Fred Harteis Editors Note: I thought this article was very interesting because most of us believe that the more money we have the happier we will be but according to this article that is not necessarily true.
If you think financial success is important but you haven't quite achieved it – at least not relative to those you know - here's something you might not want to think about on your summer vacation: Your desire for more money and your conviction that your life would be so much better if you had it.
It's true that those with more money (as a group anyway) register higher levels of satisfaction with life than those with less, but not by nearly as much as you might think.
For example, if you make twice what you used to make, your level of satisfaction likely would be somewhat higher, but not twice as high.
What's more, one study shows that setting financial success as a goal can itself make you somewhat less happy.
An article in Psychological Science called "Zeroing in on the Dark Side of the American Dream" looked at results from a study done on more than 12,000 people from their freshman year in college through their late 30s.
With the exception of adults making over $290,000, those who said financial success was important were less happy than those in their income groups who thought it wasn't important.
The lower a respondent's household income, the more negatively his or her happiness was affected by valuing financial success. (The negative effect became negligible for those making over $87,500.)
"If you're not making money, it's much better to be convinced it's not important," said Norbert Schwarz, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who coauthored the study.
Is it really all relative?
There's also a school of thought that says how much money you have in absolute terms isn't as important for happiness as how much you have compared to everyone else. So getting more money may make you a little happier, but getting more money than others will make you a lot happier.
When a group of MBAs were asked whether they'd rather make $100,000 when everyone around them made $120,000, or make $90,000 when everyone around them made $70,000, a majority opted for the lesser salary if everyone at the company knew about the discrepancy, Schwarz said. But if the salary discrepancies were kept confidential, about half said they'd opt for the $100,000 job.
Not to be contrarian, but I'd prefer the $100,000 job either way. And when I informally surveyed a group of people, the majority said that they also would prefer the $100,000 job, even if the salary discrepancy were known -- and yes, some even had MBAs.
Source: Cnn.com
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