How many times have you heard “money doesn’t buy happiness”? Who ever believed it? Who invented this huge idiocy? Who has no money to console themselves? Who has them, not to feel guilty? Being rich is better than being poor, there should be no doubt, yet decades to hear that money does not buy happiness.
Now a joint study by Matthew Killingsworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman removes any doubts. The result is this: mental well-being increases with income growth and only for a minority of the positive effects cease at 100 thousand dollars. It must be said that even the minority share are those who are satisfied with 100,000 dollars, which are not too few anyway. Of course, if you’re a billionaire you’re not necessarily happy, but the point of the human condition is to minimize unhappiness, and being rich helps. The minority who are satisfied with 100,000 dollars (another statement on which I recommend doing a research, the one that says that “those who are satisfied enjoy”, which means that you would like a Porsche but you are satisfied with a Panda and enjoy, you would like to get married Scarlett Johansson but you’re fat and poor and you settle for the buzz icon from Alberto Sordi’s films or Fantozzi’s wife) he has no imagination.
If you’re rich you can give a shit about many things that make you more unhappy, and this makes you feel better. You can still be depressed, perhaps because you are very intelligent and see life for what it is, but imagine how much more depressed you would be if you were poor. Maybe you would go to a psychoanalyst and after each session you should still give him at least 100 euros and I doubt that this will make you happier, the psychoanalyst instead will certainly be better off. Instead if you’re rich, really rich, you can be sad like a poor man but you’re rich, you can do whatever you like. You can have all the problems in the world but not that of being poor.
I don’t know what I would do if I were a billionaire, but I would do many things that would make me feel better. Many people don’t understand Elon Musk: but why did you buy Twitter, paying it 40 billion, that is four times its value? To have fun. Because he can afford it. Because Twitter pissed him off and he bought it and fired everyone. I assure you that he is much better off than those who complain that Elon has set a price of 11 dollars to have a verified account. You can write him what he wants, you can insult him, he doesn’t give a damn. If I had 250 billion dollars like Elon I don’t know what I would do with it but I would be better off. I’d be equally unhappy because I have to die, or see the people I love die, but Totò’s level doesn’t consider one thing: death makes everyone the same, but being rich is better when you’re alive.
If you’re a hypochondriac like me, and a misanthrope like me, and you never leave the house like me, for example, you can have your own private clinic with the best doctors. One checkup a day. The doctors do nothing all day, they wait for me. You don’t have to go to the ASL and book a CT scan and they’ll tell you there’s a year-long list, and in a year you might already be dead. Does a critic criticize one of my novels in Repubblica? I buy myself the Republic, fire everyone, and fill the office with penguins. If you’re rich it’s not even important to be beautiful, you can be very ugly and have all the beautiful women you want. If feminists report my Instagram account en masse to make me close it (as it happened, and they succeeded) I, like Elon Musk, buy myself Instagram and close all their accounts leaving only FUCK YOU on their profile picture. Money doesn’t bring happiness but it makes life less difficult. No, we didn’t need a search, however now it’s official. And I would add one thing: only the rich should have children. You give birth to me without asking me and I also have to work? Yet paradoxically the poorer they are, the more children they have. Because humanity is stupid.