The Key to Happiness Isn’t Money. It’s Having Some Damn Help.

Photo by D Jonez on Unsplash

They say the key to happiness is money.

And I get why people believe that. When you’re struggling to pay bills, when your credit card limit dictates your mood, when one unexpected expense can throw your life into chaos…money feels like the answer to everything. Stability feels like happiness. Relief feels like joy.

And yes…money helps. Let’s be clear about that. Money buys time. It buys safety. It buys choices and access. It removes certain kinds of stress and gives you room to breathe. I will never pretend that money doesn’t matter, especially for people who live with poverty PTSD.

But money is not the key. Because eventually…if you’re lucky, if timing and opportunity align, you reach a moment where you stop checking your bank account before every purchase. The salary hits consistently. The title looks impressive on paper. The external markers of success line up. And that’s when a quieter realization creeps in:

Your problems didn’t disappear. They just evolved, sis.

For years, I chased a specific version of success, a certain title…a certain number. I believed that once I crossed that invisible threshold, life would soften. I thought peace lived on the other side of compensation. That security would finally quiet my anxiety. That happiness would arrive fully formed.

It didn’t.

What arrived instead was clarity and exhaustion. Because I was still doing everything myself. What I eventually understood is that what I was really chasing wasn’t more money. It was relief. It was support. It was help. I just didn’t have the language—or the permission—to name it.

We live in a culture, especially as Black women, that glorifies self-sufficiency to a dangerous degree. Figure it out. Handle it. Be strong. Don’t ask. Don’t need. Don’t rely. We’re taught that independence is not just a skill, but a moral obligation.

We wear “self-made” like a badge of honor, even when it’s slowly killing us.

Burnout doesn’t come from working hard alone. It comes from working hard without support.

You can earn six figures and still be deeply exhausted if you’re the only one holding everything together. You can be accomplished and still feel overwhelmed if every decision, every crisis, every emotional load lands squarely on you. You can be financially stable and profoundly unhappy if you’re living life unassisted.

Money can buy comfort, but help buys capacity.

Help is what allows you to show up without being depleted. Help is what gives you margin—space to think, to rest, to breathe, to recover. Help is what keeps success from becoming another form of survival.

But here’s the part we don’t talk about enough: having access to help is one thing. Allowing yourself to receive it is another.

For a long time, I treated help like something temporary. A bridge you use until you’re “established.” Training wheels you discard once you’ve proven yourself. I believed that needing support meant I hadn’t arrived yet—that if I were truly successful, I wouldn’t need as much backup.

That belief is a lie rooted in grind culture and respectability politics.

Look around. CEOs have teams. Athletes have coaches. Artists have managers. Wealthy families have accountants, attorneys, advisors, and assistants. Nobody at the top is doing life alone, yet somehow the rest of us are shamed into believing we should.

We romanticize struggle and call it character. We glorify exhaustion and label it ambition. We equate ease with laziness and rest with weakness. Then we wonder why so many of us thrive on paper and are miserable in practice. Happiness isn’t about eliminating the need for support. It’s about normalizing it.

Help doesn’t just mean hiring people, though sometimes it does. Help looks like therapy instead of pushing through. It looks like delegating instead of proving. It looks like asking questions instead of pretending you already know.

It looks like a community. Friendship. Partnership. Shared responsibility.

Help looks like not being the expert, the fixer, the planner, and the emotional regulator in every room.

For many of us, especially Black women, asking for help feels unsafe. We learned early that competence was our currency. That being low-maintenance kept us employed, respected, and chosen. That needing less made us more valuable.

So we shrink our needs. We overfunction. We overdeliver. We become indispensable at the expense of ourselves.

But here’s the quiet truth: being needed is not the same as being supported.

And no amount of money can replace the peace that comes from knowing you don’t have to do everything alone. I’m no longer interested in a version of success that requires me to be superhuman. I’m not chasing titles that demand my burnout as the entry fee. I’m not impressed by lives that look good but feel unbearable.

I’m chasing a life where support is built into the structure—not something I reach for in crisis.

A life where my nervous system doesn’t rely on Lexapro (iykyk) and isn’t constantly on high alert. Where rest isn’t a reward for exhaustion. Where ease is intentional, not accidental. The real shift wasn’t my paycheck. It was my permission.

Permission to ask.
Permission to outsource.
Permission to not know.
Permission to be held.

So no…the key to happiness isn’t money. It’s having some damn help.