Why winning the lottery won't make you happy

 One of the good things about the Catholic lectionary is that it forces us to look at the whole bible, and not the just easy bits, or the bits we like. This weekend for the 25th Sunday of Year C we read Luke 16 with its difficult parable of the unjust steward, who seems to be corrupt at work and then gets praised by Jesus for it. Deacon Paul and I have both wrestled with what to say this weekend. Jesus' point though is to put people before things, and this is the angle I will take, looking at why Jesus so often challenges our relationship with money.

In a nutshell, it's because so often money makes us less happy. This News.com.au  article is one of many studies and anecdotes which show that more than half of all lotto millionaires end up less happy than before.

 

 When you look at pictures of kids like these from poor countries, people often note that they seem so happy, when contrasted with us who have so much, and we wonder why.

I wonder if it is something to do with our propensity to need other people when we are poor-er, so we create relationships of trust and mutuality, while the richer we become the more we lock doors and gates and isolate ourselves from others.

Any thoughts?