If life were merely about money, it would be like a game of Monopoly. At the end of the game, you'd count your cash, add up the value of your assets and find out whether you'd won or lost. Then you'd breathe your last.

Unfortunately, being the richest man in the cemetery is no real accomplishment! Life is about more than money!

"Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition," says U.S. president Barack Obama. "It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger... that you realise your true potential."

money can't buy happiness

American film actress and model Bo Derek once said, "Whoever said money can't buy happiness simply didn't know where to go shopping." I think she was joking. I hope she was joking.

There are too many stories of sad lives among those with wealth to say that money can buy happiness. The Casey Johnson story is a recent, extremely sad example.

Casey died of severe insulin deficiency in January this year. Thirty years old, she was found dead in a run-down, rented, West Hollywood house where the gas and electricity had been cut off and rats ran around the empty swimming pool.

Born into a family worth an estimated US$180 billion, she was the greatgreat- granddaughter of Robert Wood Johnson, the co-founder of the Johnson & Johnson empire.

"I have so much stuff that, you know, it's almost embarrassing," she once said. "I got my first Chanel bag at 12, and a $17,000 gold Cartier watch when I was 15." She referred to her wealth as a "golden handcuff " and complained that there was "nothing left to want."

She may have had money, but her personal life was a disaster. She was the victim of alcohol and drugs, estranged from her family and plagued by feelings of personal failure.

Casey once said her stupidest mistake was turning down a role on the reality TV show, The Simple Life, with her friend and fellow heiress, Paris Hilton. But it was much more than this that took this billionaire from her home in east-side Manhattan, New York, to the place of her death in West Hollywood, California.

Money does not equal happiness. We know it. We have ample proof of it. Nevertheless, we're teased by the thought that money would solve an awful lot of our problems and that we'd certainly do better caring for it than those who fail.

But would we?

money and the "me-factor"

Money can buy stuff. And it can buy some pretty nice stuff. But it's a mistake to barter the wrong things for money. How sad that, a couple of years ago, a British girl was willing to offer her virginity on eBay to help pay for her tertiary education. Bidding started at US$10,000. The good part of the story is that the highest bidder paid the money to help her out without collecting the service she offered.

Extreme? Perhaps. But there are too many of us who can spend so much time on gaining money that things like family life, character development and dreams suffer. That's particularly disappointing when, so often, the money is only used to buy stuff.

When we do this, the only people who will thank us are advertisers. They target us. When De Beers, the diamond mining company, discovered that women typically acquired expensive rings only when men bought the jewellery for them, they set their advertisers to work to change the situation.

Exploiting the politics of feminism they began to sell the concept of the right hand symbolising female freedom. One of their ads reads, "Your left hand says we, your right hand says me."

These ads marked "the creation of the Me-Ring, as brilliant and expensive as an engagement ring, only symbolising independence, not alliance. It is a token of love from you to yourself." For a time, upmarket jewellers were selling $5,000 rings faster than they could get them for the "bling fingers."

Researchers in England gave individuals two scenarios to imagine. The first scenario had them living in a society where the average income was