Does Money Buy Happiness?... no.... sorta.
I just read Tuesday's Child's most recent post at the time of writing this. I have a few things to say as someone who has lived both middle class and broke to the point of near homelessness.
It's an age-old question, does money buy happiness? My answer is no... but with an asterisk.
For context, I've lived in a hilltop condo in Anaheim Hills, I've lived in gated communities. I've also lived in a slummy duplex that had mold growing throughout parts of the dwelling that the landlord never bothered to fix. I've lived in a cheap 1-bedroom apartment with a cockroach infestation and one time where a dude got stabbed just outside of my stairwell. I've lived in a rundown neighborhood and remembered coming home from school with eviction notices on a regular basis because my single mother could barely afford rent. I've lived with a full refrigerator, and have had sleep for dinner.
This isn't to make a "woe is me" shit, I'm just trying to give you my background so you know I'm not pulling this out of my ass. I'm not speaking as a privileged white boy who grew up in a McMansion his whole life. If I was, I'd probably sound like one of those super models that tells you "looks don't matter".
TC makes valid points that I can't disagree with. Life is a lot better when your home doesn't smell like someone rung out a cat for it's pee. However, this isn't something money solves. It's a problem money created and then made itself the solution. You didn't need money to un-pee your apartment, you needed a landlord that wasn't a greedy piece of shit who actually took care of the fucking property.
It's the classic case of a problem being manufactured, manipulating you, and then selling itself as the solution that you needed all along. What's happening here is we are conflating money alleviating stressors it created with it buying happiness. Money isn't buying you happiness, it's the obstacle in the way.
After a certain point, money means piss all in terms of happiness. Once your basic needs are covered, the level of happiness diminishes. There are several psychological studies that throw around figures like $75k being the point of diminishing returns. This is where we get introduced to the concept of the Hedonic Treadmill.
For the uninitiated, the Hedonic Treadmill is a psychosocial concept in how humans always return to a baseline-level of happiness. Let's say you get a promotion, you'll get a spike in happiness levels, but it'll then return to your baseline. Money buys happiness the same way caffeine buys energy. This sounds depressing, but there is also a glass-half-full outlook on it. This also applies to the negative things that happen to us, like a divorce or loss of a loved one.
My household income went from ~$90k for 2 adults to ~$60k for 2 adults and a child. Let me tell you, I'm probably happier now than I was then. Money is a lot tighter, we have to rely on quite a few public services that give us a little extra, I have to donate plasma if I wanna go out to lunch. In spite of that, I'm happier now than I was then. If money bought happiness, I should be miserable right? If money bought happiness, then Robin Williams and Chester Bennington would still be around.
TC says the following:
I will say that comfortable living, education, and food are things bought by money and are not literally "happiness". But Tuesday's Child would be the happiest woman in the world if she had the money to not worry about such things.
Yeah... maybe? You might feel a lot better if all those stressors went away,but you can't outrun the treadmill forever. You might have solved one problem, but then new ones arise. Like when people get into bigger houses, which then gets filled with more stuff. Then you buy a bigger house, and then it gets filled with even more stuff. On and on, but the amount of stuff never actually made you any happier. Your problems just shifted.
Let me put this in perspective. I'm around a lot of kids and teenagers by nature of my wife having a lot of younger cousins and I tend to be the one adult that actually interacts with them in a non-paternal way. You'll hear about school stress, heartbreaks, and so on. These problems might seem trivial in comparison to an adult that has to deal with... idk taxes, or having to raise said melodramatic teenager, or something. However, in spite of that seeming triviality, that doesn't make the woes of the teenager any less real, or any less challenging, just different. Money is the same way. You may make more, but your problems, your inner problems, will remain.
In TC's example of the dream college, your stress would shift from having the money to get into your dream college, to now having the stress of maintaining your grades in said college. You could enter said dream college, and find yourself to be completely miserable for any number of reasons and question if you would have been better off going to a different/cheaper college.
That's why if we want happiness, we actually need to cultivate an environment for it, rather than treating it like a destination. Happiness is less like a place you can go to, and more like an cat that visits you on occasion after it's done gambling and doing blow.
Jokes aside, happiness comes independent of money. Money doesn't buy happiness. It, in our current socio-economic standing, only makes room for it. It's the thing in the way, rather than the thing itself. If happiness was buying a cat, but you got that cat for free, are you any less happy? Probably not, you still got the fucking cat regardless right?
So, now what? There's a lot of things that we can do that are a bit out of scope for what I intended to address on this post. I also want to stress that there ARE things that you can't just live, laugh, love your way out of.
TC mentions how she really wants to go to graduate school. This is something I can empathize with. Mrs. Pirate is trying to get accepted into Physician Assistant graduate programs, and those cost $150k+... my social work master's program is like 1/5th of that but we're still trying to figure out how to afford to do both. It sucks having to drop the price of a 70 kidneys (or just 1 on the black market). However, money doesn't buy you happiness in this instance, it's the whole reason you're sad to begin with. There's plenty of countries that don't make you sell vital organs just to afford education. This is money causing the problem, then making itself the solution. I understand your pain, TC, but I genuinely think that that sadness is temporary, you'll figure it out and keep moving. You don't know me, but I believe in you.
Little off track here. My point is, that money doesn't buy happiness, the things that make us happy exist independent of money. If you're able to cover your basic necessities, you already have everything it takes to cultivate happiness and for most things, you don't need to spend a dime to do it. There are things that we might want, sometimes seemingly more than anything, but even if we don't get it, we will be okay. It'll sting, but we will cope and we will work through it and figure out the next thing.
Previous |
Reply via email: me@absurdpirate.com