Conversation #5

Summary

Money is what our world runs on, although money is a very valuable asset to everyone. Money can bring happiness to a certain point. Having an immense amount of money can affect us in many ways such as our happiness, expectations, and our thoughts about how we see the people around us. Having money can often lower our expectations in things and it can also let us not appreciate the things that people do for us or give us. For example, giving a photo album with the best memories and experiences that they had with you, is an emotional gift but having wealth will affect you into thinking that gifts like this are just people being cheap. It can also lower our satisfaction and lead us to be dissatisfied with the things that we have or own. on the article The Perfect Salary to Keeping up with the Joneses, here’s how money really affects your happiness, by Cory Steig. the author states that ‘‘ if you grow up without resources like food, clothing, or shelter, then having more money really makes a huge difference in your life… But once you hit that middle class level there is really no correlation above that.. this can be challenging to comprehend because most people operate under the assumption that money will solve all of our problems’’ as mentioned in the article is great for those who grew up with no resources but once they reach that limit, people will stop caring about the things that they got and start having a life with dissatisfaction because they already have what they wanted but what they wanted really made them happy. but is not only that once we start getting money people would want to compare themself with somebody else, and we start feeling like we don't have enough, we wish that we can make more than the person we comparing yourself to. which make us think that we are not enough and thus making us unhappy despite having many materialistic stuff that we thought would make us happy. Another example is the Ted Talk by Barry Schwartz which is titled ‘‘ The Paradox Of Choice’’ in which he talks about how if we increase people's choices to have a better life at some point they will look at these opportunities with dissatisfaction.

I agree, because we are constantly comparing ourselves to others. like we can have this really nice looking pool at our house but people would often complain about what they have wishing it was better but they don't realize that they are others who just want a pool no matter how it looks. also we tend to take opportunities for granted because not many people would realize that something good is in front of them, they will wait for ‘‘ something better’’ but that something was the opportunity that they just let go.