Happiness is a feeling of the heart, and this feeling is relative. At different stages, people's understanding of happiness will be different.
Figure | Baidu
According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, there are five needs in a person's life: survival needs, security needs, social needs, respect needs, and self-actualization needs. When a person's needs remain in the survival stage, happiness may be just a full meal and a warm coat for him; when a person's basic physiological needs are met, a need for security will arise. In today's society, houses, cars, children's education, and medical treatment for illness are basically within the scope of safety needs.
Figure | Dust of the Law Realm
Money is important only in the stage of survival needs and security needs, when money and happiness are significantly positively correlated. As the chart above shows, happiness increases significantly as income increases, but once the security needs are exceeded, the happiness increase slows down significantly. Because the relationship between the latter three types of needs and money is relatively small, such as social needs, it means that a person needs to find the value of his own existence through socialization, love and love, and money cannot buy friendship and cannot buy love, even if it is bought, it is false; for example, respect needs, you cannot use money to buy the respect of others for you, and you cannot use money to buy the realization of self-worth, because these can only be obtained by paying and dedicating.
The so-called "love out of the love to return, the blessing of the return", "the lover of the person constantly love, the respect of the person constantly respected", the spiritual level of "love", "respect", "self-realization" all need to pay, at this time happiness and dedication are positively related. Let's take it a step further and look at Nobel laureate Samuelson's formula for happiness: happiness = utility/desire.
Here happiness and utility (money or material satisfaction to themselves) are positively correlated, and negatively correlated with desire, which shows that a person can also obtain happiness by reducing his desires under general material conditions, that is, the so-called "contentment and happiness", Confucius's proud protégés, Yan Hui is the poorest, and Confucius praises him: "Sage, Huiye, a basket of food, a scoop of drink, people are overwhelmed, and do not change their happiness..." Although Yan Hui's material living conditions are very poor, his spiritual life is very full. Because of his closeness to and study of the sages, he was often filled with Fa-joy, just as the so-called "there is a golden house in the book, and there is a beautiful jade in the book"!
On this level contentment leads to happiness. In addition, according to the formula, if a person's desire remains unchanged, and the expansion of utility, that is, the effort to earn money to expand the molecule, can also increase the happiness value, in this case, you only have to make money as a kind of fun, this fun is like you fishing, playing chess, singing, square dancing, it can also enhance your happiness, or make money to "reach and help the world", the happiness will burst. If you earn more money for more enjoyment, for the sake of extravagance and lasciviousness, then the desire will become bigger and bigger, and eventually the happiness will become smaller and smaller. Finally, may everyone in the world be happy and happy, and auspiciousness will always be there!!