Why do some wealthy humans become more increasingly miserable as they prosper?
Thursday, November 23, 2023. I love research about humans and prosperity… Happy Thanksgiving!
A higher income is associated with greater happiness for most humans, researchers have concluded after a decade-long knock-down, drag out disagreement, unusual in the annals of social science..
Here’s the scoop on the research:
For about 80% of humans — (these who are humans who already relatively happy) — the higher their income, the happier they report feeling about their lives.
However, for about 20% of humans, a higher income was actually linked to lower levels of happiness. I saw how this worked once. A woman once told me that her ex-husband lamented the tax complexities of his recent inheritance of 3 million dollars.
The researchers also discovered that there is no maximum income above which the link between happiness and income uncouples (previously researchers believed to be approximately $75,000 to $100,000 per year).
In contrast, for humans who start off unhappy, a higher income does not make them happy.
For this 20% of humanity, a higher income might actually render them more miserable.
The money and happiness kerfuffle…
The conclusions come from a study trying to resolve a long-running debate about the connection between money and happiness.
Briefly, in this corner, researchers found that the maximum income for optimal happiness is between $60,000 and $75,000 (sometimes this figure is a wee bit higher).
In the other corner, different researchers found that well-being related to income does not level-off at around $75,000 a year as previous studies have found.
Instead, it keeps increasing in proportion to income.
So, both sides came together to duke it out!
The latter relationship was declared the winner by the mutually agreed arbiter, Professor Barbara Mellers, one of the study’s co-authors.
Dr. Matthew Killingsworth, the study’s first author, said:
“In the simplest terms, this suggests that for most people larger incomes are associated with greater happiness.
The exception is people who are financially well-off but unhappy.
For instance, if you’re rich and miserable, more money won’t help.
For everyone else, more money was associated with higher happiness to somewhat varying degrees.”
Do happy people simply enjoy their prosperity more?
The key, then is what your baseline level of happiness in your nervous system before we consider the issue of money.
For the least happy humans among us, this new research explains that money earned past $100,000 per year will have little if any impact on happiness.
For those humans with average to middling levels of happiness, more money is linearly associated with greater happiness.
However, for those humans born with sunny dispositions, manifesting the highest levels of happiness, more money has an increasing link to greater happiness — in other words, the association accelerates.
Here’s my question…do happier people enjoy clearer values, and therefore understand how to spend their money to produce greater contentment?
The reason both sides of the debate were unable to resolve their differences was because neither had realized that money has this incredibly differentiated association with happiness depending on how happy the humans in question were already!
Not the universal secret to happiness…
None of this, though, means that money is a universal when it comes to happiness, surprising, but true.
The best this research can claim is that the associations found in this study are just that, associations: they do not prove that more money causes greater happiness, just that there is a link.
Dr. Killingsworth, a great thought leader in happiness studies, summed it up:
“Money is just one of the many determinants of happiness. Money is not the secret to happiness, but it can probably help a bit.”
Be well, stay kind, and Godspeed!… Happy Thanksgiving!
RESEARCH:
Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved
Matthew A. Killingsworth https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0290-1403 mattkil@upenn.edu, Daniel Kahneman, and Barbara Mellers https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9869-5880Authors Info & Affiliations
Edited by Timothy Wilson, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; received May 20, 2022; accepted November 29, 2022 March 1, 2023 120 (10) e2208661120 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
