Why Talking About Money and Happiness Matters

What we can learn from Bono, Brian Cox, and Jonah Hill

For four years, I’ve been exploring the connection between money and happiness on my podcast, I come at the topic mostly through conversations with highly accomplished people and authors who study fulfillment.

Sometimes I wonder if the mission is worthwhile or whether I’ve reverse-engineered an idea that fits my experience of having made some money and wrestled with its often confusing impact on my life. Either way, I found it interesting when the universe-or maybe it was just my Facebook news feed-recently presented copious evidence that the struggle for money and status is an unavoidable human tendency that begs our understanding.

Over the Christmas holiday, I inadvertently came across the work of three well-known artists who offer insights into their own struggles with money. In Bono’s memoir, Surrender, Jonah Hill’s Netflix documentary, Stutz, and the Channel 5 (UK) series, How the Other Half Live with Brian Cox, each of these masters of craft confesses to the difficulty they’ve had handling success or, more specifically, how their challenges handling life drove them to succeed.

It speaks volumes that on the second page of a 557-page book, covering over four decades of U2’s epic creative…