A School Drop-Off Conversation About Happiness, Wealth, and What Really Matters

It was an ordinary Tuesday morning. School drop off, the usual rush, my son in the back seat. To fill the drive I asked him a question.

"If you were given two wishes, what would they be?"

He went quiet for a moment. I expected something about video games or a holiday or maybe a pet. Instead he said: "All cars pollution free to help the environment. And no homelessness in the world."

I did not say anything for a second. I just drove.

He had not asked for a single thing for himself.

So I pushed a little. "What if you had to wish for something just for you?"

He thought again and said: "Health and wealth for life."

I asked him to explain what he meant.

"I want to enjoy life," he said. "For that I need to be healthy." Then he added something that stopped me.

"And by wealthy, I don't mean rich. I just mean having enough to do what I want."

I let that sit. Then I asked one more question.

"What about happiness?"

He looked out the window and said, almost matter of factly...

"Happiness is a feeling. It comes and goes, like sadness and anger. I cannot have it all the time."

We pulled up to school. He grabbed his bag and walked in.

I sat in the car for a minute pondering over what he said before driving away. There were three things he said that I have not been able to stop thinking about since.

The first is that his instinct, when given unlimited wishes, was to think about the world before himself. That is not something most adults do reflexively. We are wired to think about our own needs first. It is called self-serving bias and it is well documented in psychology research. My son had not yet fully developed that filter, or perhaps he had developed something better in its place.

The second thing is his definition of wealth. Not rich, he said. Just enough to do what I want. Researchers who study the relationship between money and happiness have found that beyond a certain threshold of financial security, additional wealth has very little impact on how good people feel about their lives. What actually drives satisfaction is autonomy, the ability to make choices about how you spend your time and energy. My son described that perfectly without ever having read a word of the research.

The third thing is what he said about happiness. He did not say he wanted to be happy all the time. He said happiness comes and goes like any other feeling. This is something that takes most people years of experience, and sometimes significant loss, to truly accept. The pursuit of constant happiness is one of the most common sources of suffering in modern life. Psychologists call the resistance to difficult emotions experiential avoidance, and it consistently makes things worse. My son already understood intuitively that feelings move through us. We do not hold onto them. We just experience them as they come.

I am his parent. I spend a lot of time trying to teach him things.

That morning he returned the favour.