Will money make you happy?

Money doesn’t make happy. Everybody knows. Okay, when you have hardly any money, it can make you unhappy and then money can help, but at a certain level it doesn’t make happier anymore. A website that I came across when looking for inspiration for this theme gives ten reasons why:

1) Money gives instant gratification but once you are accustomed to it this fades away.

2) It doesn’t fix relationships.

3) It’s the root of all evil. Most problems are about money, some way

4) It can’t solve mental problems.

5) Money and friendship don’t mix, as 6) don’t money and family.

8) Things bought with money give only a feeling of happiness for a little while.

9) You’ll have never enough.

10) Money can’t bring peace.

(https://thriveglobal.com/stories/10-reasons-why-money-will-never-make-you-happy/)

I omitted reason 7, so actually nine reasons remain. At the end you’ll see why I did. Anyway, on the face of it these reasons seem true, and not only on the face of it, although it can be, for instance, that money is sometimes a precondition for peace or, another example, it can help you get a good psychiatrist when you have mental problems. Then the money itself doesn’t make you happier, but nevertheless because of your money you become happier.

Some years ago the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis may have agreed with these points, but he wanted to sort out how the relationship between money and happiness really was and he begun to study it. Indeed, what he found was that wanting to have more money doesn’t make happy. This is not only so when you are rich but also when you are poor. Are you surprised that bankers belong to the unhappiest people in the world? For they have already much money and still want more. And who are the happiest people in the world when we look at the way they earn their income? Here they are: Florists; then hairdressers and beauticians; and then plumbers. They don’t earn heaps of money, but they help other people and receive a lot of thankyous.

However, you had bought a ticket in the national lottery and you win the jackpot. You feel so happy! But soon your feeling of happiness will be as before. Two years later your washing machine breaks down. Two years ago it would have been a big problem to have it repaired or to buy a new washer. But didn’t you win the jackpot? Now you don’t need to worry about the money and within a few days you have a new one. Even more, studies show that, after a few months, people who have won much money in a lottery are not happier than before but after two years they are. And so it is also with salary increases. Whether you are rich or poor, after you have received it, you are happier, also in the long run, albeit so that in poor people the feeling of happiness grows more than in rich people. Money can make you happy.

So there may be a relationship between your individual income and your feeling of happiness. Even more, studies have shown that on the average people who have more money are happier than those with less money. Note that I say “on the average”, for as we have seen, bankers, who strive to have more money and usually have very much money, are rather unhappy. Now it is so that you find this relationship between money and happiness not only on an individual level but also on an international level. Which are the happiest countries? In order (in 2018) they are Finland, Norway and Denmark. My country, the Netherlands, is sixth. These countries belong to the richest countries in the world. And the unhappiest countries? These are Burundi, the Central African Republic and South Sudan, countries with the lowest national incomes. Also on this level it is so that there is a clear positive relationship between the wealth of a country and the general happiness of its population: A high national income makes a happy nation. Nevertheless there are exceptions, like the USA. This country is less happy than you would expect in view of its national income. Why? Well, on the average the Americans are rich, but the income is badly divided: There are a few very, very rich people, and many people are below average: Seeing big differences in welfare around you makes you feel unhappy.

Much more can be said about the relationship between money and happiness, but let me return to point 7) that I left out from the list why money doesn’t make happy. It says that studies show that money doesn’t make happy. Older studies said so, indeed, but more recent research makes clear that these studies are too simple and that the relationship between money and happiness must be differentiated. As we saw above, wanting to have more money doesn’t make happy. But if you have money and if your country has, you can better care for your health (you can pay or get better doctors); you feel less uncertain and safer; it gives you more respect; it gives you more autonomy; etc. All these things make you happier and all these things can be better realized if you have money. So, the upshot is: Trying to get money does not make you happy, but having money does. And the more money you have, the happier you are, even if you are already very rich. Your problem then is getting money without wanting to get it.

To end this blog, I want to make one person happy: Ap Dijksterhuis. Most information and conclusions in this blog are from his book Maakt geld gelukkig? [“Does Money Make Happy?”] (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2018). Buy this book and it will make him happy, for he’ll earn an unexpected extra income.

