Money absolutely does buy happiness until you’re in middle class and in a fulfilling job. (If you’re rich but in a shit job, it means you might have the option to work less or look for a better position.)
Money does not buy you happiness applies to people who are already rich and are looking for money to fulfill needs way high on the Maslow hierarchy. In fact, much of the tyranny and cruelty within stratified social systems comes from miserable rich people believing they should be happy due to their vast wealth and power yet are not. And our capitalist society has messages everywhere that promise that a new car, (yacht, vacation, lover, religion, etc.) will totally fulfill them and they don’t.
I mean we’ve had three billionaires shoot themselves into space. If that’s not an obvious plead to the gods or the cosmos for a taste of nirvana I don’t know what is.
Curiously, this is a thing that Jesus (and every other divine-ish wise guy) knew about: If we give away our vast fortune and live simply with that experience and wisdom, fulfillment comes. But it means overcoming greed for wealth and power, which is quicker, easier, more seductive.
ETA: For those of us outside the ownership class, though, money improves our base Maslow hierarchy (better housing, HVAC, better water, better food) and gets us out of precarity (or worse, scarcity) which make us desperate and miserable (which accounts completely for elevated crime in poor neighborhoods). Money buys us out of that hell hole. The only thing better than not being there is to also have the perspective of not being there, which can lead to maybe helping others behind you out… Unless you’re Clarence Thomas. (He’s a very special case.)
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
How does one obtain food, shelter, healthcare, a basic sense of security by having a stable and safe living space?
Oh thats right, you obtain all that with money, obtaining those things without money is either functionally impossible for the vast majority of people, or literally a crime.
Yeah, adding an infinite amount of money to one person doesn’t meaningfully impact their ability to get those first two layers figured out.
Distributing money such that everyone has those two base layers… is quite literally the foundation for a happy, stable, productive society.
Liquidate the billionaires… assets, of course.
Liquidate the billionaires… assets, of course.
If it were that simple, then we should just liquidate the billionaires with rifles. They deserve no respect.
Unfortunately, they’re just the symptom of systematic issues of capitalist political economy, so without solving that, new billionaires will emerge.
But by giving the poor money we’d be robbing them of their ability to reach self actualization by creatively solving their own problems! (/s obviously)
I’m really pissed of this “I’m sad 'cause I’m poor. So if I had money I would be happy.”
(Poverty imply sadness) does not imply (wealth imply hapiness). That’s basic formal logic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraposition The Contraposition is (not sadness imply not poverty). So, If you are happy, you have money.
Expressed differently, if all the poor are sad, we can state that a happy person is not poor. But we cannot state anything about a rich person being happy or not.
In this case, “I’m sad 'cause I’m poor” doesn’t mean “if poor, then sad”, it means “poor if, and only if, sad”. Logic is about more than symbols.
Good thing these statements are not absolute then. Anecdotally I am way more happy thanks to my well praying job, even though the only change in my life apart from that was getting a driver’s license.
Money can’t solve all your problems but it can solve most of them.
Meh. I grew up dirt poor, and I am now what past me would have considered successful.
Funny thing about it, though, I’m still me. I’m that same dirt poor teenager, just older. It didn’t change me like I thought it would.
Absolutely, the lack of money will make you unhappy. Without a doubt. But I’ve never got a 20% raise and felt 20% happier. You’re always gonna be who you are, money or not.
I’ve also heard that this advice really only scales until you hit the cost of living price for your area, which supports your idea.
Its not necessarily “money won’t make you happier”, it’s more “poverty makes you sadder”
Yep. Once your basic needs are met and you’re not in poverty, any happiness above that line has to come from within yourself.
This so much. I didn’t grow up dirt poor, but also pretty low class. Now I live in the nice part of town and have a somewhat above average pay. Still miserable. Still the depressed loser I always have been. Just more money and a big house. Though, if I was just barely able to make ends meet, I’d be way more miserable.
Neither my wife or I have been able to afford to go to the dentist in over 20 years. I’ve had a general medical checkup once in that time. We make too much to get free care but not enough to afford care. It absolutely kills me because I work for a nonprofit that provides food and other resources to people in need. They’re always talking about their doctors appointments, procedures etc and I’m like, yeah I don’t get that kind of thing.
