

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