Selfies in the age of selfies

Montaigne’s Essays were the start of a new age: the Age of Man. We could also call it the Age of the Self. This age appears to continue till today. Look around: Nearly everybody today makes photographic self-portraits or “selfies” as we call them, and many people share them in Facebook, Instagram and other social media. Isn’t this symbolic for the era we live in? One thing that strikes me is that many people do not upload selfies showing themselves in different activities and situations but that their selfies are almost all the same: taken from almost the same position with almost the same facial expression. Why? Do these people love to have themselves seen so much that they don’t have the imagination to show at least different pictures of themselves? A kind of narcissism? The Age of the Self.

One can say – and with right, I think – that it is not Montaigne who is the father of the modern selfie, but that its forerunners are to be found among painters and not among writers. Although making self-portraits may be as old as the art of painting, it’s not before the Early Renaissance that it begins to develop as a special genre. Jan van Eyck’s painting “Portrait of a Man in a Turban” (1433) is perhaps the earliest Renaissance self-portrait. Two centuries later Rembrandt made even more than hundred self-portraits, as a kind of modern selfie taker. However, I am not here to talk about the art of painting, but I want to talk about philosophy.

Montaigne was not the first who wrote about himself. Already thousand years before him Aurelius Augustine (354-430; bishop of Hippo) had written autobiographically. However, there is one important difference: Augustine actually wrote about God while Montaigne wrote really about himself. Therefore we can say that it was Montaigne, and not Augustine, who started a new era. We might also say that the Renaissance self-portraitists – say Jan van Eyck – started the new era, but the difference between what these painters did and what Montaigne did is that the self-portraitists showed the new era while Montaigne put it into words. In the end images need a lot of interpretation: Were these self-portraits really a way of showing oneself or were they something else? The meaning of the Essays is clear: Yes, it is me and only me whom you see here. I have no other intention, so Montaigne. Maybe after having read Montaigne’s “To the reader” you would expect a kind of autobiography or perhaps a systematic treatise of his thoughts, as a modern author would write it. It’s not what Montaigne did. The Essays discuss many different themes and often the coherence seems to be missing, even within the individual essays! Where is the self? Where is the I? One often tends to ask this question. That’s one reason why these essays are often so intriguing and force you to continue reading; not only the clear statements and clearly autobiographic passages do. But Montaigne was a master in connecting personal experiences with lessons of life. Already during his life the essays had become popular and they still are, four centuries later.

Many philosophers after Montaigne have written about themselves. Descartes, Pascal, Weil, Wittgenstein, Nussbaum are cases in point. Nevertheless for most of them writing autobiographically was not a way of writing about themselves but a means to write about something else. Descartes used autobiographic elements for laying the foundation of philosophy. Pascal, who also wrote about himself, even called Montaigne’s Essays foolish! But, like Augustine, Pascal actually wrote about God. Etc.

Till not so long ago only few people had the time and means to make their self-portraits, written or in pictures; to be a “selfist”, so to speak. The arrival of the computer and the Internet changed this. Via the Internet or via the printing-on-demand system everybody can publish about him or herself. By the development of digital cameras everybody can take and publish selfies. Especially the latter has become popular. Just a click and you have a picture of yourself. Just a few clicks more and everybody can see it. Even more, today the slogan seems to be: Be yourself, take a selfie, so be a selfist. And so, in this age of individualism and ego-expressivism, the most of us do. For in an era in which appearance has become so important, you have no choice (or so you think). And isn’t it so that your picture is who you are? So show it! But as said in my last blog, each person – how honest s/he may be – always gives a self-subjective description and leaves things out that s/he considers not really important; that s/he feels ashamed of. And so it is with selfies. Selfies are selected (we upload only those we like); selfies are edited in order to improve our appearance; etc. But when everybody has become a selfist, what do we see then? Can we still see the individual? Can we still see the separate trees or do we see only the wood? Or do we now just belong to a category and is the individual self no longer important, as it was since the Renaissance, since Montaigne? If so, how contradictory it seems, but then the selfie stands for the end of an era.

