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Can an increase in wealth directly influence happiness levels, Shows an…

- - - - HOWEVER, Money comes and goes. Many people have times where they have a hefty amount of wealth and then go to having only the clothes on their back – if money is what defines you in that moment, your life would have come to an end.
  - - - Wealthy children may be more troubled.
        
        Wealthier children tend to be more distressed than lower-income kids, and are at high risk for anxiety, depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, cheating, and stealing. Research has also found high instances of binge-drinking and marijuana use among the children of high-income, two-parent, white families
        
        Although, children who are more poor tend to be involved in more crime such as robbery or gang violence as a means to make money or cope with their rough childhood.
        
        A number of studies have found that affluent children are more vulnerable to substance abuse issues, potentially because of high pressure to achieve and isolation from parents.
      - Wealth can cloud moral judgement.
        
        Drivers of luxury cars were four times less likely than those in less expensive vehicles to stop and allow pedestrians the right of way. They were also more likely to cut off other drivers
    - - This is quite farfetched but can just show how the idea of money, real or not, can have real effects on our demeanour and attitude towards how we think and feel.
        Can it somewhat be linked to real life wealth??
    - - Social and business value
        ‘A 2004 study proved that money alters how you value your time and effort. Researchers James Heyman and Dan Ariely created an experiment by which they could measure how motivated a person was to complete a task based upon money. Subjects were asked to drag circles across a computer screen. One group was asked to do this as a “favour.” Another group was asked to do it for $0.50, and the last group was offered $5. After timing the subjects, it was actually the group asked to perform the task as a favour that did it the fastest. Next was the $5 group, and last was the $0.50 group’
        they found that the two motivations for completing a task was social value and then Monetary value, both things which increase your happiness
      - Ethics
        
        A 2012 study published in an issue of “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America” asked if wealth and perception of a higher class could increase an individual’s involvement in unethical behaviour.
        
        From cutting off another vehicle at a stop sign, to cheating at a game, to taking more candy than offered, the wealthiest subjects were those most likely to break the rules, even when a researcher indicated that taking more candy would result in less for children
      - Addiction
        Earning money can be very addictive for some individuals. That high of a big check or a well-padded savings account can become the sole purpose of a wealth-searcher’s life, as warned by Dr. Tian Dayton, a clinical psychologist. She warns that the positive feeling that follows obtaining money can cause a chemical reaction in the brain that feels good. In turn, it can result in a severe preoccupation with money and put a strain on relationships outside of those that relate to earning more.
  - - - In this instance i am referring to drug abuse that is common among those young Hollywood stars or more profoundly young rappers who turn to substance abuse to cope with their busy lives.
      - over time, as shown by many examples, they can overdoes and lose their lives, which originally sprouted from their fame and money that sprung onto them
        Of course it is not entirely the fault of money or fame, perhaps the people surrounding them, however the influence that having money has over someone and their spending on things such as substances cannot be ignored.
  - - - HOWEVER(POSITIVE OF MONEY)The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and their partners are credited with saving over 122 million lives through their childhood vaccination programmes, and nearly eradicating several tropical diseases. The massive fortune that Elon Musk received from the sale of PayPal has allowed him to start companies he believes can help save the planet from climate change and explore space.
  - - - He intimated a toxic childhood and an abusive parent (a common theme in the biographies of addicts).
      - He revealed the exhilaration (a well-known symptom of dopamine release) at the power that money provided him.
      - He admitted that he abused money like he abused alcohol and cocaine — to feel better about himself.
      - he would do anything, including bringing harm to others, to amass more cash. A typical addict, he didn’t care as long as he could have more.
- - - - Many lottery winners experience what Pagliarini calls "the honeymoon stage of sudden wealth." He wrote in Forbes that winning such a large sum of money is an unsustainable high, and that winners should not let the prize money dictate how their lives change.
      - can completely change the lives of a struggling low income family as now they have the means to support the family and have the money to move foward.
    - - Lottery winners must be prepared for friends who want to benefit from their newfound wealth.
        
        in some cases people see a profound change in their social relationships, as people become friends with people to gain not their friendship, but a slice of their wealth - with relationships being a proven source of genuine happiness, this could change a lot for a persons happiness.
      - With such a vast amount of credit available to them, winners sometimes opt to make purchases using credit rather than use cash and overspend - this leads to them becoming broke over time as their wealth isn't supported by steady income, making them worse off than before.
      - Coming into a substantial amount of money can also mean being thrust into the spotlight — some states require you to publicly announce your winnings.
        
