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February 09, 2005
Enough!
Here is an Interesting Study about wealth and happiness:
Research on how happiness relates to material wealth by psychologists Edward Diener, Ph.D., and David Myers, Ph.D., clearly documents that people are happier if they live in wealthy rather than poor nations. However, once individuals have enough money to pay for their basic needs of food, shelter, etc., money does relatively little to improve happiness. Further, increases in neither national economic growth nor personal income have much effect on changes in the personal happiness of citizens.
This makes sense, I doubt somehow that Bill Gates is several billion times happier than I am. On the other wrist, I can pretty much guarantee that I am happier than someone who has lived their entire life trying their utmost just to keep the roof over their head...
What I do question is whether we have a “consumer culture”
Psychological research goes further than this, however, by showing that people who “buy into” the messages of consumer culture report lower personal well-being.(Emphasis original)
I have to wonder here how many people who have “enough” keep striving for more, and how much unhappiness is being reported by those who don’t have “enough” and are striving for it. Also, how much unhappiness is brought about by the debt incurred to actually pay for “enough”? After all, if I can’t meet my credit card payment every month, I’ll probably be fairly miserable...
Posted by Andrew at February 9, 2005 09:27 AM
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