Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. I had an interesting conversation the other day.

I was talking with a man who most of us would consider successful, including himself.

He said he was able to purchase a beautiful home here in Southern California.

His job was paying him well.

He had a nice car.

And he even got to do some traveling with his family. Life seemed good. But he noticed two things that were keeping

them from being really happy in his life. One is he had a lot of bills. He had that mortgage

on that beautiful home of his. He had car payments and

children that he was raising with his wife. There were just a lot of expenses. And even

though he was making more now than he ever made in his life, he realized that, oh, he just wasn't happy.

One because he still wanted more, perhaps a bigger home, even though he had a beautiful one. His wife was trying to convince

him to get a bigger home, a nicer home, closer to the water, because he was making

more now. Why not buy a bigger home? They could afford it. And then there was that sense of, what if

something happened? Would he lost his job? I mean, he was in some ways living paycheck to

paycheck. Mind you, he could have suffered being out of work for a little while,

but if he was out of work for too long, things would begin to go away. So there was fear there.

There was both fear, fear of losing things, and a desire, even though he had more now that he ever had in his life, a desire to have more.

But he also remembered what it was like when he was younger and he didn't have anything and how free he felt.

He didn't feel that he didn't have enough.

He had enough to hang out with his friends, to go to the beach, to go camping. And there wasn't really fear there because he had nothing to lose.

He already was completely broke and yet he felt free.

At the same time, though he would see nice cars and drive by nicer places and wish he could have them someday,

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