The Great Debate: Money Can’t Buy Happiness
Everyone has their own opinion about this, what is yours?
Recently I have been interested in the topic of how everyone builds their wealth and how they use that wealth for their own objectives, either personal or as a group. My curiosity also picked up on one of the most classic discussions between the upper and the lower class: can money become our source of happiness? I just want to say there is no definite answer for this one and I believe everyone can assess their own thoughts and feelings regarding the connection between wealth and happiness with reasonable accuracy in our life. Instead of jumping to personal opinion, I want to start with roughly displaying an elaboration of a 2008 research paper by Aaron Ahuvia titled “Wealth, Consumption, and Happiness”.
There Is a Connection, Even Though It’s Weak
Past studies have shown that at most, only 5% of happiness can be explained by income. Rather than focusing on the income itself, they wish to have a job that can award them with the feeling of autonomous and interesting profession and at the same time able to get the right amount of payment for their hard work — so that 5% might be an overstatement on the idea of ‘wealth’ itself. We might also think that much more developed countries have a higher number of happiness but this is unnecessarily true because in 2001 it was found that, after checking for the unemployment rate, income distribution, and inflation, there was no correlation between real GDP per capita and happiness in the twelve European countries studied. It should, however, be noted that many of these variables, like health care, are indeed related to a country’s wealth.
Money Matters Much More To the Poor
One of the main points that wanted to be brought in this discussion is how the poor and the rich use their money and what is their expectation or idea of financial satisfaction. For someone who has the resources, the wealth, and the rich, they will always have the tendency to strive even further — setting a higher level of goals that they have to achieve to gain even more wealth. One of the main examples is there is a survey by 2005, led by PNC Advisors, that shows 33% of respondents who have $10 million in investable assets always have a constant worry of not having enough money. In this, we can see that due to their income satisfaction — they can’t actually hold the true value of their current income, thus the tragic life of materialism.
While on the other side of the story, the poor have no such thing as financial satisfaction. Since they work, to have the money for the expenses of their basic needs day-to-day and to be able to achieve that is happiness itself to them. Because we know, not everyone can fulfill their basic needs especially when someone is in a high amount of debt or unemployed. For them, money is the core answer to their problem, and their salvation in gaining wealth is a way for them to free from this shackle that suffocates them.
Wealth and Its Temporary Illusion in Society
Wealth is indeed something we all want to but in this chapter, Ahuvia wants us to reflect on ourselves whether are we pursuing wealth in a healthy manner or not. One of the two reasons that he points out about why people love the idea of having money is because of biased processing and multiple goals. Biased processing can be seen as someone who overvalues extrinsic benefit (money, prestige, status) than intrinsic values (personal comfort, family time, social interaction). Of course, we can spend all of our time gaining enough resources to get out of debt or any economical expectation that we have — but what did it cost? Do we sacrifice anything in our way to pursue the so-called ‘happiness’?
Another reason is multiple goals which Ahuvia explained below:
for some people it is just as possible that they ‘seek social recognition with the ultimate goal of personal happiness’ as it is that they ‘seek happiness with the ultimate goal of getting others to think well of them for having such a pleasant affect’.
One might think that gaining wealth means that they will have honor or prestige, comply with social expectations, be sexually attractive, etc. But this will put you on a hedonistic treadmill, where you will always keep running and running to adjust yourself to other people's standards and expectations, which might lead you to another road far away from happiness.
Conclusion and Writer’s Note
I’m from a lower-middle-class family, living in Indonesia — not a really advanced country so I know how much money matters to me and my family. We use our money to barely provide meals on our table every day so money is indeed can make us a lot happier right away. But I also didn't want to ignore the feelings of those who suffer due to their own wealth that strangling their own well-being, and I guess my conclusion for money is:
Money can’t buy happiness, but money can give you a higher chance to be happy.
I don’t know what it feels like to have $10 million, but maybe if you the reader have this amount of money — try to spend it on your loved ones, donation, or just spend it to build on experience either to travel or having an adventure across the world cause that is much more meaningful than just buying materialistic stuff in this world.
source : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234777751_Wealth_Consumption_and_Happiness
