Can Money Buy Happiness?

A Sisyphean perspective sheds light on the age-old question of whether money can buy happiness.

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

During this unusual time, many people, including myself, may be starting to take a more introspective look at themselves and their lives, thinking about their choices and about bigger questions that might otherwise be neglected when we are preoccupied with ordinary life, whatever that is for us. One question that has been on the back burner of my mind for a while is that which forms the title of this piece. It’s a question that has plagued people perhaps ever since money was created. Maybe, even before that, ever since the possession of material goods began to have meaning. It asks whether having more material wealth, more things, or more capacity to obtain (buy) those things, can lead us to states of greater contentment, satisfaction, enjoyment, or whatever else we define happiness to mean.

Well, hidden in that question is an important point — in order for us to ask whether money can buy happiness, it is important to first define what happiness is, as we would with any other commodity. We wouldn’t, for example, walk into a confectionery shop asking for “something sweet”, possibly to a quizzical stare from an understandably confused sales assistant. We would ask instead for a specific type of sweet. Then the sales assistant would heave a sigh of relief and direct us to the appropriate shelf where stacks of said product were neatly lined up, ready for our choosing (and purchase).

Happiness means many different things to different people, at a range of different levels. At an experiential level, we deal in ideas such as “relaxation”, “popularity”, and “lack of stress”. These are all good feelings or experiences, but feelings alone are among the most difficult things to objectively measure. Perhaps we would do better to consider things at the biological level: there are a few chemicals inside our brains that are strongly associated with the broad feeling we call happiness: acetylcholine, dopamine, and serotonin. I won’t attempt to go into the function of each individual chemical here, but each has an important function in different areas of our lives, regulating our motivation to do things, bonding with our peers, and reinforcement of positive behaviour. But those who believe that the human brain is greater than the sum of its parts would vehemently object to us stopping there. Let us instead consider the spiritual or metaphorical level. Many people hold such thoughts as “lack of want”, “feeling at peace with ourselves”, or “contentment”, as goals to strive towards, feeling they will be happy when they achieve these states.

It is clear that there is no single agreed-upon definition of what it means to be happy, so one might argue that it is a difficult to question to answer. The real answer is, that all of this is relative, that there is no wrong answer. What a cop-out, I hear you say, the question is now moot! But this relativity, I would argue, rather than making the question meaningless, actually explains its true essence and enables us to form a general answer that isn’t riddled with conditions and provisos. By agreeing that happiness itself is an experience that is personal to each human being and that one person’s happiness is not necessarily another’s, this can explain the vastly varying definitions of what it means to be happy. We all know what happiness means to us, but we do not necessarily understand what it means for others.

Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash

The study of meaning is a tricky one, namely because it seems absurd for any philosophical study not to assume meaning as an axiom, and if we assume meaning as an axiom in the study of meaning it seems a circular argument. Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped many great philosophical minds writing books on the subject, one of the most famous being the 20th-century French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus. In “The Myth of Sisyphus”, Camus references the ancient Greek legend of a man called Sisyphus condemned to spend eternity rolling a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down again when he reaches the top. Despite the ostensible meaninglessness of this endeavour, Camus concludes that “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”. His reasoning is that Sisyphus’ rock is something that defines his existence — it bootstraps meaning from nothing. Indeed, the moral of his story is that everything we do in life is ultimately meaningless in some sense, and it is only through the relation of the things we do to other things in our lives that they acquire meaning.

Camus’ argument brings me to the key statement — happiness is defined on an individual basis by pursuing or by achieving those things which give our life meaning.

What gives my life meaning will certainly be different from what gives your life meaning. Some ascribe meaning to wealth, some to success, some to becoming the best at what they do in a certain field. Some people derive their meaning from giving to others, from improving others’ lives, from seeing their impact on the world. Some people find their meaning in achieving their ideal self, some from religion, some from their partners, friends, family, and some from their children. The list goes on and is endless and unique to each individual. I’m sure that if you consider your own life, you’ll be able to identify a few key things that give your life a meaning, a purpose, the things that you enjoy doing, or wish you could do. You’ll notice I mentioned wealth. What I will attempt to show is that the pursuit of wealth in itself has no meaning.

