Totally agree with the title, life sucks big-time without money. It's been said that, 'life is like a shit sandwich, the more bread you got, the less shit you have to eat'.
Well, that's a graphic image that will stay with me 🤣. I've lived as a poor student, and as a cash-strapped mother of two young kids; and then I've lived in relative financial comfort. It's not like I was miserable all the time when I didn't have money, and happy all the time when I did, but the misery/stress to happiness/contentment ratio is definitely better when there's more money in the bank.
The stress of financial insecurity is a very key factor, IMHO. Research on health outcomes in relation to socioeconomic status shows very clearly that there's a stepwise relationship between income and disease risk/life expectancy, and that relationship can't be completely accounted for by behavioural differences e.g. higher smoking rates in lower SES people.
Denis Rancourt makes this point forcefully in discussing the impact the convid policies on people of different SES: the poor already live in a state of chronic stress, so any additional stress will push them over the edge. The more affluent have a buffer; it takes more acute stress to provoke illness in them.
I don’t know….There are a lot of unhappy, anxious, medicated kids and teens in the U.S. and a lot of happy, smiling, unmedicated kids and teens in countries like Nepal. How are they really measuring happiness?
I've seen this when travelling in developing countries - kids who are in threadbare clothes, with nothing to play with except home-made toys, wearing ear-to-ear grins... and then kids in rich countries with every gizmo under the sun, who are miserable. And yet, people who live in these dirt-poor rural areas with strong family ties, will willingly move to grimy, polluted industrial cities to work for lousy wages, in order to lift their families out of poverty. If you haven't yet seen Climate The Movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55n-Zdv_Bwc), go to 1:10:55 and watch the scenes where poor people in Africa express their yearning for economic development that will pull them out of dire poverty, as it has in the industrialised West. The people who live in poverty don't think that living without money, and what it provides, is so great.
Interesting. I keep hearing about the opioid/ fentanyl crisis in the US and the unprecedented amounts of anti depressants that are dished out each year .... guess I’m taking those stats with a grain of salt acknowledging it’s f’ing hard to measure such a thing.
No doubt, it's hard to measure happiness. And the questions used to assess it might well be understood differently by people who speak different languages and come from different cultures. But if you ask the same questions of a whole bunch of people from different countries with a range of incomes, you can still gather some valuable data.
Maybe money just gives the illusion of being happy. After all, people in those happy places also have the illusion of being free. Or is that delusion? Maybe it’s all the drugs that money can buy. Like the meme that says alcohol may not solve your problems, but neither will milk. I’m not happy because I’m not free. Money won’t fix that.
It's not even necessarily one's individual income, but the overall wealth of a country which translates directly into the kinds of services one can access, including electricity, education and basic health care. Just as one example, people who live in countries that are so poor, they can't provide obstetric services and as a result, many women and their babies die in childbirth, are likely to have lower happiness levels than countries that provide decent obstetric care.
One of the happiest times of my life was when we lived for a year in my mum’s fibro beach shack ... it was an ice box in winter and stinking hot in summer . It was tiny, but we’d just had our first child, in those days we’d walk to the beach and watch baby play in the sand. Simple. No smart phones, no cable, I don’t even think we had a vhs player.
I've just got through living in an uninsulated shed in the subtropics for two years, with no TV and not even a table to eat dinner at, so I relate. But I have to tell you, the day we moved into our new house was pretty bloody happy for me! (We decided not to bother with the TV though - life's better without it.)
According to Wikipedia - which is a bit more reliable for facts like these - the highest suicide rates are in African countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate, with Finland coming in at #38 and and Sweden #47. That would tend to support the picture painted by the graphs - people living in the direst poverty are more likely to reach the point where they can't imagine their lives getting any better, and so suicide seems like a rational option.
Totally agree with the title, life sucks big-time without money. It's been said that, 'life is like a shit sandwich, the more bread you got, the less shit you have to eat'.
Well, that's a graphic image that will stay with me 🤣. I've lived as a poor student, and as a cash-strapped mother of two young kids; and then I've lived in relative financial comfort. It's not like I was miserable all the time when I didn't have money, and happy all the time when I did, but the misery/stress to happiness/contentment ratio is definitely better when there's more money in the bank.
My life journey has been similar, not exactly rags to riches but much more financial security after a long career of hard work, and much less stress.
The stress of financial insecurity is a very key factor, IMHO. Research on health outcomes in relation to socioeconomic status shows very clearly that there's a stepwise relationship between income and disease risk/life expectancy, and that relationship can't be completely accounted for by behavioural differences e.g. higher smoking rates in lower SES people.
Denis Rancourt makes this point forcefully in discussing the impact the convid policies on people of different SES: the poor already live in a state of chronic stress, so any additional stress will push them over the edge. The more affluent have a buffer; it takes more acute stress to provoke illness in them.
I don’t know….There are a lot of unhappy, anxious, medicated kids and teens in the U.S. and a lot of happy, smiling, unmedicated kids and teens in countries like Nepal. How are they really measuring happiness?
I've seen this when travelling in developing countries - kids who are in threadbare clothes, with nothing to play with except home-made toys, wearing ear-to-ear grins... and then kids in rich countries with every gizmo under the sun, who are miserable. And yet, people who live in these dirt-poor rural areas with strong family ties, will willingly move to grimy, polluted industrial cities to work for lousy wages, in order to lift their families out of poverty. If you haven't yet seen Climate The Movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55n-Zdv_Bwc), go to 1:10:55 and watch the scenes where poor people in Africa express their yearning for economic development that will pull them out of dire poverty, as it has in the industrialised West. The people who live in poverty don't think that living without money, and what it provides, is so great.
Interesting. I keep hearing about the opioid/ fentanyl crisis in the US and the unprecedented amounts of anti depressants that are dished out each year .... guess I’m taking those stats with a grain of salt acknowledging it’s f’ing hard to measure such a thing.
No doubt, it's hard to measure happiness. And the questions used to assess it might well be understood differently by people who speak different languages and come from different cultures. But if you ask the same questions of a whole bunch of people from different countries with a range of incomes, you can still gather some valuable data.
My initial thoughts exactly!
Maybe money just gives the illusion of being happy. After all, people in those happy places also have the illusion of being free. Or is that delusion? Maybe it’s all the drugs that money can buy. Like the meme that says alcohol may not solve your problems, but neither will milk. I’m not happy because I’m not free. Money won’t fix that.
It's not even necessarily one's individual income, but the overall wealth of a country which translates directly into the kinds of services one can access, including electricity, education and basic health care. Just as one example, people who live in countries that are so poor, they can't provide obstetric services and as a result, many women and their babies die in childbirth, are likely to have lower happiness levels than countries that provide decent obstetric care.
One of the happiest times of my life was when we lived for a year in my mum’s fibro beach shack ... it was an ice box in winter and stinking hot in summer . It was tiny, but we’d just had our first child, in those days we’d walk to the beach and watch baby play in the sand. Simple. No smart phones, no cable, I don’t even think we had a vhs player.
I've just got through living in an uninsulated shed in the subtropics for two years, with no TV and not even a table to eat dinner at, so I relate. But I have to tell you, the day we moved into our new house was pretty bloody happy for me! (We decided not to bother with the TV though - life's better without it.)
Maybe this is a urban myth, but don’t those Scandinavian countries have high suicide rates ?
According to Wikipedia - which is a bit more reliable for facts like these - the highest suicide rates are in African countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate, with Finland coming in at #38 and and Sweden #47. That would tend to support the picture painted by the graphs - people living in the direst poverty are more likely to reach the point where they can't imagine their lives getting any better, and so suicide seems like a rational option.