• morrowind@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    Context matters. This is an appropriate statement to make to someone who has enough to live a comfortable life but is always chasing more. But to say it to someone struggling to make ends meet is just incredibly disrespectful.

  • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    after a certain point*

    i doubt someone like elon musk is as happy as he is rich, id argue the opposite.

    being debt free and unworried about cash would make me happier tho

    • Buttons@programming.dev
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      8 months ago

      The people I know all seem to understand the “after a certain point” concept. Up to a certain point, money is directly connected to happiness, and I my group understands that.

      Still, a good meme (or whatever it’s called). A reminder that most thing we want to believe are more important than money are only obtainable with money.

  • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    “Money can’t buy happiness” is a great mantra for rejecting the capitalist enshirining of wealth as a virtue. It’s important to see happiness as something more complex than income.

    The issue is that when interpreted as “poverty is no excuse for unhappiness”, it loses all valid meaning.

    See also: “Life isn’t fair”

  • ZephrC@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    That’s just how rich people say they’re too dumb to figure out what makes them happy.

    • MacN'Cheezus@lemmy.today
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      8 months ago

      It’s called diminishing returns in economics.

      Basically, if you have very little of something, any additional amount of it will increase your satisfaction by a lot, but only up to the point of satiation, after which happiness will not increase further regardless of how much more you have.

      But a three year old can understand this. Give them one ice cream, they’ll be delighted, give them ten, and they’ll start throwing up.

  • Not to be confused with the fallacy that these essentials are exclusively the product of exchanging money-- while you can pay for better health and better safety, there are also things you can do with little to no money to improve those for yourself, though the freedom to do so unfortunately is not default and financial security does empower an individual to better use what resources are available to them-- maybe not everyone can trivially access hiking trails, or be in the health for it, and even then they should have a good pair of shoes, a water bottle, and reliable mode of transportation to/fro the trails, which again not everyone has unfortunately.

    Imo, the idealistic answer is to work to ensure everyone an essential baseline level that can reliably empower them to live as healthy and opportune of lives as is reasonably possible, while of course having in place infrastructure and accomodations to those less fortunate in health and/or opportunity. I’d like to think this is more than a utopian idea, and closer to a reality than one might originally think, or perhaps I was somewhat unique or grossly digressed from the status quo in pessimistically believing that we might be far from this being a reality. Perhaps my pessimism was also influenced by my financial stress at the time, among the other throes of life.

  • exocrinous@startrek.website
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    8 months ago

    Money can buy happiness, but happiness doesn’t have a delivery service. You have to go pick it up yourself.

  • 0ops@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Money can’t buy happiness, but you can buy a yacht and pull right up next to it