Apparently money buys happiness. But can’t we get rid of life’s humiliations, instead?

This was bad enough. But then my eight-year-old rambled down the path and saw me crouched, with my pants down around my ankles.

“Mu-um?” he said, as he shot me a quizzical look.

“I, I, I… –” I said, before being cut short by the sight of my husband, ambling up behind my kid.

You’ve never seen a person yank their pants up so quickly, and stammer something about checking on the plants before running into the house.

Ridding myself of the humiliations that come with bodily failings and my own laziness would boost my happiness way more than extra cash.

Jettisoning denial would be priceless, too. My refusal to accept that I couldn’t change family members to be who I wanted them to be cost me about 30 years of anguish. To calculate the amount of forehead-clutching boredom I thrust on my husband and friends, while whingeing to them about said family members, would require a new metric. (A therapist finally set me on the path of sanity, and accepting what I could control, and what I couldn’t.)

Other things that would skyrocket my happiness upwards that a wad of cash couldn’t even begin to fix? Never thinking, for even one more second, about how well I fit into my jeans (or don’t). Never having to see another loved one get ill, suffer, or die. To this list, one of my friends says she’d like to make the moment her daughter opened the door to her bedroom and caught her and her husband having sex disappear.

Or, as one of my favourite writers, Anne Lamott once said: “If you have a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, you don’t have a very interesting problem.”

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