        It's likely you might never enjoy anonymity again — which is partly why Pagliarini suggests hiring a financial team to help with the flood of media attention. And in addition to media attention, you might be bombarded with money requests from investors and scammers
        ^ a once private happy life turning into torment.
    - - This is partially because of what’s become known as the hedonic treadmill, or hedonic adaptation, that annoying tendency humans have to get used to the things that once made them happy.
  - - - this can be very helpful in the essay as it is 3 studies that show that money does have an influence on happiness, but not direct spending on oneself but another person.
        More of the kind act which gives the happiness rather than the money spent?
        Also shows how relationships are vital for happiness, supported possibly by funding of money ( gifts, presents ect )
  - - - For this research, Killingsworth collected 1.7 million data points from more than 33,000 participants who provided in-the-moment snapshots of their feelings during daily life:
      - Through an app he created called Track Your Happiness, people recorded this a few times each day, with check-in times randomized per participant. To measure experienced well-being, each check-in asked them, “How do you feel right now?” on a scale ranging from “very bad” to “very good.” At least once during the process, participants also answered the question, “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?” on a scale of “not at all” to “extremely.” This measured evaluative well-being’
      - he stated that - “When you have more money, you have more choices about how to live your life. You can likely see this in the pandemic. People living paycheck to paycheck who lose their job might need to take the first available job to stay afloat, even if it’s one they dislike. People with a financial cushion can wait for one that’s a better fit. Across decisions big and small, having more money gives a person more choices and a greater sense of autonomy.” ‘
      - From this information, Money is said to make you happier by allowing you to have more freedom/control over your life. Means that if you don’t have as much money, the constant worry over what to spend it on or how much you can spend makes you unhappy and possibly stressed compared to having to not worry about how much you can spend because you have a large source to take from – direct influence on happiness.
      - Only issue with this is it is a subjective point of view - meaning that it is not factual that having more money increases the amount of free time you have
        Just because you have more money doesn't mean that you work any less, perhaps you work even harder and it could lessen the time you have
        Overall, it is mostly the opportunity for free time and control over your life that money gives you. This sprouts from having enough money to spend on vacations, better education for your kids and better gifts or presents, which could enhance the connections someone has with their family, increasing their happiness.
  - - - Therefore, Money does not buy happiness, because the fleeting nature of happiness leaves people unable to understand what does cause happiness’
  - - - Economic growth in the last decades in most economically developed societies has been accompanied by little rise in SWB, and increases in individual income led to variable outcomes
- - - - Gives us numerous opportunities, food, drink, holidays and the means to give gifts and spend money on others to possibly strengthen relationships.
      - On the surface level, money should make us more happy, as surely there is a difference in the happiness of someone who is in poverty without money to someone who is rich and lives like a king.
        ^ only real difference being how much money each party owns, therefore surely it effects how happy you are.
      - From first JSTOR - ‘Money can take away some of the pain of life. Even if money does not make people happy, it seems to make people less unhappy’
      - ‘The more money one has, the more easily one can afford to spend time on those activities that ought to bring us pleasure, The more money one has, the more easily one can afford to purchase those products and services that ought to bring us pleasure’
      - EXPERIENCE FROM MANY RICH PEOPLE
        
        Steve Siebold is author of "How Rich People Think," and a self-made millionaire who has interviewed more than 1,200 of the world's wealthiest people.
        
        HEALTH -Wealth gives you far better access to world-class healthcare, preventive medicine, and alternative treatments. If you need a specific cutting-edge procedure that's not available where you live, you simply fly to a place that offers it.
        
        Furthermore, reason why being rich makes you healthier is the elimination of the biggest stressor of the masses: money. The wealthy don't have sleepless nights worrying about paying their bills.
        
        FAMILY - If you love your family, get rich and give them more of your time, plus opportunities only money can buy. ‘Don't listen to people who say money leads to dysfunctional families. Dysfunctional families were dysfunctional before money entered the scene; it's just that money magnifies whatever it touches’
        
        FRIENDS - You gain far more friends than you lose when you get wealthy, money opens up the world to you. You'll have the time and resources to travel, meet almost anyone you want, and gain access to the inner circle of some of the most successful, interesting people in the world. Wealth will bring you more opportunity to make friends than anything else in the world.
    - - recent research has shown that the richest country on the planet, the USA, is slowly getting less pleased with life
        
