Can Money Buy Happiness?

Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy a certain degree of satisfaction, depending on how much wealth you have and how you spend it, says Darshan Goswami

Many people share a fairly common misconception. They believe that having lots of money can make you happy. The more money you have, the happier you can be. Others believe that having money is not spiritually or socially acceptable, and that money is the root cause of all evil. Are any of these beliefs really true? To answer this question, begin by asking yourself what money means to you and how you treat it when you have it? Here’s what science has to say.

The new science of happiness starts with a simple insight: human beings are never satisfied. In other words, once a person’s needs are met, additional income mostly goes towards satisfying wants, which, beyond a very initial level, doesn’t lead to additional happiness in life. A study of more than 12,000 people from various social and economic groups found no correlation between income and happiness. The single biggest culprit is that having money raises our aspirations about the happiness that we expect in our daily lives, and these raised aspirations can be toxic. While earning more money makes us happy in the short term, we quickly adjust to our new wealth—and everything that it buys us. More money can also lead to more stress and impairs our ability to enjoy those things.