I think people simply this too much. Neither money does not buy happiness. Of course people say that family and friends buy it which is completely false IMO as well.
Both of these are simply objects. How they are used is the key. I’ll use a metaphor. Money is like science. Having a lot of money is like society understanding science to an advanced degree. But that can’t bring happiness in itself (unless your a geek )One has to apply it to get something. So understanding Organic Chemistry really doesn’t help until you apply it to something like separating crude oil, which provides energy to various appliances and creating petrochemicals.
Money in that sense can be used not just for material gain(gadgets, food) but for experience gain (travel, concerts) and manipulating yourself physically, mentally and/or socially.
Having family and friends itself can be a real pain in the ass. If you have a relationship of respect and care then it can bring happiness. But if you have them for the sake then that can get crappy.
The path to happiness is to find out what makes you happy and acquire it, experience it, whatever. A lot of people are not happy because they don’t know what they want. They keep on doing the conventional thing(get married, have a family, get a good job that pays well), and it doesn’t work for them because they’ve never really thought about what they are actually interested in. Others are unhappy because they can’t get what they want or keep on trying and failing.
I often tell people that I feel like the richest man in the world because I have everything I want(well, almost, but the things I don’t have I’ve realized are unrealistic).
I do think that for most people, it is actually relationships that make them happy. Humans are social animals, and the reason it’s said that money doesn’t buy happiness is because once you have too much of it you can’t be sure who your real friends are. you know that wife of yours wouldn’t have given you the time of day if you were an auto mechanic. Hard to find true happiness under such conditions, although most wealthy people do report being happier than poor people. Although I suspect that’s because rich people define happiness down(“I’m rich! What do I have to complain about! People kiss my ass all day!”), and poor people tend to focus on life’s difficulties, understandably.
Money and relationships are types of insurance. You can be alright without either one, but they come in real handy when the shit hits the fan. Which is inevitable if you live long enough.
As a single person without many friends, I value financial stability more than probably I would if I had more relationships. For someone else, they might place more emphasis on relationships based on the assumption that their friends and family will provide support if their finances should fall apart. Both strategies are perfectly reasonable. Even better is an integrated approach, though.
I do agree that relationships tend to come with a lot of crappiness. But so does a big pile of money. It would be stupid to decline an offer for a million dollars just because you don’t want to pay taxes on it or say “no” to begging friends. A million dollars can enhance your life in numerous ways and provide peace of mind. So can a good relationship, as long as you’re willing to do the legwork and mindwork to get it.
I am willing to take one for the team here and prove once-and-for-all that money can buy happiness. All I need is a pile of money and I’ll show you.
It may not make one happy, but it does make one more secure, and if you don’t have to worry about the cost of things, you can focus on those things that really do make you happy, whatever they are.
Money DOES buy happiness… to a point. That is, if one is struggling to make ends meet, or if one has some fairly reasonable desires but can’t meet them, it can. Having to choose which bills to pay and worrying about whether one can make rent is incredibly stressful, for those who’ve been there, they know that, and for those who haven’t, I’m sure you can imagine it. Even to a certain extent beyond meeting basic needs, it can to slightly lesser effect. That is, having a beater car that just goes from A to B but doesn’t even have working AC or a stereo really kind of sucks but even having something slightly nicer can make a real difference, especially if one spends a lot of time in a car. Spending a little bit more on things that are important to oneself can be meaningful. Or, hell, just having enough of a cushion that one isn’t living from paycheck to paycheck and a bit of peace of mind about knowing if something bad does happen makes a difference too.
But even that isn’t all that much more than meeting the bare minimum, I think even many people might argue that, in many ways, those sorts of things are included. After that, it really doesn’t do much. It’s still a resource, and it’s nice to be able to go out with friends, see a movie, take a trip, whatever, but it’s utility toward increasing happiness drops incredibly sharply and, really, at that point it’s not so much the money as how it’s being used. After all, one could just as easily spend that money on drugs or stuff that you won’t care about a week later and it does nothing, but on the other side taking a trip to a place you’ve always wanted to see is a memory that lasts a lifetime. And, similarly, I find that it really is the simplest things for me, like spending time with people that matter to me, good music, whatever, that brings me the most joy.
