Can’t buy me love? The money/happiness question revisited

By Lee Canon
Published: June 11, 2008

Gas prices, the value of our homes, and the economy seem to be in every news source’s leading story, lately. The welfare of our economy always seems to play a prominent role in the election of our presidents. It’s a fundamental principle of our society. Our Declaration of Independence is built upon escaping unfair taxes and the King’s officers who “harass our people and eat out their substance.” Let us not forget about the pursuit of happiness, which in the Declaration is endangered by economic distress. We live in a country where we grow up wanting more, believing that more will make us happier.

It’s no surprise that the United States quickly became an economic powerhouse in the world, since we put good thought into it from the beginning. We believed in it. Money makes people happy, right?
I think that most of us would agree that we would want more people to be wealthier, since more wealth generally leads to more happiness. Why then do we see so many broken lives on the news? Rich movie stars keep getting divorced — that can’t be happy. Drug problems, arrests, murders, suicides — it happens in Hollywood, just like it happens everywhere else, only it seems to happen more frequently wherever people have more money and more fame. The wealthy athletes and the rich powerful senators appear to struggle more than everyone else. Money seems to bring scandals for the same people who we all would think have it made.

Only a few weeks ago, the local front page covered a prime high school athlete. His future was bright. In four years, he would likely have finished college and gone to the NFL, but the article wasn’t about his success. Instead, it was all about his recent drug arrest. I commented to my wife about how he had just thrown it all away.

What was I referring to? I was falling into the trap, believing that the wealth in his future was where happiness could be found. If I just had that same opportunity, perhaps I would have made the best of it and reveled in the happiness.

The Bible is full of warnings about the emptiness of material gain (Ecclesiastes 5:10-11). It teaches that loving money is not fulfilling. “Whoever loves money never has enough.” If you have an urgent desire for more money and get some money, you will inevitably want more. Money just gets you more stuff; what we really want are relationships and love. Without love, we will just remain empty.

Elizabeth Dunn and Lara Aknin, professors at the University of British Columbia, along with Michael Norton, a professor at Harvard, recently published results of research in the journal Science that indicate that money can indeed buy you happiness, but only if you spend the money on other people (“Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness,” March 21, 2008). “Ironically, the potential for money to increase happiness may be subverted by the kinds of choices that thinking about money promotes; the mere thought of having money makes people less likely to help acquaintances, to donate to charity, or to choose to spend time with others, precisely the kinds of behaviors that are strongly associated with happiness.” In one of their experiments, people who were given as little as $5 and instructed to spend the money on others were happier by the end of the day, while those who spent the money on themselves were not.

I’ve always read the story of the Rich Young Ruler in the Bible and noticed how the rich ruler couldn’t give to the poor. Recently, I thought about how unhappy this man was despite being so obviously wealthy. He had it all, but he was terribly sad. It’s neat that research conducted some 2000 years later has “confirmed” this truth written in the Bible.

One constant theme of the Bible is that happiness is found in how we treat others, not in our wealth. If you want to find happiness in your life, find a way to make someone else happy. It tends to pay off.