Attention Economy


Tuesday, February 8, 2022

Money, Happiness, and Satisfaction

Wall Street Opens Its Wallet to Keep Talent. It’s Not Always Enough.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/business/employees-wall-street-talent.html
 
HOW TO WANT LESS: The secret to satisfaction has nothing to do with achievement, money, or stuff.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/03/why-we-are-never-satisfied-happiness/621304/
Arthur C. Brooks:
Scholars argue over whether our happiness has an immutable set point, or if it might move around a little over the course of our life due to general circumstances. But no one has ever found that immediate bliss from a major victory or achievement will endure. As for money, more of it helps up to a point—it can buy things and services that relieve the problems of poverty, which are sources of unhappiness. But forever chasing money as a source of enduring satisfaction simply does not work. “The nature of [adaptation] condemns men to live on a hedonic treadmill,” the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell wrote in 1971, “to seek new levels of stimulation merely to maintain old levels of subjective pleasure, to never achieve any kind of permanent happiness or satisfaction.”