As Elon Musk confirms riches cannot purchase contentment, REV GILES FRASER asks: What have tickling your self and the limitless pursuit of happiness acquired in frequent? They simply do not work

‘All is Vanity’ said the richest man in the world, King Solomon, nearly 3,000 years ago.

He was hugely successful in real estate, people admired him for his ridiculously high IQ, he had 700 wives and 300 mistresses, including fabled beauty the Queen of Sheba.

But he still penned one of the most miserable books of literature known to humankind, Ecclesiastes. Everything is rubbish, he complained. Pity the poor billionaire.

None more than Elon Musk, who last week posted to X: ‘Whoever said “money can’t buy happiness” really knew what they were talking about’ (followed by a sad face emoji).

Musk, of course, is the world’s richest man, indeed the richest human being in history. Last week, his rocket maker SpaceX bought his artificial intelligence and social media company xAI, sending his already stratospheric personal wealth to a new high of $852billion (£625billion).

So it’s little wonder that his ‘poor me’ tweet touched a nerve with his 234million followers on X.

Some replied with a version of ‘Give me your money, let me try’.

Others pointed out, rightly, that poverty is far more conducive to misery than extreme wealth. And more others used it as an opportunity to preach some version of their religious faith – only God/Jesus/Allah can make you happy.

Speaking as a Christian, I have never seen that as faith’s promise. After all, our man died in the most excruciating way possible. He didn’t skip about the Galilean hills calling people to follow him with a first-century version of Bobby McFerrin’s Don’t Worry Be Happy.

But he did say: ‘Consider the lilies of the field. Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ Glory is different to happiness. And Jesus did say: ‘What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?’ Good question.

But what the replies to Musk’s post mostly reveal is a widespread disappointment at the thought of money as not being the right path to a happy life. Actually, it feels like more than disappointment for some, more like the beginnings of a kind of crisis of worldview.

Imagine being one of those people who have done everything they can to become rich. They have sacrificed relationships – with partners and children; spent their lives with spreadsheets rather than going for long walks in the rain; can’t quite remember the simple slow joys of having a coffee on their own, reading a book or playing football with their mates.

It’s tricky to stop and smell the flowers from your Gulfstream. To those who have focused everything – time, energy, passion – on getting rich, the idea that $800billion isn’t enough to get there is a kick in the perfect pearly-white teeth.

Now there are any number of experts out there who will tell you how to find happiness. Happiness has long been a burgeoning industry. Richard Layard argues that although we in the West are now so much wealthier than our grandparents, we are also much more depressed.

Indeed, I wonder if the link we often make between happiness and having more things and more money isn’t one of the reasons we are so unhappy in the first place.

Consider how advertising works, for instance. I am sitting on the sofa, having a pretty chilled afternoon. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the kids are playing nicely, Chelsea are winning. And then the advertisements come on.

Now the way they work is this: to get you to go out and buy a new car or sofa, they need to make you dissatisfied with the one you have already got. So they find clever ways of whispering into your ear: the life you have now is a bit rubbish, really.

You could be so much more. If only you had this new thing, you would have a sexier partner, go to more glamorous places, have a more interesting and exciting life. To sell you a new life, they must first sow the seeds of disappointment with the one you already have.

This is how you can be persuaded to go out and buy things that you don’t need with money you don’t have. Contentment is bad for business, bad for economic growth.

The solutions of the happiness experts range from the obvious – relationships matter, meaning matters – to the downright sinister: we need to find objective ways of measuring happiness and then use this measure to determine political decision-making.

Back in the 19th century, Jeremy Bentham famously argued that what counted as moral good was that which simply promoted the greatest happiness of the greatest number. It seemed like a good objective measure of how to make moral decisions.

But it wasn’t long before people pointed out that this formula could easily have some terrible consequences. Could a surgeon decide to harvest the organs of a perfectly healthy man to save the lives of five others? Or could a judge send to prison an innocent man if that would stop a violent riot outside the courthouse of those who were baying for his blood?

As Caiaphas says in the Bible while condemning Jesus: ‘It is better to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.’

Justice crumbles under the weight of the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

So maybe we should stop being so obsessed with our own happiness. Or perhaps happiness is one of those things that you find only when you are not really looking for it.

There are some necessary conditions for being happy: yes, a certain amount of economic security, pretty good health, having people you love and who love you back, doing something with your life that you think of as important.

But these won’t necessarily make you happy. Happiness often comes when it’s not the overall aim, more a welcome by-product of a well lived life.

The problem with making your own happiness a goal is that you are making life all about you. And the problem is that the more self-absorbed you become, the less happy you often are.

Conversely, the happiest people I have met don’t much care about their own happiness. Trying to make yourself happy is a bit like trying to tickle yourself: it doesn’t really work.

What Solomon discovered when he said ‘all is vanity’ is that if your life becomes all about you then death turns out to be the end of all that is important to you, no matter how wealthy you are. Shrouds have no pockets.

And if you think it’s all about money, this will always haunt you. The phrase makes more sense when understood in Hebrew.

Vanity is a translation of the Hebrew word ‘hevel’, which is better translated as shortness of breath.

This life is fleeting, and if this is where you place your centre of gravity, then one day all will be lost. But to those who have placed their heart outside of themselves, then you have placed it beyond the reach of one’s own death – and so you can live without fear. This is the wisdom of Solomon, once the richest man in the world.

My old friend and former parishioner Michael Argyle, one-time professor of psychology at Oxford, and now long since passed, once explained to me that there were two paths to happiness: religion and Scottish country dancing. I laughed. 

Country dancing because we all need the warmth of another in our arms. And religion, because it’s not all about you. Thinking about it now, he wasn’t far wrong.