Money and Happiness

There's an excellent article on Money and Happiness from "More than Money" Magazine


Here are some juicy excerpts:

MTM: You’ve worked with a lot of people to help them become happier. Some
of them have a lot of money. So tell us, does money make people happy?

BAKER: I know a lot of people who, from the outside, look in and say, “Boy,
it would be great to have lots of money.” Barbara Walters once interviewed entertainment mogul David Geffen. She said, “O.K., David, now that you’re a billionaire, are you happy?” He shot back without hesitation: “Barbara, anybody who
believes money makes you happy doesn’t have money.”

It’s a brilliant insight, because money doesn’t make you happy.


ON HAPPINESS:

"MTM: What is happiness and how do you find it?

BAKER: Happiness is a side effect of living life in a certain way. It’s not a
mood—moods are biochemically regulated—and it’s not even an emotion, because emotions seem to be somewhat event-dependent. What I’m talking about is a way of living a meaningful, purpose-focused, fulfilling life. When we wrote our book, What
Happy People Know, Cameron Stauth and I studied the literature on happiness
and identified concepts or characteristics most frequently identified with happiness.
Of course, love is at the top of the list. But the list also includes qualities
like optimism, courage, a sense of freedom, proactivity, security, health, spirituality, altruism, perspective, humor, and purpose. These are qualities associated with people who are essentially happy. So happiness is both about living
well in your own situation and also about living meaningfully and fully in relationship to others."

ON INDIVIDUAL HAPPINESS AFFECTING SOCIETY

MTM: In your book you say that you think the quest to achieve happiness can
change a whole culture. What do you think that new culture will look like?
BAKER: When people are in a positive state of emotion they are generally civil
and even kind and caring human beings. To ascertain the validity of this
observation, think about your own personal experience and that of the people
you know. You will never see a truly happy and simultaneously hostile person
because those two states are essentially neurologically incompatible. This is
because positive emotions evoke activity in the frontal lobes of the brain. The
frontal lobes allow us to see abstract possibilities and to understand concepts of
good and evil; they are essential to the understanding of ethics, morality, and
civility. This is why I believe that positive emotions, such as appreciation, happiness, joy, and love—with all their power for good health physically, mentally,
emotionally, spiritually, and socially—are extremely important to civilization
and its continued evolution. It is true that war is a “statistical norm”
for humanity. Human beings have been at war with one another somewhere on
this planet almost constantly since time immemorial. However, we have within
us the capacity to build a more constructive future civilization by virtue of this
“higher order moral brain.” Though we always carry with us the capacity to live
in fear and engage in massively destructive acts, I believe that human beings
will ultimately choose civility over destruction and will benefit from all the
consequences of this choice, including creativity, ethics, and morality."