I was at the Montclair Socrates Café meeting the other night. The topic for discussion was “what is wealth”. The discussion started out pretty lame, but after a while it got me thinking about the correlation between money and happiness. I came to two conclusions. First, the biggest impediment to happiness is uncertainty — the lurking possibility that you’re gonna go broke or have a nasty experience or gonna get sick and suffer quite unexpectedly. Second, there probably isn’t a very strong correlation, in the long run, between wealth (or income level) and happiness. It seems to me that people who are “working poor” are just about as likely to be happy or unhappy (or somewhere in the middle) as people who are in the middle class, and ditto for people who are rich.

Again, the biggest problem with poverty is the increased possibility of a big nasty change, of getting sick suddenly or losing your job or becoming homeless or being a victim of crime or falling victim to depression and substance abuse. If it were just a case of low but reliable income, with a lack of amenities but just enough resources to meet the basic needs, then I think that most people could adjust. From what I can tell, low-income groups tend to form strong family and social bonds. They seem to appreciate the fact that they need one another, more than middle class or rich folk do. Sure, plenty of them are unhappy, but you could certainly say that about the middle class too. And statistics bear out the fact that the richest, most exclusive towns have the highest suicide rates.

Hey, I’m not out to idealize poverty. I’d still rather be rich. But mostly because rich means a better cushion against sickness and homelessness and crime and other unpleasantness. Rich can also be alienating, however. I myself still think that the best place is somewhere in the middle.

P.S.: The discussion group didn’t seem to agree with me on this (even though they didn’t want to say that money buys happiness either). One guy even implied that my theory that the poor are just as likely to be happy as the rich shows that I’m a racist!

INTERESTING FACT: T’was reading an article in Scientific American about the renewed interest in Freud on the part of modern neuroscientists, i.e. the guys who call the tunes that the shrinks will ultimately dance to. The article made the point that subconscious mind works by a whole different set of rules than the reality-based conscious ego. The subconscious is a wonderful realm of wishful thinking, of grand plans and beautiful dreams and happy delusions. The normal mind does its best to keep this “pleasure principle” in check so that you don’t get hurt too badly in your dealings with the real world. The neuroscientists have corroborated Freud’s concept by observing people with brain injuries that knock out their reality functioning, leaving them with exaggerated and inaccurate notions about their own importance and circumstances in life.

I guess that I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve always been very dreamy and ultimately hopeful that the world and humankind (and myself) are all ultimately good and worthy of great acclaim. And I’ve somehow kept my belief that God is real, even if incompletely or inaccurately described by the world’s major religions. Now, after reading that article, it seems that this is simply the expected outcome of the Freudian mind at work.

But then again — the human mind evolved over thousands and millions of years into what it is for some good reason. Can it be that our subconscious’s credulity represents Nature’s means of giving a name to its ultimate author? Or should an existentialist version of Ronald Reagan just stop me right here and say “there you go again”?