The following meditation was written by Doug Hood’s son, Nathanael Cameron Hood, a recent graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary.
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
(Mark 8:36 KJV)
In 2018, Michael Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School, co-led a study where over 2,000 people with a net worth of at least $1 million were interviewed about their personal happiness. Two of the questions which produced the most revealing answers concerned his subjects’ self-satisfaction with their personal wealth. First, Norton asked them to rate their happiness on a scale of one to ten. Second, he would ask them how much more money they would need to get that happiness rating up to a ten. As Norton explained in an interview with The Atlantic: “All the way up the income-wealth spectrum basically everyone says [they’d need] two or three times as much.”1 One would imagine that at a certain point when money stops being an issue, when private planes become as negligible an expense as a morning cup of coffee, enough would be, well, enough. But, as Norton discovered, human psychology doesn’t always work sensibly—or rationally.
The idea that wealth can’t buy happiness isn’t a particularly new or novel revelation. After all, one of the most famous and enduring stories of the last few centuries—Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol—centers on a miser whose insatiable hunger for wealth left him so miserable, lonely, and despised that it took an act of God to save him from himself. Or consider J. Paul Getty, the infamous founder of the Getty Oil Company who was once listed in the 1960s as the richest man on earth. He was so single-minded in his pursuit of wealth and so paranoid in clinging to it that he once famously forced his kidnapped grandson to pay him back the ransom money he spent—with interest!
There are many ways that the stories of Scrooge and Getty could (and perhaps should) be read as cautionary tales, but one of the most glaring involves their common lack of gratitude. Was Scrooge thankful as a young man with a successful job and a beautiful fiancée? No, he traded both for loneliness, a gloomy apartment, and a bigger bank account. Was Getty thankful for his grandson’s recovery from kidnappers? No, he saw it as yet another business transaction. There have been scientific studies proving that cultivating gratitude results in improved mental health and personal happiness, but perhaps equally important is the idea that gratitude protects us from losing our very humanity in the search for wealth and success. Put another way; gratitude keeps us from becoming a Scrooge or Getty.
Shortly after he predicted his death for the first time in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus Christ gave a brief sermon to his disciples about the importance of taking up one’s cross and following him. It’s only a few verses long, but it contains one of Jesus’ most startling teachings, namely that anyone who seeks to save their lives by their own power will lose it. What use is gaining the whole world, Jesus asks, if you lose your soul in the process? And indeed, looking at the lives of Scrooge and Getty we see two men who leveraged their souls a long time ago. Imagine how much a little gratitude could have changed the lives of Scrooge and Getty. Let us give thanks that there is still plenty of time for the rest of us to make the change.
Joy,
1Pinsker, Joe. “The Reason Many Ultrarich People Aren’t Satisfied With Their Wealth.” The Atlantic, February 13, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/12/rich-people-happy-money/577231/.
To read more meditations by Dr. Doug Hood and Nathanael Cameron Hood, you can purchase Nurture Faith: Five Minute Meditations to Strengthen Your Walk with Christ from your favorite book seller.
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