Basic
- Money brings happiness because it allows you to free yourself from some of the annoyances of everyday life.
- Happiness is not proportional to how much money you have.
Let’s set things right: Contrary to the old saying, money begets happiness. This is the conclusion made by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania (USA). According to them, money directly affects our level of happiness, and there is no extreme to stop this joy. The results of the study were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
To reach this conclusion, the researchers collected 1.7 million pieces of data from 33,000 participants between the ages of 18 and 65. In most past studies linking happiness with money, experimenters have focused primarily on evaluative well-being, which includes overall life satisfaction. Here, the researchers focused their study on evaluative well-being as well as experienced well-being, indicating how people are feeling in the moment.
Lightness of mind that gives him richness
With a specialized app developed for the study, called Tracking Your Happiness, participants were able to log their health multiple times a day. Among the questions that were asked, the researchers attempted to find out how people were feeling at the time, on a scale ranging from “very bad” to “very good.” In addition, at least once during the process, the participants also answered the question, “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life” on a scale from “not at all” to “highly”, for the sake of evaluative well-being.
To improve the results, the well-being assessed was divided into 12 specific emotions with five positive emotions (confidence, goodness, inspiration, concern, and pride) and seven negative emotions (fear, anger, bad, boredom, sadness, stress, and annoyance). “This process provided frequent snapshots of people’s lives, which collectively give us an interrupted composite of their lives.Matthew Keelingsworth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in human happiness and lead author of the study. Scientists often talk about trying to obtain a representative sample of the population. I was trying to get a representative sample of moments in people’s lives. “
Each participant’s average level of well-being was calculated and then analyzed based on their income. The goal here was to see if the result of the 2010 study on the topic was still relevant, meaning that the link between money and happiness ceased when the annual income of each family reached $ 75,000.. “It is a convincing possibility, the idea that money does not matter after that point, at least because of what people feel at any point. Analysis by Matthew Keelingsworth. But when I looked at a wide range of income levels, I found that all forms of luxury continue to increase with income. I don’t see any kind of bending in the curve, an inflection point where money ceases to matter. Instead, it keeps increasing. “
Money is not an end in itself
So instead of every dollar being equally important to every person, every dollar less important for high-income people. “You expect two people earning $ 25,000 and $ 50,000 respectively to receive the same difference in luxury as two people earning $ 100,000 and $ 200,000 respectively. In other words, the relative differences in income are of equal importance to everyone.” But that’s not the case: People who earn more money have been shown to be happier, in part, due to a heightened sense of control over life. Having a financial base allows us to isolate ourselves from the everyday concerns that can hold us back. As the amount of money grows, so does the feeling of control over life and independence.
However, it would be simplistic to think that having money makes you happy, because money brings it other limitations that people who do not have. “While money can be beneficial to happiness, I have found that people who equate money with success are less happy than those who do not.Matthew Keelingsworth. It also found that people who made more money worked longer and felt more time pressure. ” In fact, if money can approach the definition of happiness, there is only one way to access it, and income is just a small determinant. In short, going back to the aphorism in the introduction, money does not buy happiness, but rather contributes to it.