Wealth And Happyness
Catalin Moscaliuc
1
Wealth makes people happy.
This is a statement that, for many centuries, people took for granted. And my thought is
that the majority of them still believe in it even now. One of the main reasons for that, at
least in the modern times, is the image of happiness that is promoted everywhere in the
mass media.
We are 6 billions of customers and that is why we ‘have to’ be persuaded to buy. And
what is the best motivator the advertisers use in order to make us purchase a certain
thing? ‘Buy our product and you will be happy’. Even though now this message is not
that explicit, it is not very difficult to infer it after watching the commercial/seeing the
newspaper ad. Suddenly, everyone starts smiling and enjoying themselves and every
frown and grimace disappears. They are happy. And all this thanks to the new brand of
orange juice – ‘with up to 20% pulp’.
When you put the words ‘buy’ and ‘happy’ in the same sentence and keep it in mind for
a while, it does not take too much time until you notice that in order to be happy you have
to have money. But still that is not enough - they’re quite useless if you just own them.
You’ve got to $pend them.
We can then conclude that, in a consumer society like the one we live in, people use this
correlation between wealth and happiness as their motivation to work more and to
acquire a big number of material goods, thinking this is the best (if not the only) way to
Catalin Moscaliuc
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increase their subjective well being.
Previous findings have shown that rich people are, on average, not happier than the rest
(nor the poor are less happy) and consequently, material wealth is not such a strong factor
to influence people’s subjective well being.
Lately people have become more and more interested in...
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