Letter:

When I was thinking about what do for my belief statement I thought of one way to approach it.
Unpopular opinions. I must say I’ve realized I have a lot of them. Thus I started scrolling
through some unpopular opinions, but most of them were jokes. I finally got the aha moment
when I was listening to music. In the song I was listening to my favorite rapper, Drake said “I
just let the money energize me”. I love that lyric. I really feel connected to that lyric. My favorite
color is green literally because money is green. It kind of irks me whenever someone says money
doesn't buy happiness. I feel like they’re not “energized” by the prospect of having that stability.
I understand that I may be biased however, because I lived a comfortable life. The thing that
keeps me motivated to live even more comfortable is my dad's story. My dad is the oldest in his
family, and had to become the breadwinner at a young age. He was given the opportunity to
leave Africa at 12 years old to pursue his education. He succeeded overseas, and eventually went
to college in New York. It is the textbook American dream. I don’t have an American dream, or
variant similar to that. For me, my dad is my dream. I want to be like him, and be successful,
while being smart at the same time. He is happy as a result of that. He always tells me you can't
be distracted and lose focus, because that makes you unhappy. Being financially stable is just a
reward of hard work. That's why I believe money does in fact buy happiness.

Manuscript:

Looking back at my young life I would say that I’m very content. That I've had no issues no
problems and I've really lived a great life. That's all thanks to my parents. Without my parents
emotional and financial backing I would not be who I am today. But more importantly, them as
inspirations to me. For example, my dad came from new money he had to follow his dream, the
American dream. He worked hard over here and now he's able to provide for us. I was certainly
lucky being born as the fourth child because my first two older siblings didn't have it the best.
They had to live while my dad was you know grinding and trying to make himself something.
Me and my younger sibling and my one older sibling got to reap the benefits of his success when
he finally was stable. And it’s definitely inspirational. And that's why I believe that money does
buy happiness. Contrary to popular belief I think that it's definitely something that if you spend
wisely definitely buys you happiness. Even when looking at my dad he would even say that it’s
not made him really the most happy because of all the hard work he put into it. But he does tell
me it’s rewarding seeing the smiles on our faces and just seeing how far he came. That's why I
think it does buy happiness. If you buy materialistic things with money than it definitely gets
boring. You have to buy experiences you know. You have to share the wealth, be philanthropic,
and help multiple people. That's how money buys happiness. It buys you time buys you health all
the above. That's why I believe it does actually buy us happiness