More Important Than Dollars

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You don’t need money to be happy but you do need stability. This is from a new study from McGill University in Canada.

Researchers studied populations that do not have a lot of currency exchange in the Solomon Islands and Bangladesh. They interviewed residents of the fishing village and found that the lack of money did not affect their happiness. In fact, the villagers reported being quite happy. Money would not much change their lives much at all and therefore was not linked to happiness the way it is in the Western world.

This indicates that in the Western world, it is not really money that makes people happy but the stability it can bring.

“In less monetized sites, we found that people reported a greater proportion of time spent with family and contact with nature as being responsible for making them happy,” explains Sara Miñarro, the lead author on the study. “But with increasing monetization, we found that the social and economic factors commonly recognized in industrialized countries played a bigger role. Overall, our findings suggest that monetization, especially in its early stages, may actually be detrimental to happiness.”

This is scientific proof of the wisdom of Biggie Smalls: Mo money, Mo Problems.

 

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