I believe that all people strive to increase wealth for two reasons;
- It gives us sense of meaning and direction. It is a metric easy to measure. Sure, other things are very important for our happiness, but we can't measure them (state of friendship, love, knowing what to live for). (On this note: If you immerse in philosophy you will probably realize the utter meaninglessness of it all. If you do it is hard to fight the suffering. So if you wish to live, you have to come up with a superficial goal that you are willing strive for and not blow your brains out. Nowadays they fancy call it finding a life purpose.)
- It improves our social status (ones standing on social hierarchy). As social beings it's something we can't resist as it expands our mating opportunities, influence, freedom etc. (On this note: Some propose the state redistributing the money so that we all had the same. I firmly believe such people are just trying to improve their status, a game they're currently losing. They disguise this fight by using noble terms such as equality, solidarity etc. They know that by somehow destroying the money game we would find another criteria on which to base social status. They don't really care about the others because the new criteria would produce the same percentage of unhappy people. They just hope to be on the winning side this time.)
Due to a relational nature of happiness, there is no absolute amount of wealth that would make us happy and keep us in that state. Our current state of wealth doesn't really matter (once the basics are covered). What matters are our expectations, whether we are going to be even wealthier in 1/3/5/10 years.
In other words, for most people most of the time money plays a predominant part in ascertaining their state of happiness (I am no exception). Hence, what matters most is, how much we believe our wealth will increase or decrease.
This explains:
- only small variations in happiness among different nations despite huge differences in objective wealth criteria (say income). Solely from the wealth perspective, it is easier to be happy in non-western world,
- unhappy ultra-rich people, whose wealth is stagnating or decreasing,
- unhappy lottery winners/ financial market speculators/ gamblers (once their initial excitement subdues). They made money with luck, which is an event they can't replicate on their own. They are not confident in their wealth creating abilities so they logically assume that from this point on their wealth can only stagnate or decrease.
My theory in a glance; our current wealth determines our status, while our belief determines our happiness. The higher we are on the total wealth (Y-axis), the higher status we enjoy. The better the future we expect (steepness of the line angle), the happier we are.
Entrepreneur might have very little wealth (hence low status), but he might be very happy due to belief in better future. To the contrary, a person with a lot of wealth (hence high status) might feel miserable.
