Money, health, family and happiness

Money, health, family and happiness

Bullets, blood, burnt human bodies, destroyed cities and countries ended the World War 2. It was only after a world war that Homo sapiens thought of ending the destructive wars and come together to redress the grievances between countries and take every measure to stop wars so that people can live happily. The earth has now been turned into a global village, with clothing to food almost being the same. The economies of countries have touched a trillion dollars. Science has given humans superhuman powers. With the recent Mars Perseverance and James Webb Telescope, humans can watch planets and galaxies very closely, which was for long ago only a dream of humans. But the question is, are we happy than our ancestors who lived thousands of years before us, without money, science, medicine, vehicles, or are we still in search of happiness?
The question arises: what actually is happiness? Psychologists and biologists have taken up the challenge of studying scientifically what really makes people happy. Is it money, family or virtue? The first step is to define what is to be measured. The definition of happiness is subjective well being. According to this view, happiness is something I feel inside myself, a sense of either immediate pleasure or long-term contentment with the way my life is going. It is not necessary that what makes me happy can make you too. It varies from person to person and from place to place. Take an example of a person who sits in his home with his parents, wife and children all day in front of him and of another person who is lying in prison for almost a year and on being released sees his family. For the second person seeing his family is a greater happiness and this happiness can’t be bought by money.
Money does bring happiness but only up to a point, and beyond that point its significance grows less. For a person with monthly income of 10,000 rupees, a lottery of 1 lakh rupees means a greater happiness but for a person with monthly income of 1 crore rupees, 1 lakh has little significance. According to a study, continuous increase in money is not going to make a big difference to the way one feels in the long run. A person will buy luxurious cars, build a beautiful home, but it will soon all seem routine and normal.
One study has found that illness decreases happiness, but in the short term. A person who is ill and is thinking only about his health loses the charm on his face and is not interested in any activity unless and until the doctor assures him that the prescribed medicine will cure all his illness and then, for that person happiness is visiting the doctor for check-up and listening to his advices. A few weeks ago my grandmother was not feeling well. She was saying, I need to consult a doctor who will add some medicines and only then I’ll be fine, but the doctor cancelled all the previous medicines and just added a nebuliser, and a few kind words brought back the lost charm on my grandmother’s face.
Another study has found that family and communities have more impact on happiness than money and health. So, people with strong family and supportive community are happier than those whose families are dysfunctional and who have never found a community to be a part of. Repeated studies have found that there is a very close correlation between good marriage and happiness and between bad marriage and misery. This is true irrespective of economic or even physical conditions. An impecunious invalid man surrounded by a loving spouse, a beautiful family and warm community is happier than an alienated millionaire. Few months ago we had a husband and wife in our chamber and the wife’s father had come to gift some portion of his land worth lakhs to his son-in-law, but he was not ready to accept the same as gift. On being asked what the reason was, he said, “When my wife is not faithful and sincere to me, what will I do to this land no matter its worth. My happiness lies in my wife being faithful to me and not land or money.”
But the most important finding is that happiness does not really depend on wealth, health or even family. Because when things improve, expectations increase tremendously, and when things deteriorate, expectations shrink. Understanding human happiness is too complicated. It is hard to accept this line of thinking. The problem is a fallacy of reasoning embedded deep in our psyche.
When we try to guess or imagine how happy other people are now, or how people in the past were, we imagine ourselves in their shoes. But that won’t work because it pastes our expectations onto the material conditions of others. In today’s times when a person has almost everything, why is he still not happy? It’s because of exposure to the first-world standards, the competition, the greed to be different than others, to be seen as a different Homo sapiens.
Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, in his study found that happiness consists in seeing one’s life in its entirely as meaningful and worthwhile. Our values make all the difference to whether we see ourselves as miserable humans or as loving and nurturing a new life. Friedrich Nietzsche put it as: if you have a why to live, you can bear almost anything. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is. So, perhaps, happiness is synchronising one’s personal ideas of meaning with the prevailing collective ideas, although it is much too early to come to a rigid conclusion and end the debate that has hardly yet begun.

The writer is an advocate. [email protected]

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