MONEY CAN BUY YOU HAPPINESS
It’s a fallacy to think possessions can’t make us happy — it’s the motivation that matters
I have long held the belief that the “science” surrounding happiness is really just a ginormous crock of smelly brown stuff.
I am not talking about just those idiotic self-help books or even all those positive-thinking “life coaches” — I am looking at you, Tony Robbins — peddling the power of self-delusion. Even scholarly articles perpetuate some truly outrageous fantasies, the most important of which — at least the most important to a car columnist — is that money can’t buy happiness.
Yes, I am going to take on the oldest truism in pop psychology, a maxim so popular, so universally accepted, that I’m guessing every parent at some point in time has mouthed it.
Money can’t buy happiness. Now, let’s never mind that no one in a Third World country has ever mouthed these words. Or that, even in a worst-case scenario, it’s probably better to be rich and unhappy than poor and unhappy. What I’d really like to talk about is this misconception that possessions can’t make us happy. Indeed, the accepted wisdom seems to be that said possessions make us decidedly unhappier.
The theory, as neatly explained by David Futrelle in Time magazine’s recent The Science of Happiness journal, is that because we humans are adaptable creatures, we will always “overestimate how much pleasure we’ll get from having more.” We quickly adjust to our new-found wealth, our increased affluence becoming our new paradigm. Thus, says the theory, the joy of the new car you just bought or the new condo you just moved into will always be fleeting.
The reason, goes the theory, that the new Porsche or BMW isn’t making us happy is that we are always comparing ourselves to our neighbours; H.L. Mencken famously quipping that a happy man is one who makes $100 more than his wife’s sister’s husband.
That’s why pretty much every author on the subject says that buying “experiences” is a surer road to fulfilment.
However, here is where this whole eschewing-personal-possessions theory falls apart. The majority of the experiences that bring me pleasure require a certain amount of ... let’s call it equipment. For instance, I love racing cars around a track and, having done pretty much nothing but for the past 30 years or so, I can absolutely assure you that the experience will be a whole lot more joyful in a brand new Lamborghini than it will be in a clapped-out Toyota Camry.
Anyone not understanding that simple equation either hasn’t driven a Lamborghini, or has no idea of how to drive a car. Anyone thinking the quality, and hence the cost, of your possessions won’t add to the joyfulness of your experience is probably just a poor person fooling themselves.
Oh, I suppose one could make an argument for diminishing returns, that the rewards for trading up from a new $69,998 C8 Corvette to a $631,680 Lamborghini Aventador SVJ will not be commensurate with the money spent. Or that possessing five Lamborghinis won’t make you happier than owning just one (though I can see an excellent argument to be made for having five Lambos stored at five different racetracks). But such relativism works both ways.
Sometimes it isn’t the absolute amount you spend, but rather the relative expenditure that matters. As an example, I have weathered many a rainstorm aboard a motorcycle in both cheap and expensive rain suits, and let me assure you that my “experience” has always been far “happier” when I was not chilled to the bone.
Indeed, the whole notion that “money can’t buy happiness” would seem to be based on the fallacy that the problem lies in the mere possession of a material good and not the reason to possess it. That trying to keep up with the Joneses will not make you happy in the long term — envy being, after all, the crack cocaine of emotions — is somehow still news absolutely baffles me. To blame the resultant lack of contentment on the possession and not the motivation is sheer idiocy.
Or, to quote a famous Lexus ad: “Whoever said money can’t buy happiness just isn’t doing it right.”