6. Money Can’t Buy Happiness
Where it’s from: “Money buys everything, except morality and citizens.” — Jean Jacques Rosseau (1750).
What it means: That when you reflect on your life and what you’ve accomplished, it’s the relationships you’ve built and the moments where you appreciated the present that transcend dollar values and really mean something. Money won’t make you whole.
How it relates: This cliché is often used to keep people grounded, and to remind them that their friends and family matter more than a career that may be taking an undue burden on their life.
It’s also been used as a way for middle-and lower-class families to feel good about their current state and not push for too much. I believe this saying has a symbiotic relationship with religion in that it preaches humility and anti-materialism (good things), but also takes away some of your personal agency and willingness to change things. You can just tell yourself you’re lucky and leave things in God’s hands, when you should be pushing or voting for more and better things.
There’s nothing wrong with the simple life and there’s all sorts of anecdotal evidence supporting this cliché, or at least saying there’s a threshold (~$75,000/yr) where it stops buying happiness; but we’re going to ignore all of that because common sense says that money can buy happiness.
Modern society places tremendous financial burdens on people at all stages of life. If you grow up poor, everything from dinner to car payments will be stressful. But for everyone else there’s still hospital visits, retirement savings, braces, mortgages and rent payments, funerals, college tuition, and every type of compulsory insurance… AND THEN maybe you can have fun with whatever’s left (nothing, the average American family can’t even handle a $500 unexpected expense).
So given this, if you can buy your mom a home, fly anywhere you want whenever you want, and just basically do whatever you want to do, then wouldn’t you be happier too? Of course.
So if this cliché isn’t about money making us unhappy, what is it about?
It’s about the pursuit of money, and more specifically, the sacrifices people make to get it, the time you sacrifice for it. People pursue money precisely because it does buy happiness, or at least a relief from the stress that an increasingly unequal society places on every middle-and lower-class citizen.
When money doesn’t buy happiness, it’s because you’ve sacrificed the other things that bring value to human life. It’s not being rich that makes people unhappy, it’s forgoing friendships and relationships, family obligations and personal experiences in order to get rich, and, looking back, wishing that you hadn’t. What do you look back and laugh about?
When money doesn’t buy happiness, it’s because of something called marginal value, or the final level of satisfaction you feel with your life when considering the things you’ve done (and haven’t) and the things you have (and don’t have). It’s when you realize that you spent so much time at work your wife found someone else. It’s realizing that you’ve got all this money and no one to share that freedom with, or worse, no personality or identity because you were so focused on money.
Of course, money can add stress in ways; professional athletes are famous for trying to bring their friends up with them and instead falling back down from their collective weight. It’s a shame, because the motivations are right but the execution is sloppy. Sports leagues have gotten better about this and provide more financial advice now, a welcome development because these people are using their wealth the way everyone should — to make the world a better place.
For the rest of us, this cliché presents us with an option: do we take the necessary steps to create a society less dependent on financial wealth (via universal basic income or some other method)? Do we accept that it’s our individual duty to find the right balance for ourselves once we obtain a certain level of freedom from stress and financial uncertainty? Should you spend those free hours developing new skills or getting some leisure time? This cliché is a call to think about things in a broader, more reflective manner as we go about our lives, not when it’s too late.
