There are more important things in life than wealth

While we know there are and will continue to be cries all over America from the sad hopefuls who did not win, we at The Daily Eastern News would like to remind everyone that money isn’t everything.

Now, some of you might be thinking, what do these poor, non-lottery-winning college student journalists know about riches?

Well, most of us may not be able to talk from experience, but imagine what would happen if you were a billionaire?

It is easy to say you would give a lot of your riches away, but it would be all too easy to intend to do it at some point, meanwhile spending money on a huge house, a couple of nice cars, a whole new wardrobe and more, until the money is all gone.

And as we are seeing in the world today, most billionaires do relatively little to share their wealth.

You hear from a lot of sources that it is not good to be too rich because it can lead to selfishness—one of the most well-known references to that idea being in the Bible, where Mark 10:25 says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God.”

It is certainly nice to have fancy, expensive things, but what purpose would life have if you placed your happiness in material wealth?

A study done by Princeton University found that the yearly income a person needs to be making in order to have the highest quality of life is around $75,000 a year, after which there is no significant improvement in a person’s emotional wellbeing.

While money can “buy” happiness to an extent, this Goldilocks dollar amount falls more than 20,000 times lower than the jackpot.

Of course, the jackpot is a one-time thing as opposed to a yearly payment, and the actual amount going into the winner’s hands will be less due to taxes and whatnot, but regardless, no single person needs anything close to $1.537 billion to be happy.

We at The Daily Eastern News believe that one thing that will surely and easily increase happiness is acting in generosity.

It feels good to get, but it feels even better to give.

Whether that gift is in the form of money, time or another sacrifice, we have found from personal experience that generosity often causes a cycle of happiness among the givers and the receivers, often leading to a pay-it-forward type of situation where people share the love all around and feel the joy caused by one another.

So even though none of us in the Eastern community won the Mega Millions jackpot, we have so many opportunities to increase our own and others’ happiness.

If we all took those opportunities, imagine what the world could be like.