Essay: Can Money Buy Happiness?

Money controls the world. It is the global sign of success, wealth, strength, social stability and overall power. It represents what people have accomplished, how well established they are, and if they are good candidates as the ancestors of future generations. Money can acquire anything, from rare metals and jewelry, to life-saving treatments and medicine. However, a common debate about the power of money sums itself up in a basic question: can money buy happiness? In a sense, money can and cannot buy happiness. Although that is a controversial answer, allow me to explain myself. If your life was hanging by a thread due to a certain disease, such as cancer, AIDS, or Ebola if we assume dangerous cases, the ability and capacity to be able

Part of the problem is that happiness isn't a quality like height, weight or income that can be easily measured and given a number (whatever psychologists try and pretend). Happiness is a complex, nebulous state that is fed by transient simple pleasures, as well as the more sustained rewards of activities that only make sense from a perspective of years or decades. So, perhaps it isn't surprising that we sometimes have trouble acting in a way that will bring us the most happiness. Imperfect memories and imaginations mean that our moment-tomoment choices don't always reflect our long-term interests. One way of accounting for this is to assume that lottery winners get used to their new level of wealth, and simply adjust back to a baseline level of happiness – something called the “hedonic treadmill”. Another explanation is that our happiness depends on how we feel relative to our peers. If you win the lottery you may feel richer than your neighbours, and think that moving to a mansion in a new neighbourhood would make you happy, but then you look out of the window and realise that all your new friends live in bigger