Wait, so money actually does buy happiness? New study makes us want to work harder today.
The old adage “Money doesn’t buy happiness” has been turned on its head, thanks to a study conducted by the University of Illinois showing that people with higher incomes are more likely to say they are happier with their lives.
Rob Stein of the Washington Post reports the findings, perhaps the most interesting of which is the revelation that this is not simply a cultural phenomenon, isolated to certain pockets of the world. Instead it is a global one, spanning race, culture, age, and sex, as the survey included 136,000 people in 132 different countries.
Daniel Kehneman, a professor of psychology at Princeton, elaborates further:
“When people evaluate their life, they compare themselves to a standard of what a successful life is, and it turns out that standard tends to be universal: People in Togo and Denmark have the same idea of what a good life is, and a lot of that has to do with money and material prosperity.”
No matter what country they hail from, people “take stock of their lives by comparing themselves to their equivalent of ‘the Joneses.’”
The standard measure used when comparing one’s own life to another’s? Income.
However, directly connecting one’s material wealth with one’s “happiness” is too broad an attribution; as the article explains, having more money doesn’t necessarily mean one is more likely to experience positive feelings, which are instead correlated to other factors, including having strong relationships and feeling respected. Rather, having a lot of dough simply leads to “satisfaction,” a form of happiness.
Though a portion of our own happiness may be derived from our material prosperity and success relative to others (studies have even shown we take delight in others’ failures or misfortunes), there’s more to the overall equation.
“Yes, money makes you happy,” according to lead researcher Ed Diener. “But,” he notes, “it makes you more satisfied than it makes you feel good.”
So while your neighbor may feel a smug satisfaction in his fleet of luxury cars or his Christmas light display, it ultimately says little about how he feels toward himself.
—Nick Lehr
Vocalyze
[...] we’ve told you that money can’t buy real happiness. It can buy some kind of shallow and fleeting self-satisfaction. However, a new study has gone as [...]