In 2012, the British Adrian and Gillian Bayford won 190 million euros in the EuroMillions lottery.
Months later, they were divorced and in the following years they ended up married to people who cheated on them, fighting with their family and in debt from bad investments.
In 1988, William Post won $16.2 million in the Pennsylvania (USA) lottery.
A year later, his brother paid a hitman to kill him and inherit his fortune.
Post survived, but his life ended with more than a million euros in debt.
Stories of lottery winners who end up bankrupt abound and, according to some media outlets, they are not anecdotes.
The idea that 70% of those who win the lottery are ruined five years later is attributed to a widely cited work by the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE), in Denver (USA).
The organization denied in 2018 that there was a study of its own with these conclusions and attributed the confusion to a participant in a meeting organized by the NEFE in 2001, who invented the data.
Later studies suggest that lottery winners feel better after the prize and have calculated the percentage of bankruptcies among the winners at less than 6%.
However, after the denial, the figure has continued to be published, showing the need to believe that money does not buy happiness.
Many scientific studies, however, say the opposite.
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The science of happiness, under examination
In a recent work on the subject, Matthew Killingsworth, from the University of Pennsylvania (USA) and Daniel Kahneman, from Princeton, tested their own results on the relationship between money and emotional well-being.
Kahneman had observed in a 2010 study that well-being, at least among Americans, increases with income until it reaches $75,000 annually.
Afterwards, the effect disappears.
Killingsworth, with its
Track Your Happiness
app , which asks users questions about how they feel at random times of the day, had concluded in 2021 that money continued to increase happiness well beyond $75,000, and he did not see the limit detected by Kahneman.
In the joint study, designed to resolve their disagreements, the researchers observed that they were both somewhat right: for 80% of people, earning more money never ceases to have emotional benefits, but there is a 20% for whom from Of the $100,000 a year, those profits mean nothing.
Money, by itself, does not bring happiness, but it allows us to do things that make us feel better.
One of the ways to achieve this, for both rich and poor, is to spend money on other people.
Obviously, the rich can invite more.
Another factor that is related to subjective well-being is good social relationships and it seems that it is easier to have them with a high socioeconomic status.
In general, although people who earn more money may sometimes have very long work hours, they tend to have more control over how they organize their time than people who earn less and who, in many cases, also work a lot. hours.
However, with something as abstruse as happiness, it is unreasonable to think that your pursuit can be reduced to trying to earn more.
Economist Richard Easterlin suggests that, once basic needs are met, increasing income does not necessarily increase well-being.
According to his data, time spent with family or taking care of one's health has a more lasting impact than money, which loses its effect like a drug to which one becomes accustomed.
“People spend a disproportionate amount of time on pecuniary goals,” Easterlin says.
This is because, according to him, individuals believe that their aspirations will be the same now as in the future, and they do not realize that with the increase in profits so will their aspirations.
Furthermore, people do not learn because, when asked how they felt in the past, they evaluate themselves with their present material aspirations and not with the lower ones they had years ago.
“As a result, most individuals spend a disproportionate amount of their lives earning money and sacrificing family or health, areas in which aspirations are fairly constant as circumstances change,” Easterlin concludes.
The relationship between money and happiness is even more complex.
A few days ago, the
PNAS
magazine published a study in which the life satisfaction of people living in societies on the margins of the globalized world was measured, who in several cases are members of indigenous populations and with very few economic resources;
between 500 and 1000 euros per head of assets compared to more than 40,000 in Spain or 65,000 in Austria.
Despite this apparent poverty, among the Mapuche of Lonquimay, a mountainous region in southern Chile, the reported level of satisfaction is 8.1 out of 10. In the Amambay region, in Paraguay, the Guaraní reach 8.2 , the Collas of the northern highlands of Argentina at 8, the Tibetans of Shangri-La at 7.9, and the ribeirinhos of the Brazilian Amazon at 8.4.
With that same scale, the European Union in 2021 had an average of 7.2 and Austria, the happiest country, an 8.
Eric Galbraith, professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and first author of the study, believes that the positive results of many of these communities may have to do with comparison.
“People are always comparing themselves to others, and those of us who live in monetized societies have money as an obvious way to compare ourselves to other people, and we can feel satisfied if we have enough money or more than the people you compare yourself to.” ”, he points out.
This comparison factor has been seen in other analyses, which show how in the most unequal societies, the advantages of earning a lot of money and the problems of having little are more extreme.
This means that where there is less equity, the link between income and happiness is stronger.
Galbraith, who carried out his study as part of an analysis of the impact of climate change on these societies on the margins of the industrial world, believes that future work, which looks for what can generate happiness without the need for exacerbated economic growth, can help us understand how to improve the well-being of humanity without depleting natural resources.
In some of the societies with the best scores in their perception of happiness, there is a strong sense of community, there is a close bond with nature and a deep spirituality that can explain part of their well-being beyond money.
“Perhaps, with a social effort directed over a couple of decades, we can learn to recover these aspects in our societies and we will be able to increase subjective well-being beyond what economic growth would allow us, that would be my hope,” summarizes Galbraith. .
Marino Pérez, from the Spanish Academy of Psychology, is skeptical about the usefulness of measuring happiness to guide public policies and achieve citizens who are more satisfied with their lives.
“Happiness doesn't mean anything, it depends on each person and each moment and the society to which they belong,” he says.
“Happiness had to do with a virtuous life, interested in the common good and not with this individualistic and subjectivist sense, typical of developed countries, and particularly of Anglo-Saxon countries, where one thinks all the time if one is happy by comparing oneself to others. the others,” he continues.
In his opinion, the well-being of the traditional societies in Galbraith's study may be due to the fact that “these people are not concerned with happiness, but busy with the tasks of life.”
Easterlin observed that, although individual happiness is consistently associated with increased income, when the level of happiness in a country is analyzed, it does not grow with the economy.
Some data may support this paradox: despite economic growth in recent decades, the mental health of the younger population, which has grown in times of prosperity, is increasingly worse.
Pérez suggests that, on the one hand, “consumer capitalism is based on individuals not being satisfied with what they have and wanting things they do not have,” a madness that “we can infect traditional societies.”
Secondly, he believes that “concern about happiness is one of the causes of the mental health problem of Western societies and new generations.”
“Seeking happiness is a sick task.
“Happiness is something more retrospective than prospective,” he adds.
From this point of view, it is not so bad to remember and feel that we were happy even though we did not know it.
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