1: The big thinkers say no.
“Money has never made man happy, nor will it,” Ben Franklin once said.
Centuries before, Aristotle wrote: “The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.”
More recently, Maya Angelou observed: “Don’t make money your goal. Instead pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off you.”
And yet, many of us are obsessed with money.
“People tell each other all the time that money isn’t the answer, and yet money remains a central object of desire in cultures almost everywhere,” Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz write in their book The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.
“We see it,” Bob and Marc note, “in the fascination with the ultrawealthy, in the increasingly pragmatic educational system (‘You go to school to get a ‘better’ job’), in the glamorous promises of consumer products, and in many other avenues of life.”
The data tells a story: “The overall effect of money is so significant that people with high incomes can expect to live ten to fifteen years longer than people with low incomes,” they write.
Citing the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which the authors oversee: “The men in the Harvard Study are no different; on average, the college men had significantly higher incomes than the Boston inner-city men, and lived 9.1 years longer.”
2: In 2010, Princeton researchers Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman set out to quantify the relationship of money to happiness. They utilized a year-long Gallup survey that generated 450,000 daily responses from a nationally representative sample of one thousand people.
Does money buy happiness? The answer is not a simple yes or no. It’s a paradox.
“In the United States, $75,000 seemed to be a kind of magic number at that time,” Bob and Marc write. “Once a household income was more than $75,000 per year, which was close to the average family income in the U.S. at the time of the study, the amount of money that people earned showed no clear relationship to daily reports of enjoyment and laughter, which were used as indicators of emotional well-being.”
Life is stressful when dollars are tight, and we are not confident in our ability to meet our basic needs. “Life can be incredibly stressful, and in this situation, every dollar matters,” the authors observe. “Having a basic amount of money allows people to meet those needs, have some control over life, and in many countries affords access to better health care and living conditions.”
However, once we get beyond a certain income level, money does not impact our overall happiness. As Angus and Daniel write: “More money does not necessarily buy more happiness, but less money is associated with emotional pain.”
3: And yet, our relationship to money is complicated. “Money is woven deep into the foundations of modern societies,” Marc and Bob note. “It is tied to achievement, to status, to self-worth, to feelings of freedom and self-determination, to our ability to care for and give joy to our families, to fun. To everything.
“It’s natural that we see it as a central medium through which we interact with the world and pursue so many things in life,” they reason.
This view of money makes sense. “Because the things that our respective cultures encourage us to pursue—money, achievement, status, and other things—are rarely complete mirages,” they note.
“Money allows us to acquire important things that we need for well-being; achievements are often satisfying and aiming for them can provide goals that give purpose to our lives, and allow us to move forward into new, exciting realms; and status gives us a certain social respect that can allow us to effect positive change.”
The danger, however, is when money, achievement, and status become the center of our lives. “When money becomes the point, rather than a tool, it joins ranks with other persistent objects of desire that are imbued with importance by the culture around us,” they write. “Things like fame and career success.”
Our brains are wired to focus on the visible. On the immediate.
“The value of relationships is ephemeral and hard to quantify, but money can be counted,” Bob and Marc relate. “Achievements can be listed on a résumé, and social media followers tick up in the right-hand corner of your screen. These countable victories give us small pulses of feelings we like. . .
“As we go through life we can see it all accumulating, and we pursue these goals without always thinking about why we’re pursuing them,” they warn. “Here, the pursuits become abstracted, more symbolic than tangible, and the chase for a better life starts to look more like running in circles.”
Perhaps “Can money buy happiness?” is the wrong question. What if, instead, we asked: “What actually makes me happy?”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What is my relationship with and philosophy about money?
Action: Take some time to journal about the question above.
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