Friends and family are always lumped together and something I’ve come to realize is that that isn’t really the best way to approach it. If you have crappy friends, they’re going to do little or nothing to make you happy, or even make you miserable. Similarly, if you have a dysfunctional family, time with them can be miserable. A phrase that’s really come to be meaningful to me is that “friends are the family you choose”. These are the people whose company I generally enjoy, those whom I trust, those who have my back and I have theirs, and we bring out the best in each other. People that were “friends” but made me miserable, I’ve dropped or reduced my interaction with them to a point where they don’t, and those that mean something to me and bring me joy, I’ve stayed connected or increased my connection with them.
And the same goes with family, just because someone is related doesn’t make it a good relationship to spend a lot of time and energy on. I have family that are also friends or, as that isn’t exactly how I might describe my relationship to them, they’re still people I care about deeply and want to spend time with. Similarly, I have family with whom I have nothing in common or who are even outright toxic to my own health and forcing myself to be in their presence for the sake of “family first”. That’s not to say one should cut off family, unless perhaps they’re extremely toxic or dangerous, but they don’t HAVE to be above other relationships just because they share a tiny fraction more genetic material with me than someone else.
In the end, after basic needs, I feel that relationships ARE the basis of real happiness and joy, but it’s all about the quality of those relationships. If one surrounds oneself with people that lift you up, life just starts to get better and better. Without a doubt, cutting off just a couple people that I’d come to realize weren’t good for me made a mountain of difference, and fostering a couple friendships that I’d come to feel were good for me made just as much.
The absence of aggravation is not the same thing as happiness. A ton of money can free you from the annoyance of a boss and creditors. Cutting all the relationships out of your life will remove all the relationship-based drama. But what do you have after that? An empty life with no purpose that makes no impact on the world.
“Money doesn’t buy happiness” is a trite expression, usually said by people who either have no money or have no understanding what money represents. Money may not buy happiness, but it’s nice to receive a lot of money as evidence that your hard work and efforts are successful and appreciated. That’s why someone who becomes extremely wealthy as a result of being an entrepreneur, artist or through professional excellence enjoys it more and seems happier than someone who is simply handed a windfall or inherits it.
It’s even better if you have positive relationships with people who can share in your success.
I think that the curve of sheer wealth-related happiness follows a logarithmic curve, in that it rises really steeply as wealth increases, and then flattens out past a certain point.
Having money makes you happier, up to a point, because you’re progressively freed from worries about making ends meet, you start having spare cash to fund activities, etc…
But past a certain point, and it becomes more subtle- buying a Yeti cooler instead of an Igloo one, or a Milwaukee drill instead of a Ryobi (as a homeowner), or getting All-Clad pans instead of Farberware for your kitchen. Or staying at the Hotel Intercontinental when you visit Budapest, instead of the Best Western (yes, there are Best Westerns in Budapest) You’re not getting something new- you’re just getting a “better” version of what you already have, or could get. This doesn’t, IMO, make you much happier, even though it costs you more.
I think with money it’s pretty simple: the more you have the happier you will be. At some point this levels off a lot, so $30k on top of $30k makes a huge difference, $30k on $60k not as much and $30 on top of $1m barely registers.
And maybe you “can’t buy happiness” but it’s sure a lot more comfortable to be unhappy with $100k in the bank than being unhappy AND penniless.
With relationships it can go either way: bad ones can ruin your life, while good ones can make your life a lot better.
But there’s a lot of evidence that after either good or bad fortune people pretty much go back to an average (for them) happiness level. So I guess the way to be happy is to avoid things that continue to annoy you on a daily basis and don’t forget to engage in activities you enjoy.
People also tend to be extremely bad at predicting what will make them happy. Not sure if that means you should preemptively give up on your dreams because they won’t make you happy anyway…
I think it’s a combination of getting yourself out from whatever money related issues that are making you unhappy, and then at some higher income point, the happiness to be gained by engaging in activities that takes a certain amount of spare cash levels out, and you have to have some other things that make you happy.
Somewhere in the middle, there’s probably a point where an increase in income probably does increase happiness by enabling more fun activities.
But unless you’re Scrooge McDuck and swim in a giant pile of money, it’s the activities that money enable that make you happy, not the money itself.
If you have a set of things which do make you happy, and you can afford them, then money enables that, but more money doesn’t make you any more happy. And deciding what makes you happy and getting it is different than hoping that getting things will make you happy.
It depends on what you get out of money and relationships.
