coraa: (don't fear the reaper)
[personal profile] coraa
When I was a tween and a teenager, we didn't have a lot of money. I don't mention this very much because I don't feel that we had sufficiently little money to complain about -- we had food, a place to live, and health insurance (via my dad's retirement package from the Army); when I grew -- which I did a lot as a teen, as did my brother, of course -- I could get new clothes, I had a warm coat in the winter, we had a car that ran. We were okay.

But we weren't great. My mom would hold off on buying bread and milk until her paycheck came through. The house was always cold, because it wasn't very energy-efficient, and we couldn't afford either to have better insulating installed or to heat the house until it was warm. At midwinter, I -- who have not-great circulation -- was basically never warm except when I was having a hot bath. (This is part of why I don't like living in cold climes. The other is that, no matter how much I bundle up, some part of me is aching and painful with cold when I go outside.)

And while this was going on, my comfortably-middle-class friends, and their parents, would make blithe and stupid statements like:

Poor people are so much happier -- they don't have as much to worry about.

I wouldn't want to win the lottery -- it just causes problems.

Money isn't everything.

As long as you love each other, income doesn't matter.

You can't buy happiness.


And I always wanted to hit them over the head with a big mallet. A big one. And then go through their pockets and take the money that didn't buy happiness, because obviously they didn't think they needed it.

To be fair, they weren't entirely wrong. You can't spend your way out of emotional problems. If you're not getting along with your family, if your partner is not good to you, Prada handbags won't make it better. If you have no agency or goals or drive in your life, a vacation to the Bahamas won't satisfy your soul.

But.

But, you know, it's really hard to be happy when you're cold. When you're hungry. When you have no bed on which to lay your head. It's hard to be happy when you have one set of clothes to your name, and you can't get a job because the clothes you have aren't appropriate for an interview. It's hard to be happy when you know your kids will never be able to go to college. It's hard to be happy when you know that you can't afford the car that you need to drive to the workplace that could maybe get you out of your hole. It's hard to be happy when your mother is dying and you can't afford the plane ticket to go see her and hold her hand before she does.

It's hard.

And all the love in the world won't make it okay when you go to sleep in the backseat of your car, hungry and cold, knowing that your child is hungry and cold. Sure, it's better than being in that situation when you're not with someone you love. But it's a far cry from being with someone you love and being, you know, sufficiently warm and well-fed.

Right now, I am a lucky person. I have a job at a wonderful company that pays me well. I live with someone I love. I am very comfortable. I am happier than I was when I was poor. Of course, if I had to choose between the person that I love and the money, I'd choose the person that I love. But that's a fucking false dichotomy. It's entirely possible to have enough money to be comfortable -- to have a roof over your head, the lights on and the heat on, food in your fridge, clothes on your back -- and still be with the person you love.

But when I hear comfortably middle-class people say, "Oh, money isn't everything," or "Money can't buy happiness," it makes me think: Bull. Fucking. Shit. Because it's easier to be happy if you're well-fed and reliably housed and have clothes and heat and so on, than if you don't. And the reason it makes me angry instead of just frustrated is that it's sometimes -- perhaps even often -- used as an excuse. I don't have to give to charity, because poor people are happier and more noble than me with my reliable income and healthy savings! I don't have to worry about the problem of poverty -- of people who are cold and hungry in my community -- because they are somehow ~~~better off~~~ than me in some mystical way, and never mind that they can't get a job because they need new clothes and better transportation! I can, in fact, feel sorry for myself for having a comfortable lifestyle because it means I'm somehow spiritually poorer, and that's so much more important!

Bullshit.

I'm glad that the studies on this are beginning to show that the 'oh, money can't buy happiness!' thing is not totally true. I remember reading a study -- I can't find it now, unfortunately -- that said that, over the $40k/year threshold, happiness didn't correlate with income. But below that... it did. Because above $40k/year, most people can live comfortably, but below it, they can't, and not being able to meet basic needs makes people unhappy. Not being able to buy food, pay rent, pay the gas/electric company, afford health insurance makes people unhappy.

I don't know that I have a point here. Or, well, I guess I do: it's the end of the year, and for a lot of people it's the holidays. It's also, if you're in the northern hemisphere, a time of year when it's getting cold and dark. I'm not going to tell you what charities to give to, but I think charity is important, so I'd encourage you to give. What may seem like a very little money to you might be, to someone else, the difference between feeding yourself and your kid for a day, and... not.

And if you ever think: well, mo money mo problems, poor people don't need my help, money just complicates things for them, they're really better off ~~spiritually~~ than me, so I don't have to worry about it. Well. Think about that for a second, and then see if you really believe that you'd be happier without food, heat, electricity, a roof over your head, or health care.

If you're poor, don't feel that you're a bad person for not appreciating the simple gift of poverty, because poverty sucks ass. You don't need to feel guilty for wanting comfort.

And if you're comfortable, give. Give in whatever way makes you happy. But share the wealth, because some people are not comfortable, and the happy fable that it's better that way is just not true. But you can help.

Date: 2009-12-04 01:34 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] zalena.livejournal.com
How did you arrive at $40/K and how many people on that income?

