The Happiness Survey

There was a sixteen paragraph article in my newspaper yesterday devoted to “A first-of-its-kind global study” that finds a link between money and happiness.

Is this a no-brainer, or what?

“Pulling in the big bucks makes people more likely to say they are happy with their lives overall—whether they are young or old, male or female, or living in cities or remote villages, the survey of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries found.”

One of the interpretations the researchers made was that when people are asked about income and satisfaction, the first thing they do is take stock of their lives, and that involves comparison. They check to see how their lives compare with “the Joneses” (an expression I haven’t heard in years). I suppose this could be true to some extent, but I doubt it’s a major cause except maybe among those who only “see themselves” as not having enough. Truly not having enough money to survive, or to do things like keep your house and still eat, or not having enough to avoid bankruptcy due to the loss of a job, do not involve comparison. “Times” they say, “are hard.” You don’t too often hear, “These are unhappy times,” but when you say “times are hard” you are generally saying that a lot of people are under a lot of stress.

Many other factors that contribute to happiness were spoken of in the article – as if to downplay the finding about income (in my view).

I’ve had arguments about this with people – about it being easier to be happy and peaceful when you’ve got money. I get it that people can have a lot of money and still be miserable and vice versa, don’t get me wrong, but I truly feel that this could be a great opportunity to look at this issue (or truism) head on. In a world in which poverty is growing so rapidly, how do you ignore it?

A young man I know was just told by his employer – a major bank – that he had to take a $5 an hour pay cut or lose his job. With the CEO and execs making what this bank’s CEO and execs do, how can you reconcile the need for the bank to take such an extreme action against its already low-paid tellers? This is a huge amount of money -- $800 a month – suddenly gone from a young guy’s budget. For what reason? On top of the anxiety of having to figure out how to meet his expenses, the unfairness, the arbitrariness, the “they’re doing it because they can” feeling of it, eats away at his happiness. He is not alone.

This survey was taken before the world economy took a nosedive, so I can only imagine that the answers would be even more strongly in the affirmative concerning money and happiness now, but it’s not just that life is harder and more stressful when there are survival types of financial concerns, but that there is such an overriding feeling of unfairness in the great divide between the rich and the poor, the highest wage earners in a company and the lowest, and the lack of choice. This is not a matter of comparison with the Joneses as I understand that phrase to imply – a keeping up with the neighbors kind of thing. This is more of a feeling that something has gone terribly wrong…and it’s being felt up close and personal by a ton of people.

One percent of American people control 40 percent of the wealth; 5 percent control 60 percent. As non-violent peace activist Marv Davidov says, “Whoever owns it; runs it.” It is not a mystery where this has taken us. It does not bode well for democracy.

It seemed to happen overnight or somewhere out there in the dark reaches of the last few decades, to sneak up while nobody was looking and change all the rules. It’s like we were the last to know. Like we were duped into believing there was still an equality and an American way of doing business that wanted everyone to benefit in due measure.

In the end I figured the word “happiness” was the problem, but no matter what word I'd substitute – like well being or fulfillment or satisfaction – I still find income being a major contributor because, with a feeling of the threat of doom and few options hovering about you, that sense of happiness that comes of ease and freedom from anxiety is going to be hard to come by.

And what I came up with was that, at least to me, happiness has some connotation of contentment with the status quo. If you’re not content with “the way things are” you are challenged to change, to live differently, to find some other way. I figure you gain lots of depth and fulfillment from that challenge and start appreciating your life and its different aim and you might even, if you’ve got some breathing room, feel happy about that. But in terms of what the Gallup corporation means by happiness, I don’t know if this would apply.

The other thing I came to was that, while you might not be happy with the way things are, you might ultimately become happy with yourself. You might feel a greater sense of purpose and come to recognize your strength and resiliency. Your relationships might, when you’re in a financial crisis, (as in any sort of crisis) have that chance to evolve into something richer than they were (if the stress doesn’t tear them apart first). You are almost forced to become a little more aware of what really matters.

Which all leads back to the fact that we’re in a world financial crisis and no matter anyone’s individual financial status, the suffering it’s brought, the obscurely blatant causes of it, and the need for fundamental change, creates its own unhappiness with “the way things are” and those concerns can eat away at you like dread.

It’s still perfectly possible to get up in the morning and greet your day and your trees with love and appreciation…even really heightened appreciation and gratitude…even appreciation that doesn’t hold dread even while it does hold concern. You’re amazed at the ability of the earth to sustain the human family and the sun to warm it and the freeway noise not to drive us all crazy.

I don’t know, I guess it’s just that the ability to find happiness from those essential qualities of self and relationship that sustain us – I don’t want to see them being used as an excuse for not changing this elitist culture. You could call this a belated Independence Day acknowledgment that a “ruling class” was not what was intended in the creation of this nation, and nor was an acceptance of greed as good.

We can maybe rejoice that more people are concerned, even if their actions are not yet skillful and, besides carrying a handkerchief, let our empathy and outrage grow hand-in-hand.

Jimmy Buffet is due to give a concert on the gulf coast. He said it was what he thought to do after feeling the rage that all people who feel “as if the coast is in them” can’t help but feel. You feel the rage but you can’t live there.

One spiritual person, the mystic and writer Andrew Harvey, recommends sacred activism in his book The Hope. He combines our spiritual heart and desire for soulful change with a reclaiming of our heart for social change.

I am still, like so many people, stunned by my family’s decline of the last few years. On the one hand, I feel grateful that we get by, and on the other, I rail at the freedoms lost. But I guess at some point I quit beating myself up for my sense of unhappiness with the way things are. I’ve realized that the general milieu of hard times and even a direct association with its hard edge, don’t deprive me of joy in all those things that still touch my heart or lift my spirit and that it is those same things, and that same joy, that call out for concern and attention to the great change we’re undergoing, socially as well as spiritually.

"They say money can't buy love -- but what about happiness?" by Rob Stein, Washington Post, as reported in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, 7-6-2010, 1A.