Apparently there was a study done and your happiness levels out. Like if you got a big pay bump you’d be happier for a while but then back to baseline.
My boss used this to say that we don’t need raises. I asked if we could prove it and me and her swap pays. She laughed and brushed me off.
Money does buy you happiness. It just has diminishing returns.
So the best way to maximize happiness is to take the money from those that have maximized its effect and give it all to the poor.
I do have terrible crushing problems money can’t solve.
but I would be a hell of a lot happier with lowish 6 figures a year.
The thing is, it’s true that money can’t buy you happiness. I can guarantee you that I would still be depressed after a salary increase. I actually think the majority of wealthy people are fucking miserable.
However, money can buy you a lot of other helpful shit and its importance should not be downplayed.
But I have always interpreted “Money can’t buy happiness” to mean that accumulating wealth beyond what you need to survive and be comfortable won’t actually make your life meaningfully better. And that’s true. Happiness levels off after a certain level of wealth.
“Money can’t buy happiness” is a warning only intended for people who already have enough money to meet their basic needs. It’s bad faith to say it to people who are struggling financially. It’s kind of like saying, “Food won’t bring you happiness.” It has a different meaning depending on whether you are saying it to an emotional overeater or someone who is starving and malnourished.
Money isn’t sufficient for happiness, but it’s usually necessary.
Money buys you the luxury of beeing in the position where money can’t contribute to your happiness any longer.
Money can’t buy you happiness. But it can damn well enable it.
*pay increase above actual inflation/bill increases.
My pay has gone up every year, but each year I end up poorer as my bills eat the extra, plus some more!
The problems of poverty might be easier to deal with. Not discounting that. But a salary increase under capitalism does not solve the fundamental depression you feel from alienation.
Not to say I don’t have it better. I do. But the emptiness is not solved by a higher wage. It only has allowed me to have the time to become more reflective and depressed by the alienation of my labor.
To have more time and freedom to reflect on the suffering of these systems that I benefit from more than others do.
Money of course can buy happiness. Can subcribe to YT Music forever, can pay for therapy, can pay for everything. :,-)
access to culture should be free, access to mental health should be free
Digital piracy can get you at least one of those happy things.
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.
This is off topic of the main thread but the chart was eye-opening to me about the order of love/belonging and esteem. Much of my insecurity drives from not having a girlfriend or any intimacy, but the only way to get that is be socially adept, but I’m not because being socially adept is a lower priority on the hierarchy of needs than intimacy.
I like the way you think. Meeting everyone’s two base needs at a minimum is a great way to put it.
Good old Maslow. This is correct. The first two require money. As a single person without children, I’ve generally got the first two covered. I can not cover the third and I also feel like any amount of money will not help me either. This is why people with money say you cant buy happiness… because it is presumably at the top of this pyramid when you achieve it all.
Spawn more Luigis
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.
Garys Economics on Youtube talks about this and his proposed solution. He’s worth checking out.
That’s what government is supposed to be for. To regulate. Capitalism is like a car, or a train. When under control, harnessed, maintained, directed, it is an amazing engine for accomplishing things. When out of control, it’s deadly.
Capitalist markets are built off of the idea that people are inherently self serving and the ensuing competition will benefit people with lower prices, better products, etc to meet their own selfish needs. Capitalism uses capital to gain more capital, and is exploitative by design. When a company acts in a way to maximize profits, and appease shareholders, they’re doing it selfishly, with total disregard for others or the environment, in a system that rewards their actions. This is quite like psychotic, or sociopathic, behavior.
I just think trying to control this is a losing battle, and what we really need are foundational changes to values, motives, and what gets rewarded and how.
Capitalist markets are built off of the idea that people are inherently self serving
You think they’re not?
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)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I may ask, what are the mainreasons people are homeless in the Netherlands? Mental illness? Drugs? Unwillingness to deal with “the system”?
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.
