Aristotle Revisited: What Ancient Philosophy Can Teach Us About Modern Happiness
By Randy Kaufman, with research assistance from Dustin Lowman
The question of whether money can bring you happiness is as old as time (which is money) itself. I’ve written about the topic before, arguing that money can bring you happiness, depending on how intentional you are with it. Since then, some valuable thought has taken place, which, conveniently, adds some credence and depth to my ideas. If you’ve investigated the money-happiness link at all, you’ve probably read that there’s a golden yearly income beyond which you do not get “happier.” In 2010, Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School conducted a study which led to a $75,000/year valuation of happiness.
That figure is often mentioned in polite conversation as a rejoinder to the notion that more money always means more happiness. But also, the figure has since been complicated. A 2018 Purdue University study found that depending on which country you live in, happiness can cost anywhere from $35,000/year (in Latin America) to $125,000/year (in Australia and New Zealand). They also divided happiness into the categories of “life evaluation” and “emotional well-being,” and found that those had different price tags, too.
Are any of these be-all, end-all prices of happiness? Of course not.
They’re more likely the points at which your basic needs are covered. After that, financial decisions are driven more by preference than necessity, aiming at self-actualization, rather than survival. This means more ways to spend, and more abstract criteria for success. It’s the point at which you have to have a clear idea of what happiness means. Unfortunately, I’m unable to provide you with a single definition. But Aristotle would argue that that’s not the point.
Defining Happiness — Aristotle & Co.
In her engrossing book Aristotle’s Way, Edith Hall outlines several major philosophical schools of thought on happiness, ultimately championing Aristotle’s.
En route, she examines and critiques:
Stoics, whose figurehead Marcus Aurelius “recommend[ed] the resigned acceptance of misfortune” through suppressing emotions and physical appetites. Hall laments Stoics’ lack of joie de vivre, favoring Aristotle’s belief that sensual delights, “when enjoyed in constructive ways with people we love, offer crucial clues to human happiness.”
Hedonists, essentially the opposite of Stoics, who defined happiness by “the total proportion of our lives we spend enjoying ourselves, experiencing pleasure, or feeling delight and ecstasy.” As pleasure is both brief and expensive, hedonism makes for a rather shoddy five-year plan.
Cynics, who “agreed [with Aristotle] that the goal of life was happiness,” but who thought it could only be achieved via “social rewards such as fame, power and wealth.” People who measure a life’s value by its net worth fall into this category.
Objectivists, people/organizations using a set list of criteria like “good health, longevity, a loving family, and freedom from financial problems or anxiety” to evaluate national happiness. These criteria are about as good at evaluating happiness as the SATs are at evaluating intelligence: not useless, but utterly flawed. It is possible to match all criteria and be unhappy, or to match none and be happy.
Each of these approaches requires at least one concession that, Hall argues, Aristotle’s way does not. Aristotle’s own happiness criteria — “self-realization, finding ‘a meaning,’ and the ‘flow’ of creative involvement with life” — should sound familiar; everything from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to Oscar Wilde’s indispensable wit (“Everything in moderation, including moderation”) to the growing self-help industry express similar maxims. My favorite element of Aristotle’s philosophy (or Hall’s distillation of it) is the idea that happiness is a practice, based on “habitually doing the right thing.” You could spend a library’s worth of language unpacking what “the right thing” means, but in practical, everyday situations, you know what it means.
If someone drops their umbrella, you pick it up and give it to them. If you have to choose between saying or not saying a hateful thing, you don’t say it. If asked whether you prefer boxers or briefs, you respond, with Aristotelian enlightenment, “boxer-briefs.”
“The right thing” also means figuring out what matters to you and treating it like it matters.
This is where definitions begin to diverge. For some people it’s beekeeping, for others it’s philanthropy, for others it’s the New York Mets (those poor souls). As a wealth advisor, I know firsthand that everyone has something very close to their heart, that they’re willing to invest in, and that never looks quite the same as somebody else’s. A key part of my job is starting the conversations that lead to revelations about personal happiness, and then figuring out how money figures into it. In my understanding, Aristotle would argue that money should be fuel for a person’s “creative flow.” For the beekeeper, extra money turns into hives, smokers, jackets, and hat veils (and apparently not bananas). A high net worth is a wonderful thing to have, but re-purposing it into fuel for your passion gets the Aristotelian gold star.
The Time Gauge
What is the relationship between money and wealth? Wealth, I think, is what we’re all really after, and consists of more than money. However, in a society so confidently reliant on its currency, money is a pretty good barometer of wealth — or at least the potential to be wealthy. Most of us probably agree that wealth consists of more than money — friends, family, experiences, generosity, and gratefulness are all core components of personal wealth.
But money is quantifiable. It’s a number that gets higher or lower, and so it feels completely rock-solid in a world where so little is. What if there were another quantifiable metric for wealth that went beyond net worth? Allan S. Roth believes there is. Writing for Forbes in October 2018, Roth proposed a simple equation for measuring wealth in years, rather than dollars[2]:
Net Worth in Dollars / Annual Expenditures = Wealth in years
So, to make that a little more concrete:
$5 million Net Worth / $1 million Annual Expenditures = 5 Years of Wealth whereas… $500,000 Net Worth / $10,000 Annual Expenditures = 50 Years of Wealth
As you can see, in Roth’s model, years of wealth has as much to do with how you use your money as how much you start with. I like this for a number of reasons. For one, it complicates the wealth gauge without doing away with net worth entirely — try as we might to unlatch the shackles of materialism, having money is still important.
Also, it acknowledges the fact that Time is what we’re all really after. The video game of net worth accumulation (and comparison) can distract from this, but the whole point of getting money is being able to use what limited time we have on this planet in a meaningful way. It’s always possible to get a little more money, but it’s not always possible to get a little more time.
Gauging wealth in money is seductive for its simplicity and seeming concreteness, but gauging wealth in years speaks more to our common goal as humans.
Synthesizing: Roth, Meet Aristotle
Maybe you’ve always known what your passion is; maybe you only came across it recently. Maybe you’ve never given the topic any thought. You could also be one of those lucky few whose job is their passion, in which case, congratulations, you’ve solved life.
No matter your situation, Aristotle would argue that happiness means using your skillset at its maximum potential. Roth’s model elucidates the interrelation between getting and spending, setting Time as the ultimate product. Together, the models produce a vision of money and happiness which prioritizes Time, and whose engine is a dynamo of skill-utilization, fueled by Money.
My job is figuring out how to assemble an engine fitted to the particulars of your life.
Some people need eight cylinders, some are satisfied by four. Some barely know how to find a car engine, but do understand getting enough, not more is a critical key to happiness. As ever, I welcome your thoughts, questions and feedback. If anything in this article sparked your interest, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
If this topic appeals to you, I recommend you read:
Enough.
Inspired in large measure by the hundred of lectures Bogle has delivered to professional groups and college students in recent years, Enough. seeks, paraphrasing Kurt Vonnegut, “to poison our minds with a little humanity.” Page by page, Bogle thoughtfully considers what “enough: actually means as it relates to money, business, and life.