Kamis, 01 Juli 2010

Money And Happiness

Chris Gardner has big dreams for him and his family but it doesn't seem to come together for him. Chris has an opportunity to be a stock broker but first he has to go through a grueling internship which means no pay. Chris decides to do it but when his wife leaves and he is evicted, he has to take care of his son on his own. So they find themselves sometimes living on the street and struggling to get by. But Chris is determined to make it (full synopsis).
There is a synopsis from pursuit of happiness. Here also quote from that movie ( I genuinely love this word) :

Christopher Gardener : “It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what. How did he know that?”
What is source of happiness then? In that movie, the source of happiness seems to be money. Christopher had to get a job as a financial advisor to pursue his happiness. Unfortunately recent research shows a different result. Arthur C. Brook research shows that:

psychologists and economists who have studied the relationship between money and happiness paint a different picture. According to them, you'd likely grow tired of your cabana in a matter of years. You see, people have an astonishing ability to adapt to all sorts of situations, and while that can be a good thing if you get locked out of your house during a drenching rain, it also means you'd quickly grow accustomed to a life of affluence. A shiny red Jag and new house in the Hamptons would be great for a while, but after a few days or weeks, their newness would wear off, and you'd go in search of the next best thing. Even surveys of lottery winners indicate that their initial joy at hitting the jackpot wears off in just a few months

The one place that money and happiness are significantly linked is when a person is unable to afford to meet their basic needs. There is an appreciable difference in levels of happiness between those below the poverty level and those above it. Homeless people in Calcutta, for instance, score a mere 2.9 on a 7-point scale of happiness, while multimillionaires in the United States rank themselves a cheery 5.8. Once people pass that poverty threshold, though, the money boost tapers off; Inuits in Greenland and Masai ranchers living in Kenyan dung huts are just as happy as the high-society Americans So while the Warren Buffetts of the world are indeed more content than beggars on the street, they're not a whole lot happier than people who herd cattle for a living.

If you running your live thought that every more penny you had as a symbol of more happiness you had. You have to re thought that mind. And what in the hell we’re looking for a money then. Proud is the answer for that . Financial status is the way we demonstrate to others (and ourselves) that we are successful—hence the fancy watches, the expensive cars, and the bespoke suits. We use these things to show other people not just that we are prosperous, but that we are prosperous because we create value.

There is nothing strange about measuring our success with money; we measure things indirectly all the time. I require my students to take exams not because I believe their scores have any inherent value, but because I know these scores correlate extremely well with how much they have studied and how well they understand the material. Your doctor draws your blood to check your cholesterol not because blood cholesterol is interesting in and of itself, but because it measures your risk of having a heart attack or a stroke. In the same way, we measure our professional success with green pieces of paper called “dollars.”

What scholars often portray as an ignoble tendency—wanting to have more than others—is really evidence that we are driven to create value. Wanting to create value is a virtue, not a vice. The fact that it also brings us happiness is a tremendous blessing (Arthur C. Brook).

Money is important, to fulfilled our basic need , but not that important to sacrifice what all we had..

MONEY

It can buy a House, But not a Home

It can buy a Bed, But not Sleep

It can buy a Clock, But not Time

It can buy you a Book, But not Knowledge

It can buy you a Position, But not Respect

It can buy you Medicine, But not Health

It can buy you Blood,But not Life

It can buy you Sex,But not Love

It can buy you accompany, But not Friend

It can buy you a food, but not appetite

It can buy you a security, but not safe

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