I should upload a selfie to this blog, but instead I’ll put here a shadow of myself.

Montaigne to the reader

Maybe the most interesting chapter of Montaigne’s Essays is not, for instance his essay on friendship, in which he expresses the essence of friendship in the simple sentence “Because it was him, because it was me” (referring to his late friend Étienne de La Boétie). It is also not the last essay in the book (“Of Experience”), seen as such by many (the essay that ends with the phrase “When seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are but seated upon our breech.” No, I think that it is the preface of the book, entitled “To the reader”.

When you start to read the preface, you tend to think that it is what it is. Usually a preface explains to the reader what the author’s intention is and what his or her reasons are to write the book that follows. And it is true that you can read the “To the reader” this way. Montaigne tells us here that he has written the essays for his family and friends, as a kind of memory to him after his death. The essays will help them to remember what kind of person he was. Therefore Montaigne wants to give a realistic self-description and he doesn’t want to hide his bad sides. For “Had my intention been to seek the world’s favour, I should surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties”. So, “it is myself I paint.” Therefore, he’ll be completely honest in the essays that follow. Now it is so that many Montaigne interpreters believe he is and they see the essays as a kind of self-expression by Montaigne; as a true and straightforward reflection of his thoughts and self-image. I, too, think that there are good reasons to believe that Montaigne was a very honest person, certainly considering the age he lived in and the persons in his environment. Nevertheless, I have my doubts whether the essays fully reflect the person he was. Each person, how honest she or he may be, always gives a subjective description of her or himself. Everybody leaves things out that s/he considers not really important; that s/he feels ashamed of; etc. Every self-description – even a honest one – is always a distorted description; consciously or unconsciously. Moreover, when Montaigne wrote only for his family and friends, why then had he published his book by a publisher? Why not simply having printed, say, 20, 30 or 50 copies for himself and give them away? However, he didn’t do so, and the book could be bought by everybody. So, probably Montaigne had a hidden intention with the Essays, anyway with the first editions (that comprised only the Books I and II; Book III has been added much later). I’ll not speculate what this intention was, but one possibility is, as Philippe Desan assumes, that the Essays were a kind of application for an official function, like an ambassadorship in Rome.

Montaigne gives a description of himself in the essays that follow the “To the reader”. The description is often not direct but for a part the kind of person he is must be inferred from and gathered from his discussions of all kinds of themes, varying from military affairs, the education of children, friendship, means of transport, etc., etc. However, already in the preface Montaigne starts with his self-presentation. Here already we see that he is a person who likes to talk about himself, who addresses himself in a familiar way directly to the reader; not with indirect polite language forms. He doesn’t like frills and artificiality. He would rather be seen naked than with clothes, figuratively speaking. Not to be looked upon without awe. Therefore, the preface can also be read in a second way. Then it is not a “To the reader” that invites others to read the book, but then it is actually the first essay of the series of essays that follow. Essay 0, so to speak.

All these aspects and the double status of the “To the reader” make that this preface is a special kind of document, which makes it by far more important than the essays themselves. Till the time of Montaigne people didn’t write about ordinary people, let alone that they wrote about themselves. Stories and writings went about God, the saints, knights and kings and people who had performed extraordinary deeds with a holy meaning. But this changed with the Renaissance and the rise of humanism. The holy and religious remained important, but it was no longer the centre of the mental world. In the new age man, and no longer the spiritual, became the main focus of attention. And that’s what we see also in this “To the reader”. Although Montaigne was religious, he doesn’t talk about God and the holy in this preface, and in the Essays he hardly does, if he does at all. No, in the preface Montaigne talks about himself and about nothing else. And that’s why it is the most important and most interesting text in the Essays. For this “To the reader” opens a new era. It is a declaration that opens the Age of Man. And the essays that follow? They are simply a footnote to it.

Note

You can find the text of Montaigne’s “To the reader” here:

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/montaigne/michel/essays/preface2.html

(In the original French text it’s simply called “Au lecteur”, so “To the reader”.)

