“Money can’t buy you happiness” is propaganda from rich people to convince the poor to be satisfied with less.
Delicious, finally some good fucking food.
they’ve actually studied this, and there is a measurable point up to which money basically does buy happiness, and then past that point it stops
a billionaire is not guaranteed to be any happier than a millionaire, but both those people are almost guaranteed to be happier than someone living in poverty
(the “point” turns out to be “the time at which you have enough money that all your needs can be met without anxiety and you have some amount of money left over to do things like pursue passions, give back to the community, and do other emotionally fulfilling things.” what a shocker!)
but it goes even deeper than this imo, it’s a purposeful form of control that goes beyond the rich’s greed. “money can’t buy you happiness” is a lie that is fed to the poor, not only to distract them from the reality that their problems stem from systemic inequality, but to convince them that their lack of basic satisfaction in life is just something “they need to work through” and not At All a by-product of their society that overworks and underfeeds.
the motivations behind this lie isn’t just so that the bourgeois can “have more things” but imo it comes from the fact that by those in power pretending that not having enough food or money to survive is a problem of the self and not a problem of society, makes it so that they aren’t at fault for the aspects of society they so obviously control, and also makes it so that the average person has less time to think to themselves, less time to ponder their interests and questions they want to ask themselves about life - less time to be critical of their surroundings, less time to think about how to make things better In The Grand Scheme. instead, all of that time is allotted to desperately trying to survive while being convinced that your inability to survive is entirely your fault, and your fault alone. they not only take away our ability to survive, but they also take away the Time one needs in order to ponder anything but survival.
