No change in happiness despite a windfall

I recently received a windfall and came into a significant sum of money. This was due to certain personal events, and through absolutely no merit, or effort of my own. It is not so large a sum that I am suddenly a rich man, but it is also more than I have made in my 4 years of working.

What struck me most upon receiving this is that I felt no special joy in having this fall into my lap. I would have thought receiving a tidy sum of cash would make me a rush of excitement. That is what is often seen on TV, and also how I imagined it would feel like. Otherwise, why are people so bent on getting windfalls.

Instead, I feel a mixed set of emotions. Firstly, there is some relief that this has created stability in my finances. Yet, if I did not come by this cash, I doubt I would have even noticed it. If anything, what I feel is grateful that I am given a second chance to make up for poor fianancial habits in the past, and should not waste this chance. Which brings me to an opposite set of emotions. There is both a fear of losing the money I now have, and stress on myself to make sure I deploy the funds in the best way possible. In some ways, it feels like having more money makes me more worried. What strange irony.

This experience has caused me to further rethink this relationship we have with money. While I am quite confident that I am not greedy and materialistic, I still expected that I would have felt more happiness upon these circumstances. This muted reaction has further helped me realise that I do not really need so much to live a happy life. I can already achieve that on my own. I wonder why people spend so much effort and are willing to sacrifice morals or relationships to get such wind falls. Perhaps they truly believe they will be happy? I hear of this often as a lawyer, and now question even more whether it is worth it.

Now the next step is to find an optimal way to allocate my funds to grow them for the future.