“Money Can’t Buy Happiness” is Wrong
Money actually can buy happiness.
We hear stuff like “money can’t buy happiness” and “more money, more problems” and stuff like that all the time. It’s kind of incongruous in a country that pushes people to never be content with what they have. It’s always “climb the corporate ladder” or “turn your hobbies into side hustles,” get rich quick schemes and MLMs.
For whatever reason, we are encouraged to pursue money while simultaneously being comforted that more money won’t make us happy or solve our problems. On that, I call bullshit.
The majority of my problems right now can be solved with money. I’m not even mired in student loan debt or anything, I just have a lot of things that I need to get done, whether around the house or related to my health, that require money that I don’t have.
I just paid $73,000 to fix my house’s foundation. The bulk of that money came from refinancing the very house I was fixing, and I will be paying that for years, but I also had to pull $23,000 from my retirement fund to support part of it. I’m fortunate that I had that money available to me, but now it’s gone and won’t be coming back anytime soon.
More money would’ve solved that problem. Having money would also allow me to fix the various things that my foundation issues caused — the cracks in the walls, the tuckpointing in the brickwork, and a handful of other things that need to be done around the house. It would also allow me to replace a few things around here that need replacing, such as the hand-me-down furniture from my parents that we’re still using despite it being 20 years old and not matching our decor at all.
Some of these things sound nitpicky — why do we need furniture that matches our decor? Isn’t the stuff from my parents good enough for me, or am I just ungrateful? Yes, it would be nice to have better bookshelves, but is it really necessary?
Some of these things are not strictly necessary, no, but a lot of them are, and even those that aren’t still increase my general state of comfort and well-being. I’m not asking for a solid-gold toilet or anything, just some decent furniture that isn’t a hand-me-down.
That, I think, is the place where a lot of people go wrong. When people say “money can’t buy happiness,” they’re thinking of people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who have more money than they could ever spend and instead use it to shoot giant penises into space. For about 80% of the population, more money would be incredibly effective toward improving our well-being by solving a lot of the problems that being poor or living paycheck to paycheck creates.
Most of us don’t want to be super-rich or have endless wealth or anything like that. We want enough money to get by and be comfortable without having to worry about how to pay our bills or put food on the table. All most of us want is to simply be secure in the fact that everything will be cared for and we don’t have to worry about how we’re going to pay for it.
Money doesn’t necessarily buy happiness when it comes to having billions of dollars, but it does by comfort and security, and when you live a life of daily struggle, those things are happiness. Happiness for most of us isn’t having a megayacht or three mansions or whatever — it’s knowing that we can buy nice cheese and a latte now and then without worrying about how to pay for it.
There are plenty of studies that show that money buys happiness up to a certain point and that having a particular income level is where peak happiness occurs. The thing about that is when you make a certain amount of money, there is a solid chance that you can use that money to buy safety, security, and comfort without breaking yourself or your bank account. That amount depends on a lot of factors like where you live and how much debt you have, but eventually, you will reach a point where you can buy a safe, comfortable life for yourself and your family.
I am well aware that money cannot buy happiness — I’ve spent time around a couple of multimillionaires, and some of them weren’t happy even with the nice things that their money bought them. These were people who would never be happy with what they had and tried to buy their happiness by throwing money around.
On the other hand, the ones who really were happy didn’t try to buy it, they simply lived comfortably with their money and enjoyed a nice life. They traveled to where they wanted to go, owned houses that weren’t extravagant and unmanageable, and used their money to live comfortable if somewhat rich lives by most standards.
I think it is telling that, if you ask someone what they would do if they won the lottery these days, most will answer “pay off my debt and all of my friends’ debt” before anything else. I write a lot about how the American Dream is dying off, and I think this is one of the most telling signs of it: if most of us were to come into lots of money, our dreams are not “buy a big house” but rather “live debt-free.” We no longer seek extravagance, but simply comfort and stability, and money provides those things.
So yeah, money does buy happiness for most of us. It just comes in the form of the basic and mid-level needs that many of us don’t get to enjoy, along with a handful of simple pleasures we might not get to enjoy otherwise. It turns out that for the vast majority of people, true happiness comes not from nesting-doll yachts and launching ourselves into space on phallic rockets, but from knowing our bills are paid and an occasional nice meal out. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
Be well out there.
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What would you do if you won the lottery?