        Could have very little to do with money, as they are many other factors that could be getting worse to cause this, however it does contradict one of the central assumptions of modern society that money equals pleasure.
      - To answer why money may not be making us happy, an article i have found talks about the idea of ‘experience stretching’
        because money allows us to enjoy the best things in life - we can stay at expensive hotels and eat exquisite sushi and buy the nicest gadgets - we decrease our ability to enjoy the mundane joys of everyday life
        
        STUDY: The psychologists gathered 351 adult employees of the University of Liège, from custodial staff to senior administrators, for an online survey The scientists primed the subjects by showing them a stack of Euro bills before asking them a bunch of questions which attempted to capture their "savouring ability."
        Interestingly, the scientists found that people in the wealth condition - they'd been primed with all those Euros - had significantly lower savouring scores. This suggests that simply looking at money makes us less interested in relishing the minor pleasures of life
        
        The psychologists stated that ‘our findings provide evidence for the provocative notion that having access to the best things in life may undermine one’s ability to reap enjoyment from life’s small pleasures. Our research demonstrates that a simple reminder of wealth produces the same deleterious effects as actual wealth on an individual’s ability to savour, suggesting that perceived access to pleasurable experiences may be sufficient to impair everyday savouring’
        
        the feeling of once taking gratification in the small things perhaps when you were a child disappears for some when they come into possession of this wealth, making people more spoilt.
        BRAINSTORM: Could take this deeper going into the meaning of spoilt which is to diminish or destroy the value or quality of something, so basically the little things that once gave you pleasure have become diminished in quality to the person of wealth, as what they have is to good for it or greater than, but what happens when that becomes over saturated?
        This is mostly waffle but could be interesting to go into.
        
        Henry David Thoreau is famous for retreating to a cabin near Walden pound and writing a book about his experiment of living a simple, self-sufficient life in the wilderness.
        ^ His time in the woods showed him the benefits of living simply, such as how much humanity can gain by spending more time in nature and how getting away from material pleasures can help us live a fuller life – indicates that we don’t need money or fancy things to make us happy
        
        this shows the life of someone who has not had the abundance of wealth to overshadow the little pleasures in life, contradiction to those who have money and do not take pleasure in the small things.
      - Why chasing money alone won’t make you happy
        Many people think that if they can just attain that “ultimate” financial goal, their problems will be solved
        
        If money equalled happiness, lottery winners would be the happiest people on the planet. Instead, lottery winners are mire likely to declare bankruptcy within three to five years than the average American.
        
        -Money alone will never be enough. Having money as a goal won’t fill you up, it is not a destination but a tool.
        
        Money can’t change how you think about yourself. If you’re not proud of who you are, money won’t change that. If you don’t believe in yourself, money will fail you there, too.
        
        Money alone doesn’t give you a sense of purpose
        .
        ^ According to Steve Taylor, Ph.D., author of Out of the Darkness, “The need for purpose is one the defining characteristics of human beings. Human beings crave purpose and suffer serious psychological difficulties when we don’t have it. Purpose is a fundamental component of a fulfilling life.”
    - - ‘the life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful for the sake of something else’ – Aristotle, nicomachean ethics
      - Epicurus believed that
        
        ‘Rather than accumulating wealth, one should try and live a simple life and find joy in things like friends, the pleasures of work, and philosophy’ - like Thoreau in some respects.
      - Schopenhauer believed that ‘wealth is like sea-water: the more we drink the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.’
    - - Dorothee Loorbach in 2016 lost a lot of money due to being taxed for her glory days
        
        -all she had left were some coins and her material possessions and couldn’t even afford to bake her daughter a cake or give her anything for her birthday.
        
        ^also became anxious and worried all the time about not having enough money and being a failure.
        
        -However, she then decided to attempt to go from rock bottom to a fortune in 6 months, and succeeded becoming an entrepreneur.
        
        -This experience taught her how important money was in her life and worrying about money doesn’t allow you to take care of yourself or anything, decreasing your happiness and freedom.
        
        -she learnt that she also needed to value herself more as at the time she only valued herself based on her wealth, not on her being; changed how she valued herself.
  - - - data/graphs regarding positive feelings vs income
      - data/graphs regarding negative feelings vs income
      - ^ positive feelings go up with income, negative feelings go down with income
      - Implies that money makes you have less negative feelings and more positive feelings = happiness.
      - Experienced and evaluative well being vs income
      - Control over ones life vs income
- - - - -
        
        1.Psychological wealth is more than money. It is also your attitudes, goals and engaging activities at work.
        
        Happiness not only feels good, but is beneficial to relationships, work and health.
        
        It is helpful to set realistic expectations about happiness. No one is intensely happy all of the time.
        