Good guys and bad guys

When decisions to perform actions appear to be taken after the actions have already started, it’s no longer right to say that we decide to act. This is the conclusion drawn by many philosophers from Libet’s experiment discussed in my blog last week. However, I contended that, although we cannot say that we decided to act at the moment we started to perform the action, it is still possible that the decision to act then and there has been taken some time before the action concerned took place. Nonetheless, Libet’s experiment and other research made Wegner and others conclude that there is no free will. What we call a decision is only a kind of confabulation that fits the action. Actually it is so then that an action determines the decision to act and not the other way round.

But let’s suppose that my view is false and that there is no free will. Indeed, it is so that many of our actions aren’t really free, because they are determined, for instance, by our character or our physical constitution. For example, our character may change after a stroke or a severe damage of the brain caused by an accident. Sometimes it seems then as if the victim has become another person. Maybe it is not so that a stroke or brain injury directly determines our individual actions (which are, for instance, also dependent on the situation we act in and on the options we have), but they determine at least the range of actions we choose from. An illness that affects the brain can change a decent man into a sexual pervert. Considerations like these made Stijn Bruers remark in his book on moral illusions that, if there is no free will, then maybe we are simply destined to follow moral rules or to interfere when we see something bad happening. This raises the question, however, whether there still is room for ethics. For if there is no free will but people simply do, does valuing and judging actions and so punishing crime and other bad actions still has sense? According to Bruers, yes it has. Let’s see why he thinks so. However, before I go on, I must say that many philosophers who think that there is no free will, argue in the same way, and I discuss just Bruers’s view only in order to make my point clear.

In the end, all crime finds its cause in the brain, so Bruers, and one cannot punish a person for that, for it is nobody’s fault that his brain is structured in a certain way. Nevertheless, some kinds of punishing can make sense, if they influence a criminal that way that they discourage criminal behaviour. For often brains are made up thus that they tend to avoid bad behaviour if it is followed by punishment. Therefore it is useful to punish criminals in order to re-educate them, so that they don’t relapse into criminal activity. Likewise rewarding good behaviour makes also sense, albeit just because it stimulates pleasant feelings. So ethics doesn’t need a free will, as long its aim is to stimulate good behaviour, so Bruers. Metaphorically we need to see criminal behaviour like a kind of illness: dangerous behaviour that happens to a person and that needs to be cured, if possible. The administration of justice is then a kind of health care. Of course, in trying to cure a criminal, we have to follow the latest insights of neuroscience and psychology.

So far so good, and if there is no free will, it seems that the best we can do (and also the best we must do) is a kind of criminal justice based on the view just expounded. Nevertheless, to my mind there is a problem with such a reasoning: With the exception of a short remark  – “maybe we are simply destined to follow moral rules or to interfere when we see something bad happening”; see above – the reasoning leaves out the practitioner, i.e. the therapist who treats the criminal. But isn’t this practitioner in the same way the victim of his brains as the criminal is? The only difference is that the practitioner is on the good side, while the criminal is on the bad side. Then, just as a criminal commits a crime, simply because he “has to”, also the therapist treats the criminal just because he has to. In the no-free-will scenario it cannot be that the practitioner chooses a method to treat a criminal: His brain determines him to do so. In other words, who manipulates the manipulator? Brains that are brain mechanisms meet other brain mechanisms. Some tend to be on the good side and others on the bad side. There are good guys and there are bad guys, but it’s all determined and there is no ethics. The view that there is no free will leads to the view that the whole world is a complicated machinery of interacting mechanisms. A subpart of this world is the human world, consisting of interacting human mechanisms called men. In this world there is no sense; there is no meaning; there is no ethics. Maybe this is really the world we live in. I’ll no deny that it’s possible. However, if free will is an illusion, it is also an illusion that we can guide, steer or manipulate the behaviour of others. Everything simply happens.

Reference

Stijn Bruers, Morele Illusies. Antwerpen: Houtekiet 2017; pp. 66-71.