From the environmentalist Bill McKibben in 2007 – Money? Happiness. QED.
Very long but worthwhile read that effectively summarizes how our growth-focused economic model led to great prosperity in the West, and is now leading us to great unhappiness:
Our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually. Growth no longer makes most people wealthier, but instead generates inequality and insecurity. Growth is bumping up against physical limits so profound—like climate change and peak oil—that trying to keep expanding the economy may be not just impossible but also dangerous. And perhaps most surprisingly, growth no longer makes us happier
An interesting point on the scientific research behind more cheerful people being happier and living longer:
Indeed, people who call themselves happy, or who have relatively high levels of electrical activity in the left prefrontal region of the brain, are also “more likely to be rated as happy by friends,” “more likely to respond to requests for help,” “less likely to be involved in disputes at work,” and even “less likely to die prematurely.” In other words, conceded one economist, “it seems that what the psychologists call subjective well-being is a real phenomenon. The various empirical measures of it have high consistency, reliability, and validity.”
Part of the problem with all of our wealth is that it has grossly shifted our notion of what levels of consumption are normal. It has also completely reset what it means to live “comfortably,” which is just the point beyond which additional things provide no additional happiness.
In 1991 the average American family owned twice as many cars as it did in 1950, drove 2.5 times as far, used 21 times as much plastic, and traveled 25 times farther by air. Gross national product per capita tripled during that period. Our houses are bigger than ever and stuffed to the rafters with belongings (which is why the storage-locker industry has doubled in size in the past decade). We have all sorts of other new delights and powers—we can send email from our cars, watch 200 channels, consume food from every corner of the world. Some people have taken much more than their share, but on average, all of us in the West are living lives materially more abundant than most people a generation ago.
This comes at a cost – the same concepts that led the United States and other Western nations to great prosperity – self determination, the pursuit of wealth – have also pushed us farther from each other.
We left behind hundreds of thousands of years of human community for the excitement, and the isolation, of “making something of ourselves,” an idea that would not have made sense for 99.9 percent of human history.
During the same decades when our lives grew busier and more isolated, we’ve gone from having three confidants on average to only two, and the number of people saying they have no one to discuss important matters with has nearly tripled
This is a problem because, once we’ve more than solved for the money side of the equation, relationships are what provide us marginal amounts of happiness, not consumption:
When people have lots of companionship but not much money, income “makes more of a contribution to subjective well-being.” By contrast, “where money is relatively plentiful and companionship relatively scarce, companionship will add more to subjective well-being.”
This next bit really resonated with me:
Why do people so often look back on their college days as the best years of their lives? Because their classes were so fascinating? Or because in college, we live more closely and intensely with a community than most of us ever do before or after? Every measure of psychological health points to the same conclusion: People who “are married, who have good friends, and who are close to their families are happier than those who do not.”
The essay ends with a note on moving to a more sustainable, community-focused economic model. I’m not sure how feasible that is, but he makes a compelling argument that we’re already on the slow path there:
Already I’ve seen dozens of people and communities working on regional-scale sustainable timber projects, on building energy networks that work like the Internet by connecting solar rooftops and backyard windmills in robust mini-grids. That such things can begin to emerge even in the face of the political power of our reigning economic model is remarkable; as we confront significant change in the climate, they could speed along the same kind of learning curve as Pretty’s rice farmers and wheat growers. And they would not only use less energy; they’d create more community.
Give the full thing a read if you liked what you read!