Date: 2009-12-04 02:15 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] coraa.livejournal.com
It's not my number, so I can't answer how it was obtained. Some poking around points to the following sources:

R. Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (New York: Penguin, 2005)

E. Diener and M. E. P. Seligman, “Beyond Money: Toward an Economy of Well-Being,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 5: 1–31 (2004)

B. S. Frey and A. Stutzer, Happiness and Economics: How the Economy and Institutions Affect Human Well-Being (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002)

R. A. Easterlin, “Income and Happiness: Towards a Unified Theory,” Economic Journal 111: 465–84 (2001)

D. G. Blanchflower and A. J. Oswald, “Well-Being over Time in Britain and the USA,” Journal of Public Economics 88: 1359–86 (2004).

T. Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy: The Psychology of Human Satisfaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976)

Since I haven't read the studies, just works citing them and others, I don't know how they were obtained, or for households of what size. I assume it must be an average, given wildly differing costs of living between, say, Omaha and San Francisco.

EDIT: Er, belatedly I realize that a citation dump can come off as snitty, and I didn't mean it that way at all -- I just mean that I don't know where the figures came from, but that those references might shed more light.
Edited Date: 2009-12-04 04:01 am (UTC)

Date: 2009-12-04 04:14 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] zalena.livejournal.com
No worries, I was just curious, as I and most the planet are a long way away from 40K. By 'how many people' I meant what size household on 40K.

I'm not in disagreement with your sentiments or with correct citations. (How did she get that many that fast? I wondered.) It just seems an awfully high benchmark to happiness.

Date: 2009-12-04 04:16 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sithjawa.livejournal.com
Good point - I'm well below 40k this year (though I had two good years before to make up for it) and by my standards I'm living like a queen.

Date: 2009-12-04 04:31 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] coraa.livejournal.com
Right. I thought I was rolling in dough in my first job out of college, and that was less than $40k/year. But part of it is that, before that point, I was living on quite a lot less, and having trouble paying for things like vital dental work.

Which actually was the point of the studies -- going from $15k/year to $25k/year can make people happier, because they can pay for more necessities of life, but going from, oh, $50k/year to $80k/year doesn't, statistically speaking, make people happier. Not that everyone below $40k/year is miserable, but that past that point, more money won't increase happiness.

I think I did not explain that well in the original post.

Date: 2009-12-04 04:33 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] sithjawa.livejournal.com
So that's the average saturation level? (not the level below which you lack important things, but the level above which there aren't many happiness increasing things you could buy and haven't)

Date: 2009-12-04 04:36 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] coraa.livejournal.com
Yes, that's my understanding. (And yeah, I think it must be an average, because I have a really hard time believing that the number itself is the same for cities with very different cost of living.)

Again, not an expert, have read some books that touch on the subject but haven't read the studies themselves, so I could be totally wrong.

Date: 2009-12-04 04:27 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] coraa.livejournal.com
I think it's not that you can't be happy below $40/k, it's just that that's the point at which, statistically speaking, adding more money won't make you happier. So someone might be quite happy making $20k/year, but statistically speaking there's a real chance that the added advantages that another $10k/year could bring would make them happier. Whereas someone making $70k/year has very little statistical chance of being happier if they add $10k/year -- or even if they add $30k/year. Going from $15k to $25k has a very real chance of making someone happier; going from $60k to $100k doesn't.

I'm not sure I'm explaining this well. But yes, you're absolutely right that many people are quite happy with quite a bit less. I don't think the studies disagree with that.

(And as for how I got the cites so fast -- Kindle search function. ;) )
Edited Date: 2009-12-04 04:28 am (UTC)

Date: 2009-12-04 05:13 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] porfinn.livejournal.com
I think the 40k estimate makes more sense if it is used as a gauge for how much yearly income can free someone up from the possible unhappiness that financial obligation can create, since worry can crush you like an aluminum can.

Date: 2009-12-04 05:21 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] coraa.livejournal.com
Put that way, it makes a lot of sense. Thank you!

Date: 2009-12-04 05:50 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] porfinn.livejournal.com
I get very wistful when I hear people discuss the concept of happiness in terms of on and off, as if it were some sort of binary condition-- this makes me happy, that doesn't. Or if happiness was a collectible commodity; if I have x amount of this it will result in y amounts of happy. I feel happiness must be practiced, and can only be evaluated in the long term, and I also believe it is hard work. I try to think of happiness as a skill, like wood carving or calligraphy (or playing the guitar, which I seem to suck at). I believe it is Aristotle that considered happiness only achievable through the process of living. It's interesting that these days there seems to be some research to back up his concept, as I understand it, that living a life filled with good deeds and kindness will further the practice of happiness, and that wealth will not get the job done, but a certain level of poverty makes the process of achieving a skill in happiness very difficult. Happiness should be a project that is not dependent on a moment's pleasure, but on the cumulative effort of an individual through out their life time-- on the sum of all the parts of their existence. I have appreciated being poor, it has made me much richer than if I hadn't been (sigh, sorry, I will shut up now. Four hours of sleep makes me spout this sort of nonsense)

Date: 2009-12-04 05:02 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] maggiedacatt.livejournal.com
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1999). If we are so rich, why aren't we happy? The American Psychologist, 54, 821-827.

It's a source for the paper I'm writing RIGHT NOW.

Date: 2009-12-04 05:06 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] coraa.livejournal.com
Thank you!

Also, that is one hell of a name.

Date: 2009-12-04 05:15 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] porfinn.livejournal.com
I love Csikzsentmihalyi's ideas! Good, tasty stuff.

Date: 2009-12-04 05:27 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] maggiedacatt.livejournal.com
Chick-sent-mee-hi-lee.

I had to learn to say it because my publication, and now my dissertation, is based on a theory that he came up with, and so I will have to pronounce his name when giving talks at conferences. :P

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