10 philosophers on whether money can make you happy

Henry David Thoreau is famous for retreating to a cabin near Walden pound and writing a book about his experiment of living a simple, self-sufficient life in the wilderness. While his experiment is often presented as more than it was, his cabin wasn’t that far from a town and his mother usually cooked and cleaned for him, his ideas on the simple life are still worth considering.

His time in the woods showed him the benefits of living simply; such as how much humanity can gain by spending more time in nature and how getting away from material pleasures can help us live a fuller life. 

Epicurus was a philosopher with some bold ideas on how to make people happy. He lived in the countryside in a large house with a dozen other people where they all lived communally. He argued that the path to happiness was moderation, strong friendships, and philosophy.

Rather than accumulating wealth, one should try and live a simple life and find joy in things like friends, the pleasures of work, and philosophy. The moderate life, however, didn’t require much money at all.

 Nietzsche argued that the morality of the gospels was a slave morality which was based on a sort of sour grapes approach to things. Since the authors of the gospels didn’t have money or power they declared those things to be evil and the poverty and weakness they had to be good. Nietzsche sees this reactionary morality to be unbecoming of great people.

This doesn’t mean that he thought hoarding cash was good, but he does warn us to be wary of the poor man who derides money as evil and useless to our happiness.

Kierkegaard strikes out against how people are increasingly dispassionate, conforming, and detached. He blames, among other things, money for causing some of this. As the abstraction of real value, it tends to make us desire of it rather than the things it can buy or represents.

Kierkegaard implores us to dive headfirst into life and live it fully and desiring too much money is a symptom of not doing so.

Schopenhauer was a pessimistic thinker who felt that most people were doomed to rather unpleasant lives. He was so convinced of this that he was one of the first prominent anti-natalists and wrote that most people were better off not being born. His advice on how to be happy is fittingly strange.

Schopenhauer’s great solution to the endless miseries of life is to withdraw from them and live ascetically. Money then, that cause of infinite desire, labor, and strife, is to be avoided. The worst part of his solution is his understanding of how few people could hope to carry it out.

Franklin was independently wealthy. After a lifetime of wise investments, hard work, and a fair share of luck, Franklin was able to turn his attention to his social projects and not have to worry about money again.

His ideas on wealth were similar to Aristotle’s in many ways. He wrote a book on how to earn and save money and associated having wealth with having a least a few virtues. He also agrees that, while good to have, money is at best a tool for getting other things. Unlike Aristotle, however, his list of virtues does not require wealth to live life to the fullest.

Marx reminds us that money, for all the bad things philosophers often say about it, is extremely useful. It drives history, grants the ability to accomplish great things, and often consumes too much of our time. His philosophy of communism isn’t so much against wealth as it is an attempt to tame it and make it the servant of humanity rather than the problem it frequently can be. The results have been mixed at best.

His life story and later dedication to intellectual pleasures speak against a life of chasing money as the path to Nirvana. However, extreme poverty is no solution either. While many Buddhist monks are supposed to avoid even touching money, the rest of us are encouraged to have the “right livelihood” and earn it virtuously. This also includes not having more than we need.

We are warned that there is too much of a good thing and that we should not suppose that more money is the solution to suffering. Having nothing isn’t too much fun either though.

Needleman has spent decades helping people navigate life. He is often sought out as a consultant on how to handle money at the conceptual level and has a lifetime of advice on how money affects us to give out.

One of his realizations is that money doesn’t solve problems or provide answers. While it might assure that we have access to necessities, it won’t cure us of worrying about having them. He reminds us that there are things that money can’t buy, like happiness, that we must never lose sight of; even if it is nice to be able to buy that trip to Hawaii without saving for it.