Money does influence one’s ability to be happy to an extent, of course. If you’re constantly worried about whether or not you’ll make rent and keep the lights on, it can be quite difficult to enjoy life to the fullest.
However, once you get past the threshold of no stress over day-to-day finances though, increasing income only has a marginal uptick in overall satisfaction. And at that point, it’s probably significantly more costly in time to make those extra dollars.
You could be spending time with friends and family instead of staying chained to your desk. You’re doing yourself a disservice there. Especially if you’re overworking yourself (you likely are).
Think about all the things you could do with the extra time:
You could cook more. Which would make you healthier. Which would boost your energy levels. Which would make exercising easier. Which you could do more frequently with those extra hours each week.
10 extra hours per week. Spend 5 cooking and eating dinner with someone you love. Spend 5 on yourself: reading and exercising.
If companies keep your pay the same for 30 hours per week that they were paying you for 40 hours per week, your happiness will rise. Increases in happiness lead to increases in productivity.
Increases in productivity boost value for your employer. Which makes the employer happier. Which makes them more likely to promote you – thus paying you more. While keeping you at 30 hours per week.
You’ll probably even get more vacation time. That you could use to travel and see the world. Those life experiences will likely boost your happiness even more.
Maybe you’ll find a new hobby. Those are known to increase happiness too. You might even get good enough at your hobby to start a business and turn it into profit.
Who knows? Maybe you could even make so much money doing it you hire a few people to help you. You really shouldn’t run a business alone. Even if you simply outsource a lot of tasks to virtual assistants.
Hiring more people – job creation – is a wonderful thing. And an important role in our society. You’d be quite valuable to your community. Reputations like that tend to have a huge uptick in happiness and life satisfaction.
Wins all around. A positive feedback loop gets started. And when a loop that powerful gets rolling, it will be an immensely powerful force for good.