“What will make me happy?” Since everyone wants happiness,
it would make sense to give this question some serious attention. But
my impression is that most people don’t really think about it
much, probably because most of us assume that we already know the answer.
Most people seem to take it for granted that getting whatever we happen
to want is what will make us happy: in other words, that happiness
means fulfilling our desires.
But it’s easy to see why this can’t be correct. The drug
addict, for example, wants his fix, but getting it won’t make
him happy. To the contrary, his only hope for happiness lies in learning
how to live without fulfilling that desire. (In philosophy, conflating
happiness with the pleasure of gratifying our desires is known as the
hedonistic fallacy).The example of the addict highlights the fact that
some of our desires lead to happiness and some to suffering. The ability
to discern the difference combined with the commitment to discipline
oneself to pursue only the positive desires are essential skills to
master if we want to be happy. Happiness is neither easy nor accidental;
achieving it requires discriminative wisdom.
And that brings me to the widespread belief that having more money
will make us happier. We are (even in the midst of the current recession)
the wealthiest civilization that has ever existed. Yet almost all of
us believe that we don’t have enough money, and assume that we’d
be happier if we had more. Fantasies of winning the lottery are probably
are probably almost as popular as sexual fantasies for conjuring up
pleasant pictures of our future happiness. We may say that money can’t
buy happiness, but that’s the kind of pious platitude that hardly
anybody takes seriously and almost no one really believes.
There’s
actually been a mountain of research on the subject of happiness, involving
more than a million subjects on five continents, and in recent years
psychologists have reviewed and summarized the findings. What does
the science actually demonstrate about the relationship between money
and happiness? First of all, and not surprisingly, it confirms that
destitution – meaning lack of the basic necessities
of food, shelter, clothing, sanitation, and medical care – is
misery. But it also reveals that, once we have these necessities,
further increases in affluence have little effect on how happy we
feel.
Since
World War II the gross domestic product per capita has tripled
in the United States. Today we travel more, have bigger homes, more
appliances, gadgets, and stuff of all kinds than any previous generation
of Americans. But our subjective sense of well-being, as measured
by surveys asking some variation of "Overall, how satisfied are you
with your life?" has hardly changed at all. The same is true in
other countries. Japan has had a huge rise in GDP per capita since
World War II, but measures of national happiness have stayed flat.
The same thing has been true in Western Europe during its long postwar
boom. After surveying the research on money and happiness, Ed Diener
of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Martin E. P. Seligman
of the University of Pennsylvania concluded "Although economic
output has risen steeply over the past decades, there has been no rise
in life satisfaction … and there has been a substantial
increase in depression and distrust."
One reason for this outcome may
be that more money increases material aspirations – the sense that there
are so many more cool things you just gotta have. For many of us, when
our affluence increases the result is that, like hamsters, we just run
faster and faster on the materialistic treadmill.
Do people become happier when they win the lottery? Surveys of winners
confirm that they do experience initial elation after winning, but
very soon the general sense of being alive returns to about what it
was before they won. Frequently the winners even became unhappier when
they quit their jobs and experience lost relationships and lost sense
of meaning and accomplishment; or when they are harassed by friends
and relatives who expect financial assistance.
Our delusions about money are surely no accident: there’s a huge
corporate investment, in the form of the advertising industry, in deceiving
us about the relationship between consumption and happiness. As Harvard
psychologist Daniel Gilbert wrote in his best-selling Stumbling on
Happiness "Economies can blossom and grow only if people are deluded
into believing that the production of wealth will make them happy … Economies
thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will strive
only for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly
believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being."
Now for the punch line: research does show that there is one way in
which money can reliably increase happiness. Several published studies
showed that money contributed to people’s subjective sense of
well-being when they gave some of it away. When they donated to charities
or gave some of their wealth as gifts to loved ones, there was a measurably
positive influence on their level of happiness. So the conclusion seems
to be that the materialistic treadmill of greed, acquisitiveness and
hoarding can’t increase your happiness -- but generosity can.