Money does buy happiness, until you reach middle class/upper middle class status. At that point more money doesn’t matter. However this could be cause/effect too. If you are poor you will have money stresses. But if you are poor you also may have other issues in your life (bad decision making skills in general) that contribute to a more negative life experience. The majority of people in prison come from poor backgrounds for example. Basically a lack of money could be a symptom of a shitty life as much as a cause, and the lack of happiness vs income is just an unrelated and uncorrelated effect of bad luck and bad decision making.
Relationships are important to happiness though. However those are meaningful relationships. Friends who visit when you are sick, a romantic partner who sticks with you through thick and thin, people who understand and accept you on a deep and intimate level. Feeling like you are an accepted and productive member of your community.
Relationships in the sense of having a lot of romantic suitors, having status, being attractive, etc does not make you happy. Relationships that are I-it do not contribute to happiness.
I’m basing all this on what I learned back when I used to study positive psychology about 10 years ago.
The secret of success and happiness is to get away with all the dumb things you’ve ever done. There’s a lot of luck involved there, but you can learn to be prudent and frugal, improving your chances of soft landings.
Someone said you need two things, in order to have happiness and contentment. Money, health and love. Any two will do, and make up for the shortfall in the third one. So if you have health and love, you can get by nicely with very little money.
I’m willing to volunteer for an experiment. I’ll take a “happiness” test today, and then you send me $5 million and I’ll take a “happiness” test three months later.
If you go by research, one of the most significant factors in a person’s individual happiness is the quality of their relationships. Money is only relevant (again, statistically) up to the point it allows you to cover your needs. The more money you have, the smaller the effect size for happiness. My theory for this is that the more money you have, the more it has the potential to screw with your relationships, hence affect one of the single most fundamental happiness factors.
I am related by marriage to a great number of ridiculously wealthy people. I grew up poor and it’s still culture shock to hang out with them, but it’s fairly typical for the average family event to have about thirty people, with the birthday parties and weddings ranging from one hundred to two hundred people, and we are among just a handful of people attending these functions who are not ourselves wealthy. We have been given advantage just by association… about ten years ago they took about thirty of us on a two-week European cruise and paid for everything… except I had to buy six formal gowns to attend the required black tie events, which is something they took for granted that everyone going would already have. It was such a surreal experience, I felt like I had won a game show. I’m just trying to give you a sense of the level of opulence I’m talking about here. These people have the financial means to make anything they want happen at any moment.
Are they happy? God no. A huge part of his family’s culture is to avoid anything unpleasant and present a facade of perfect happiness, so naturally everybody is miserable and the level of dysfunction rivals that of my own family. There is no ‘‘down time’’ in these families, every event is a formal event, if you are a seven year old boy you wear a suit and tie to Thanksgiving dinner, if you are a four-year-old girl you wear a formal dress and a pound of makeup. If you are a man your job is to look powerful, if you are a woman your job is to look perfect, even if you have to snort coke to do it. Being wealthy is a full-time job. The ones that aren’t miserable tend to be happy at the expense of others. The difference is when you have that kind of money, you can afford to fuck your life up in ways that poor people could only dream of. I’ve also seen some of them claw their way from their misery to a place of peace and belonging – and it ALWAYS involves improving the quality of their relationships. Whenever I’m in a room full of them, I feel like the luckiest person in the world. I will never forget his billionaire great uncle telling me that the secret to life is to accept that you’re always going to be unhappy. (A little Zen wisdom there, but sad nonetheless.)
I’ve never put much stock in money as a panacea but having witnessed the miserable lives of so many wealthy people, I’m more convinced than ever that it’s not that relevant. I have no desire whatsoever to have that kind of money. The irony is someday we’ll probably inherit a lot of it. But when we do, I swear we will do everything in our power to be worthy of it, to rise to the honor, to make use of it not just for ourselves but for the communities that need it. We have chosen to embrace an entirely different set of values but that doesn’t mean money is worthless.
Only if you take the ‘‘happiness’’ test three years later when all of your relationships have been destroyed and you don’t know who your real friends are.
My father always said that money doesn’t buy happiness, but what it does do is: “give you the freedom to pursue things you want and like. And that can in turn bring you happiness.” Whether that’s getting a higher education, pursuing a hobby, traveling or anything else that you desire. He wasn’t much of a father most of the time, but that is something that I remember thinking about. And for me, it rings true most of the time.
)One has to apply it to get something. So understanding Organic Chemistry really doesn’t help until you apply it to something like separating crude oil, which provides energy to various appliances and creating petrochemicals.