Surely you have heard the saying “Money can’t buy happiness” many times, and have heard many times that money can do a lot of things to make us happy. The story seems to depend on the point of view of life and thought of each of these individuals, but psychologists and economists have seriously searched for the answer.
In 2010, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist, theorized that there was a “happiness plateau” in terms of currency. When you hit your annual household income of $75,000, making more money doesn’t make you any happier.
Eleven years later, researcher Matthew Killingsworth published a study that countered Kahneman. He did surveys, research and came to the conclusion that happiness increases with income and there is no evidence of “divine money” for people to achieve satisfaction.
New studies confirm that having more money can improve our mental health
Now, the pair of experts have teamed up on a project known as “adversarial cooperation” and published a new study that has found that both are true. After all, though, Killingsworth was a little more right: for most people, making more money makes you happier.
New research by two leading experts has been carried out on a large scale and shows the result: the more money people have, the more satisfied they are. However, happiness only seems to increase gradually until household income reaches 100,000 USD (about 2.3 billion VND). After crossing this milestone, the feeling of happiness will suddenly level off. Then there will be some problems that money cannot solve.
For those in the “average happiness” emotional range, happiness increases in direct proportion to income but slows down after the $100,000 mark. And for people who are already very happy (possibly because of other factors besides finances), after reaching an income of 100,000 USD, their happiness is easy to increase even more. The study didn’t look at people with incomes above $500,000, so we still don’t know if space travel makes Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk feel truly fulfilled.
Either way, this research does say that you don’t need a sports car and private jet to be happy, but you still need shelter and stability, and those things are pretty expensive these days, too. difficult to achieve. Issues such as inflation, child-rearing costs, high housing and retirement costs, etc., are increasingly complex and increase the pressure on people of working age.
Unless you’re a billionaire living on a yacht with a team of chefs, bodyguards, and waiters, this is essentially the prevailing view of today’s society. Most people are well aware that we don’t need to be billionaires yet, that not having to deal with a cost of living crisis or the stress of monthly bills is good for our mental health.
Source: The Guardian