Money and Happiness

A decade ago I lived on the east coast and longed to move to California and work for a hi-tech company. Back then if someone had written down my current situation on a piece of paper and asked me what I thought, I would have said it is more than what I dream for! However, now that I have all that, it does not seem all that exciting. Many of us have probably gone through similar experiences. This has often made me wonder what makes one happy.

Recently I came across this interview with Laura Rowley author of Money and Happiness: A Guide to Living the Good Life. She made some points during the interview that truly struck a chord in me.

First she said that studies have shown that a certain amount of money is needed for one to be happy. This seems intutive. If a person does not have enough money to even feed oneself and one's family, we can not expect that person to be happy. So some basic amount of money is necessary to be happy. There is no magical figure or formula to figure out how much this basic amount is. I suppose it depends on the cost of living in various parts of the world. However, it is possible to generalize and say that one should at least be able to feed one's family, provide them shelter, clothing and basic education and health care. The word basic is key here. Shelter does not imply a huge villa in a posh neighbourhood and we are not talking designer clothes here nor are wwe talking about gourmet food and ivy league education.

Laura point out that studies have shown that happiness does not rise in the same proportion as money. She also points out that we quickly adapt to improvement in our circumstances and then we want more - a concept described by Richard Easterland as Hedonic Treadmill.

I have come to believe that once a person's basic needs are met as described above, happiness is more of an attitude more than anything else. This is why we often find different people with approximately the same wealth with different levels of happiness. My son often says he can not imagine how my generation must have got by without video games, personal computers, theme parks etc. He actually feels sorry for me. However, I do not think his generation derives any more pleasures from the toys and activities they have at their disposal than the pleasure my generation got from the simple toays and games during our times. Growing up in a third world country, my family had much less material good than we have today. However, we were no less happy than we are now.


Laura makes another important point - Persuit of money or material goods as a primary goal has negative consequences on one's mental health. I also believe that putting a ceiling on desires is key to being happy. Every desire that is satisfied gives rise to two or more other desires and this vicious cycle goes on. Some feel that lack of desires leads to a dull life with no ambitions or goals. That is not what I am talking about, however. What I mean is aspiring to do ones best but not making one's happiness contingent on the results or rewards. Needless to say, this is a difficult feat to achieve but I believe we need to gradually train ourselves to do so.
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