Someone recently told me about how he’d seen others in the world become successful at a young age, attributing their success to their upbringing and the circumstances surrounding their birth. I took no issue with this, but I did note that when he talked about success, he talked about it as something desirable, almost conflating it with the idea of happiness. Ironically, it was exactly because these people had acquired so much wealth that this person was citing them as an example of someone who was happier, who was luckier. All too often we are jealous of those people around us, believing that they have better lives than us, wishing that we had what they had. This is perhaps because we see others around us sharing in our desires, complimenting people for being rich or famous. Without this sounding too much like a homily, I truly believe that what many people truly desire is for others to love and respect them, and society has told us that those who are loved and respected are those who are rich, those with power, those with influence. This is perhaps the reason why we ask whether money can buy happiness.

But it is clear that to be loved and respected by those around us we do not have to be rich. Does this mean that those people who strive for riches are mistaken and that money does not buy happiness at all? Well, this is only partly true. Now that we have a working definition of what happiness is — namely, the ability to pursue those things that are meaningful to us, let us take our initial question further. Money is, of course, necessary. A painter living on the streets seems, on the surface, much less likely to be as satisfied in the pursuit of her goal than a painter living in a penthouse apartment overlooking a city skyline. But perhaps we are simply evaluating the quality of others’ lives by the standards we have developed for ourselves. Often we say, and forgive me the trite saying, that the poorest people are the happiest. My belief is that this can be the case because those people that are both poor and simultaneously happy are those who see money for what it truly is — a means to an end, something to facilitate their lives and to help them do things. Money is not something to be stockpiled, so that we can show off how many digits we have at the end of our latest bank statement. People who see the world in this way, who are not necessarily poor, have broken the false link between money and happiness.

As I said, money is essential to our lives. We need money to sustain our livelihoods and to keep us healthy and out of danger, physically and mentally. Money, then, can be seen as giving happiness when it removes barriers in pursuit of those things that give us meaning.

Let’s return to the lives of our two artists, perhaps they are both happy. Perhaps the first artist feels she cannot paint unless she feels secure in the knowledge that she will not have to search for a place to sleep that night. Perhaps part of her meaning in life is having a beautiful skyline view out of her window. If this is her reason for striving to earn money to buy the apartment she has, then money has indeed bought her happiness — it has paved the way for her to achieve what she dreams of. Coming to the second artist, she lives on the streets, but is equally happy. Her dream is to be free to explore the city at night to her heart’s desire, to see those things that others don’t, and to simply have the freedom to paint and draw those things she finds beautiful. She doesn’t particularly care about how others perceive her.

It seems these extreme examples demonstrate that small differences in what people find meaningful can lead to drastic differences in material requirements. On the surface of things, things seem unfair: one artist derives meaning from activities that cost nothing, whereas the other requires expensive rent to pay for her meaning to be fulfilled. However, let us entertain the idea that the first artist simply wanted to see beautiful scenery from her window — she saw meaning in that. In fact, in order to do this, she could equally well have been living in a small apartment at the bottom of an unsightly street. This wouldn’t have prevented her from climbing to the top of the tallest buildings in London each day and looking out on the city. The moral? We derive meaning from our experiences, or what we seek to experience, and there is more than one way to skin a cat.

My conclusion is that money can buy us happiness, in so far as it enables us to do the things we like to do in life. Most things that give our lives meaning are often free, or very inexpensive — pursuing hobbies, spending time with friends and family, and learning new things to quote a few. Problems creep in when we start to conflate money with popularity, status, or likeability. Money alone has no power over us, rather, it is the artificial association of money with these things in our own minds, and the minds of society, that have given the acquisition of riches and material wealth a meaning in itself. To become happy, we need to look inside ourselves and ask what the essential qualities of our dreams are. Perhaps they might cost a bit less than we might have previously thought.