The title to this post is a teaser, of course. After a certain point, having more stuff does not make people happier.
In his new book, Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and a Durable Future (2007), Bill McKibben asks why having more stuff usually doesn’t make us happier. He considers several reasons.
You could argue, for instance, that we’ve simply began to run out of useful or fun new things-that despite vast numbers of patents, there’s not much we can buy that really runs much chance of making us happier. Those who fly frequently (a good slice of the most affluent) will be familiar, for example, with the ubiquitous SkyMall catalog …
If satiation isn’t what has cast a pall over our satisfaction, then perhaps the pall is the effect of all that economic buildup: if growth has filled the field behind your house with mega-mansions and you can see the horizon anymore, maybe that loss cancels out the effect of the flat screen TV. Or maybe the pall is cast by the fact that more of us have had to sit work more hours to afford all that new stuff. Or perhaps were worried about keeping thieves from taking our stuff-or, more likely, wondering how we’ll be able to hold on to it as an increasingly insecure old age looms. Most of all, perhaps the very act of acquiring so much stuff has turned us evermore into individuals and ever less and to members of a community, isolating us in a way that runs contrary to our most basic instincts.
For the moment, however, the why is less important than the simple fact. We’re richer, but were not happier.
In fact, the more we study the question, the less important affluence seems to be to human happiness. In one open-ended British questionnaire, people were asked about the factors that make up “quality of life.” They named everything from “family and home life” to “equality and justice,” and when the results were tallied up, 71% of the answers were non-materialistic. The best predictor of happiness was health, followed by factors like being married. Income seems not to matter at all in France, Holland or England…
[Pages 37-38]
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