"Money can't buy happiness. It can only buy you comfortable places to suffer in."

(Mmm. Adrian Savage. No talent at dialogue, no talent at generating atmosphere, no understanding of plot... This book makes my top ten list of crappy novels, and that's going a ways for someone who collects pulp horror. For all of that though, every five or ten pages there's a real gem of a phrase lurking unlooked for. Savage should write bumper stickers.)

Anyway, I wanted to talk about the phrase "money can't buy happiness."

What pretty, pointless, pessimistic, self-serving swill.

Let me assure all of you that money can, indeed, buy happiness. I've been broke and I've been flush... and I've noticed a pronounced correlation between money and happiness.

"Money can't buy happiness." What bullshit. The proper way to phrase that concept is actually "money can't cure stupidity."

By stupidity, I mean counter-productive imprints and behaviors on the physical, mental, social and emotional circuits.

You see, unhappiness is just another form of stupidity. It's a phenomenon that is essentially identical to physical pain in terms of its overall usefulness. Unhappiness and pain both tell us that something is wrong, and that we need to do something to fix it.

Since human beings tend to be a bunch of maladjusted hunchbrains, we've demonstrated an unfortunate tendency to accept both physical and emotional pain as our lot in life.

In other words, too many of us have accepted "unhappiness" as a state of being instead of as a brief response to a specific stimulus.

That's because we're dumbasses.

Those of us who aren't dumbasses (go ahead... raise your hands) are only unhappy when we are exposed to stimuli that provoke that response...

And I've got to tell you people -- money is a great way to shield yourself against the sort of stimuli that provoke an unhappiness response.

So, for all of you people out there who are unhappy in spite of all of your money, let me just say