“Where is she? How could she do this to me? She never does this! There has to be something wrong,” my aunt said as she frantically searched for my cousin’s nanny’s number to see why she had not picked my cousin up from school yet.

Three hours had gone by after my cousin’s school had finished, and there was still no sign of her. Not a call. Not a voicemail. Not a text message. Not an email. Nothing. It just was not like her.

My aunt finally did a simple Google search with her name to see if there was any other way to reach her, and the unexpected happened.

There she was. Front headline, first search. “Wrong-way driving on I-280 turns deadly in Palo Alto.”

The previous night, she had been driving back from San Francisco when there was another car traveling the opposite way. She was heading southbound, but he was heading north on the same side. It had been that way for a while, but other cars were able to dodge it.

She could not. Both cars collided head on. The other driver died on the spot. She had broken almost every bone in her body and was in a state of coma. She needed a miracle.

She did not come from an extremely wealthy background. She lived with her mom and her sisters. She worked two jobs in between her college classes at De Anza College. Money to pay for all her treatment would not be easily accessible.

When my aunt set up a GoFundMe page in order to raise money for her treatment, it struck me. The common expression, “Money does not buy happiness,” was wrong. The only light at the end of this dark tunnel was her life, which depended on money. But even that was not enough. She passed away a week later.

It makes me wonder if she had come from a better background would she have ever had to be put in that situation of driving late at night from job to job. Those with more money are tend to have better lifestyles, and it is sad that money plays such a huge role in that sense.

Poorer schools are stripped from arts programs. These kids are stripped from a skill that provides them with some of the most valued traits a person could have such as self-esteem, confidence, motivation or love for learning, and most importantly pure happiness. A person is simply not complete without the arts. Arts take the mind to a different place to creates a strong, well-rounded, confident human being. Future generations are left hanging without these programs. Even though the strong positive impact of these programs is so evident, these arts programs are still taken away from these students merely because of the lack of funds.

These two incidents made me realize how dictatorial money really can be. We are nothing but money’s slaves, or even money’s puppets constantly dancing to its tunes. We fall into an addictive trance, chasing after that intangible object, money, in order to achieve the highest level of happiness.

Our lives are curbed and dictated based on the amount of money we have. Money opens ourselves up to life-changing opportunities that we would not be available otherwise.

Yes, we should not derive our only happiness from money, but money does play a huge part in our happiness.

Had that 20-year-old nanny come from a decently well-to-do family, she might not have had to overwork herself and endanger herself. Had there been even more money for treatments, the story might have ended a different way. Had there been more money in our education system, we could have more smiles on our nation’s students.

Money should not buy us happiness, yet money is really the only thing that can give one happiness. Money is, unfortunately, what makes this world go round. Without money, one can simply not reach the pinnacle of happiness.