Page 86 - Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money_ Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness-Harriman House Limited (2020)
P. 86
The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say,
COBACOBA
“I can do whatever I want today.”
People want to become wealthier to make them happier. Happiness is a
complicated subject because everyone’s different. But if there’s a common
denominator in happiness—a universal fuel of joy—it’s that people want to
control their lives.
The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as
long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.
Angus Campbell was a psychologist at the University of Michigan. Born in
1910, his research took place during an age when psychology was
overwhelmingly focused on disorders that brought people down—things
like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia.
Campbell wanted to know what made people happy. His 1981 book, The
Sense of Wellbeing in America, starts by pointing out that people are
generally happier than many psychologists assumed. But some were clearly
doing better than others. And you couldn’t necessarily group them by
income, or geography, or education, because so many in each of those
categories end up chronically unhappy.
The most powerful common denominator of happiness was simple.
Campbell summed it up:
Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable
predictor of positive feelings of wellbeing than any of the objective
conditions of life we have considered.