        Thinking is an important aspect to happiness. His theory of Attention, Interpretation, and Memory (AIM) helps people to increase their psychological wealth.
        
        While income is not highly correlated with happiness, Diener has found that social relationships are
        
        “The most salient characteristics shared by the 10% of students with the highest levels of happiness and the fewest signs of depression were their strong ties to friends and family and commitment to spending time with them.” (‘Very Happy People,” Psychological Science 2002)’ :
        
        Things that truly make you happy tend to be things which don't have to do with the amount of wealth you have obtained; although it can be argued that wealth is the finalising factor, without these social relationships there would be no meaning to have an abundance of wealth as there would be no reason/motive to earn all the money for.
        
        this research shows that social relationships are a huge factor to what makes us happy.
        How money relates to that can be discussed later in essay but is interesting just to point out from the start what factor in society influences our happiness the most, and it seems this can be argued to be the most pivotal one
        I would also argue without social relationships, what would we have money to spend on apart from ourselves, and it is proven by a study which will be mentioned that the most pleasure obtained by money spending is from spending on others.
    - - One of the most quoted facts about happiness from psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky goes as follows
        
        50% of happiness is determined by your genes.
        
        10% of happiness is determined by the circumstances in which you live.
        
        40% of happiness is determined by your actions, your attitude or optimism, and the way you handle situations.
        
        However, it should be argued that there is no comfortable formula for happiness. What we can say, is that our genes play an important role in determining happiness. But so do other factors, including our circumstances, environment, and our actions. Happiness is not a hard science. It is a way too complex phenomenon to quantify.
        
        Moreover a person could on the formula be stated to be unhappy, but they personally believe that they are happy, which shows that it should simply be left at an idea rather than a valid formula
      - The Happiness formula from Martin Seligman.
        
        It’s the sum of three factors: one’s genetic set-range for happiness (S), their life circumstances (C), and factors under their voluntary control (v)
        H = S + C + V
        
        S – apparently, according to this blog, about 50% of your happiness is completely out of control because it depends on your genes. Surely this would mean some people are destined to be unhappy because of their genes? They have no way to be happy as they genes determine it?
        
        according to Seligman, we have a set range of happiness towards which we naturally gravitate. This set range is what’s keeping your level of happiness from increasing; only helped by the variables of C and V
        
        C and V are variables which you can change to make you happier, C more about your surroundings and V more about yourself. C making up 10% and V making up 40%.
      - BRAINSTORM: These formulas are very interesting as they are results of a lot of scientific research into what makes us happy, so in that sense can be quite a viable/reliable source to look at what makes us truly happy
        However, happiness is too complex for some vague formula which only takes into account 4 factors, and both formulas are quite similar in terms of what percentages they think make up happiness.
        it is also quite interesting to see that Seligman thinks that 50% of our happiness is out of our control, so that only gives us 50% of things to work with to make us more happy.
        ^ this can be quite a depressing thought as perhaps if we already have poor happiness from genes, and also have not the right circumstances or situational relationships we want, what is there really to do to make us happy?
        If we have or eventually come to the point where we dictate our happiness via a 'formula', then we will ever truly be happy if we have to ask some formula whether we are happy. Happiness should come from within and ourselves, dictated by ourselves and worked on by ourselves, not from a formula which may only be applicable to a small population. There are 7 billion + people on the planet, how on earth can this apply to every single one of our differentiated species.
    - - ‘true’ or ‘real’ happiness. To be truly happy, a person’s sense of contentment with their life needs to come from within – happiness is internal.
      - Aspects of true happiness are acceptance, appreciation and understanding the transience of life.
      - ^with this one can go through the good and bad short-term periods or long term periods of their lives, accepting change and appreciating those around them and the opportunities that they are given.
      - However, the blog goes onto say that Wealth and satisfaction with income are big causes to making people happy. This is couples with having friends and social relationships, sense of community and religion which are strong causes to happiness.
      - Interestingly, ‘Lykken & Tellegen (1996) found that stable temperamental tendencies (those that are inherited genetically) contribute up to 50% in the total variability in happiness. This research found that many personality factors – extraversion, neuroticism – as well as self-esteem, optimism, trust, agreeableness, repressive defensiveness, a desire for control, and hardiness all play a part in how happy a person is’
        
        This links to the formulas from Seligman and Lyubomirsky
    - - ‘like all other living things, humans were designed by nature to survive and reproduce. If they get happy along the way, then that’s a bonus. If anything, feelings of happiness and unhappiness were shaped by natural selection to improve their chances of survival and reproduction’