Happiness is related to money. It’s that simple, but with nuances. Some authors are quick to assert that “money is not everything” or that “it does not buy happiness.” The first we could accept, the second needs explanation. Having established the connection between salary and personal well-being, experts suggest that there are income levels and ranges to measure the extent to which this is true.
On the other hand, if money is happiness, to what extent does income affect it? Is there any income limit that cannot increase that happiness? A work published in the journal Nature reveals some curiosities. However, some psychologists, such as the American Charles Whitehead, remain skeptical about this issue and deny the conclusions of the study that we will discuss below.
Socially it is more than accepted that money does not buy happiness. What’s more, in 2010 a study from the University of Victoria (New Zealand) was published that stated, indeed, that money was equal to well-being but that, in no way, it was capable of “buying” a dose of happiness. In this study, almost 500,000 interviews were carried out from about 70 countries around the globe. The conclusions were that Freedom and free time are above accumulating wealth when it comes to providing well-being.
Some believe that this responded to an intentional study to calm the masses in times of economic crisis and a decline in the purchasing power of citizens worldwide. To put it some way, this study was an emotional relief for those groups that were convinced that Bill Gates and Amancios Ortega lived happier lives.
Well, they weren’t so wrong. Another joint study between Harvard University and Columbia (USA) contradicts the research of their ocean colleagues. It’s more of a semantic question. Money doesn’t buy happiness, true, but it does. helps to be able to invest in it in free time. What unequivocally distinguishes happy people from unhappy ones is the time variable. If we have a good income and know how to manage leisure time with our working life, we can have many more possibilities of being happy, while the population with less money has to accept precarious jobs of many hours or moonlight in order to survive.
The problem is that the other way around, the same thing doesn’t happen. If we have little money but a lot of free time we will not be able to invest in our well-being, we do not have enough resources to be able to take advantage of free hours. The logic is this: time without obligations minimizes the effects of stress and anxiety, which increases happiness.
The limits between the relationship of money versus happiness
To determine the correlation between happiness and money, American sociologists and human behavior researchers Andrew T. Jebb, Louis Tay, Ed Diener and Shigehiro Oishi conducted their study using the Gallup method. The Gallup Organization is specifically responsible for measuring, analyzing and studying the behavior of individuals to resolve issues that concern society in general.
Having chosen the Gallup World Poll, the authors relied on a panel of 2 million people from around the world, controlling demographic factors that determine income by area in which data collection is carried out, in a random manner to reduce as much as possible. any type of bias. Once the study was completed, an clarifying result was obtained: there is a threshold beyond which earning more money does not provide more happiness. This limit ranges between $60,000 and $90,000 annual. Figures that exceed that amount are incapable of generating more happiness or emotional stability.
As it is an extremely complex topic to draw exact conclusions, each author who intervenes in this type of study or research tries to collect different variables and statements to support a more realistic thesis. To this end, both Elizabeth Dunn, a research collaborator at Columbia University, and Louis Tay, agree that the time factor is the mother of all unknowns.
A parallel study was carried out to be able to specify this thesis. With a smaller number of participants, just over a thousand of them (and only in the United States), well-off people, multimillionaires and people from the middle or lower middle class were grouped together, and more than half of those surveyed said no. know the advantage of investing in reducing stress by relieving yourself of other responsibilities that means having more time for themselves.
