The authors of many studies on the dependence of human happiness on money came to the conclusion that 75 thousand dollars per year enough to be happy. This is the upper limit of income, the increase of which will no longer affect the feeling of happiness and well-being.
He tells about it BBC.
However, Matthew Killingsworth, Ph.D., from the University of Pennsylvania, believes that feelings of joy and satisfaction increase in proportion to rising incomes. That is, the higher a person’s income, the more satisfied he is with life.
Killingsworth came up with a new approach to this topic and decided to look at how income affects not the overall satisfaction of life, but the daily feelings. So, the scientist analyzed the survey in the special mobile application Track Your Happiness (“Track your happiness”). More than 33,000 Americans who have a job filled them every day. At any time during the day, this program may ask you to fill out a short questionnaire with a mandatory indication of your income level.
The momentary state of happiness was determined by the simple question “how do you feel at this moment?”, to which several options of answers could be given, from “very good” to “very bad”. This method of repetitions made it possible to derive the average indicators of the everyday feeling of happiness among the interviewees. In addition, approximately half of the survey participants had to answer one more question: “How satisfied are you with your life in general?” in the range from “absolutely dissatisfied” to “extremely satisfied”.
It turned out that people with a high income received more daily satisfaction from life, and after an income of $75 thousand, the satisfaction did not slow down (as the authors of all previous studies believed), but continued to grow in accordance with the growth of income. According to Killingworth, this is due to the fact that the authors of past studies took into account only dichotomous indicators of well-being, which did not leave room for identifying improvements that go beyond the given parameters.
People who equated money with success were less happy
Based on the analysis of the obtained data, Killingworth concludes that the connection between money and happiness can be explained by a sense of control over one’s life. However, the results of the study also suggest that money in itself does not necessarily make its owner happier.
“While money can be good for happiness, I found that people who equated money with success were less happy than those who didn’t. People seem to overestimate the value of money when they think about how well their lives are going. Yes, this is an important factor, the role of which we were not fully aware before, but it is only one of many aspects of life”, – summed up the author of the study.
