David Brooks wrote a nice piece on the relationship between money and happiness in New York Times on March 29th, 2010:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/opinion/30brooks.html
One major finding from the studies on happiness is that money is only strongly correlated with happiness when it allows people to meet their basic material needs. When people have enough money to pay their bills and do not have to struggle to make ends meet, the ability of more money to bring more happiness decreases rapidly. Essentially, past a certain basic point, more money does not make us much happier.
And yet, as David Brooks points out, most Americans make earning more and more money a major priority in their lives. They sacrifice many other aspects of their existence in order to maximize their income. Mr. Brooks points out that interpersonal relationships, social bonds, and enjoyable daily activities are much more strongly correlated with happiness than the accumulation of greater wealth. Nevertheless, most Americans ignore this and focus on financial success.
Mr. Brooks suggests that we prioritize money because financial success is easily quantifiable, while enjoyable relationships and fun daily activities are not as readily measured. I agree with Mr. Brooks' point, but I believe that lessons that I have learned in my psychotherapeutic work with clients can also explain why so many people exhaust themselves pursuing money even though it yields such poor returns on happiness. I believe that psychoanalytic thinking can explain this phenomenon in a deeper way.
For example, I once worked with a client who was bullied and taunted by his peers in middle school. He was humiliated and made to feel powerless. Moreover, his father would sometimes fly into rages and scream at him and occasionally would hit him. He developed into an adult with great anxiety and a strong sense of vulnerability, even though he was a tall and strong man. He developed several coping mechanisms to try to feel safer. One of these was that he focused incessantly on accumulating money. He would work almost every free hour, depriving himself of leisure time or the opportunity to build his social life. He came to feel that money was his protection. It represented, psychically, a way to defend himself from threats in the world. The accumulation of wealth also came to represent to him the feeling that he was somebody, somebody of importance, and not just a powerless victim.
In a way, this kind of thinking is very similar to how anorexics view their weight. People sufferring from anorexia believe they will gain a sense of control and self-worth if they can only “lose a few more pounds.” Money, like weight, or like most other easily quantifiable things, can make us feel like we have done something to make us feel less threatened in the world and more important. That is a major reason, I believe, that people work tirelessly, at great cost, to earn more money instead of engaging in other activities which would make them happier. They are chasing the dream of finally no longer being vulnerable to the frightening feelings, or the low self-esteem, that plagued them when they were younger.
The problem with this approach is that it is external. The sense of safety comes from achieving an external goal, like a certain dollar amount or a certain number of pounds lost. The sense of security, of feeling that one has transcended the fear, has not been achieved internally. In other words, the individual has not faced their fears, worked on them, and come out the other side- the more healthy side- where they are finally comfortable within themselves. They are still not comfortable in their own skins, and must perpetually chase their external goals lest the psychological demons from their past catch up to them.
Psychotherapy can be of great help in achieving that sense of internal comfort. If the therapist and client both do their jobs, together they can help the client transcend the earlier fears and help him or her feel much more comfortable in the world. When this happens one is so much more at ease with oneself, and one’s place in the world, in a way that the illusory chasing of external quantitative things, like money or weight loss, could never achieve.
