Happiness For Us Po Ain’t Always Money

As a recent study suggests: “We frequently overestimate just how much happiness money buys & might be happier if [we] focus on the best ways to use the money [we] have vs getting more of it.” Tell us about it …

But, first the problem most people would love to have. Or, exactly how much more money does the average Joe or Jane think they need to be happy … or, happier? A new study by financial services company Empower & related in a WSJ story puts the expected “happy state” between $65K and $350K, depending upon how high one’s median salary was in the first place. Yet, cautioned Elizabeth Dunn, a psych prof & researcher at British Columbia U, “The impact of [that] money on happiness isn’t as large as people typically assume … Happiness is determined by so many different factors that changing any one thing” might not be so golden after all.

Now, the nightmare scenarios. Human nature being what it is, cautions U of Penn’s fellow Matt Killingworth, the more we get the more we want. As Ian Fleming warned us in “The World Is Not Enough” (for James Bond anyway), the more baubles we acquire from our new-found wealth, the bigger the debt we tend to incur as well as the mushrooming costs of maintaining our new baubles & the magots we attract as if magnets. Oh, how more stressful life can become as one climbs the “Keep Up With the Jones’ Scale of Grief”. More mortgages, more potential squatters & fraudsters hovering around (at least, if you read the WSJ regularly.) Maybe that suggests the true meaning behind Italy’s “Po River,” which translated from it's Ligurian origins means “bottomless” … that is, perhaps that’s where all the “Po” aka “Poor People” live after being wealthy Lombard winery owners who drank themselves to oblivion because of bottomless financial problems they reaped upon getting rich off their product. Put another way on Thanksgiving 2023: Watch what you wish for & not only thank God for what you got but put it to best use.

Davd Soul