I’m in a different country so all that is covered for me.
It’s not like the working class can move. My daughter and her UK boyfriend/fiance want to get married but neither would be able to legally work in the other country. If you can’t get a work visa for a technical specialized job, you’re SOL or you try to find under the table work which is becoming more impossible with governments tracking everything.
Your basic needs aren’t being met. That is horrible for any human. I’m sorry… I’ve been there.
The part that really sucks is you don’t get to really understand this until you’re in your 30s/40s. We spend all this time trying to fill a hole in ourselves that can’t be filled with stuff.
There are people reading this right now who are like “yeah, right”…
Or it could be accomplishments or a relationship. Sometimes problems run deeper than outside stuff.
Sure, but poverty is a lack of money. The inability to sustain oneself healthily. Once you have “sufficient” money, having even more won’t make you happier.
That was the original meaning, but it’s also been co-opted by assholes as an “argument” against providing for people’s basic needs.
Money can’t buy you happiness. But stress due to lack of money destroys people. Working as a volunteer at a homeless shelter has taught me that atleast here in the Netherlands quite some of them stay homeless not because there are no options to get of the street, but because with these options comes all the stress of having to pay the bills. That goes to show how rough it must be to live with financial stress, because living on the street itself is terribly rough, and still some prefer it.
Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can give you the foundation and support to look for it.
This image post could have been a text post.
A few years ago I was stealing water from a construction site so my partner and I could flush the toilet. Parked in a development lot in the middle of the night, watching for security guards while I filled a bunch of plastic organizer bins in the back of a van.
We were several years into a total financial crashout from a combination of major health problems, deaths in the family, and a floundering job market. Things are better now, but I can say at least that I know now what it feels like to lose everything and claw your way back out of the hole. I don’t recommend it, it sucks.
Our nation doesn’t want you to succeed. Remember that. In order for the wealthy to stay wealthy, there has to be a class of people who have less or nothing so that money retains value. We’re the richest fucking nation that’s ever existed, many times over, so if we really wanted we could end poverty, we could end hunger and disease and make a glorious world where everyone is comfortable and able to aim for their own dreams without risk of losing everything and having to steal water to flush the fucking the toilet.
We’re not in that world for the simple reason that a tiny fraction of people want to have things and they want other people to envy them.
The money can’t buy you happiness people are rich.
Maybe not rich, but at the very least they are not poor.
As the saying goes, money can’t buy you happiness but a lack of money can buy you a lot of misery. Enough money for a comfortable lifestyle, anything over that and we enter ego validation territory.
The one I heard is money can’t buy you happiness but it can buy you a helicopter, which is almost as good
Money probably really doesn’t make you happy. Most of the things that make me happy have nothing to do with me being able to buy crap I don’t need.
But that dumb sentiment hides the fact that a lack of money can definitely make you miserable.
Only the people that never had stress over dentist of vet bills will suggest money is somehow not a massive factor in determining your quality of life in a capitalist society.
Well duh. Just apply for a leadership position. Double the stress for a dollar raise!
Nobel Laureates Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton at Princeton University published a study in 2010 showing that money buys happiness only up to about $75k per year (in 2010 dollars, for Americans), at which point happiness plateaus and more money doesn’t meaningfully buy more happiness.
Years later, Matthew Killingsworth at the University of Pennsylvania published a study showing that happiness didn’t really plateau with money, but kept increasing at $75k and beyond.
They got together to see if they could reconcile their different findings from pretty similar methodologies.
As it turns out, Killingsworth’s data did show the same plateau, at pretty much the same place, if you focus only on the least happy 20%. In a sense, the Kahneman data was focused on only measuring unhappiness, and didn’t properly distinguish between people who were kinda happy, people who were moderately happy, and people who were really happy.
So now the most widely accepted analysis is that there are people who are deeply unhappy, for whom giving them more money might not make them emotionally better off, at least past $75k in 2010 dollars. But for the rest of us, the majority of people will continue getting happier with more money, well up to the $500k income.
