Money and Happiness

‘Money makes the world go round.’ This famous saying seems to sum up the way this materialistic world we live in works. You cannot survive comfortably in our world today without having it. We need it to buy the basic essentials (needs) of life: food, clothing, shelter etc. This is how it begins to tie into happiness. How can you be happy if you are starving or living on the streets? Once you have enough money to pay your rent and buy food and clothing, logically, you would be satisfied. However, we then choose to go one step higher. Why would you dine at McDonalds when you could eat at a fancy restaurant? Who would shop at an Op Shop when you could buy Prada? And who would live in a tiny house overlooking the freeway, when you could have a mansion overlooking the sea?

So, we aim to make more and more money to buy bigger and better things. Studies have shown, however, that once you have enough money to be comfortably middle class, your happiness stops growing along with your pay. Along with increasing incomes comes increasing aspirations. Why should I stick with the holiday house on an exotic island in the pacific when I could have the entire island? I’ve got the Porsche now I want a plane. It’s a vicious cycle and most of us seem to be stuck in it.

In life, most people basically want to be happy. The problem is that people don’t know how to achieve that goal. If you can remember being happy when you went to Portsea last summer, then it’s logical enough to expect to be happy if you go this year as well. Then, once you enjoyed that holiday as well, why not buy a beach house up there. It is easy to see why people do this. However, when you’ve been to Portsea every weekend for the past few months, it begins to get a bit boring. A few months later and you never want to see the hole again. We, as humans, become bored very easily. We are not able to enjoy something if we do it too often.

Psychologists and other experts such as economists have been trying for years to work out a formula for happiness. Economists argue that people try to sell items for more and buy items for less, therefore meaning that we would rather have more money than less. If we want to have more money than less, it’s easy to conclude that it would make us happy. Psychologists will tell you however that the key to happiness is to surround yourself with friends and family, to take life slowly and to stop and smell the roses for awhile. People who work hard and earn lots of money probably tend to agree with the economist’s point of view more, while the people who have less money will most likely agree with the psychologist’s point of view. However, are any of these people really happy? Or are they both just trying to justify their way of lives to themselves.