Existential Psychology

Stop Banking On Money To Solve Your Problems

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Stop banking on money to solve your problems, because unless you’re living in abject poverty, struggling to get your basic needs met, your plan probably isn’t going to work. Actually psychological studies have come to the conclusion that differences in happiness between people who make fifty thousand dollars a year and five million dollars a year are negligible.

We’ve put forth a few different reasons why. An idea we want to discuss here is that psychologically speaking, banking on money to solve your problems might be an unconscious strategy to avoid having to deal with your problems right now, in effect finding some relief in the present without having to do anything except believe that these problems will all go away once your financial situation has improved.

Actually the most significant sources of distress once your basic needs are met, sources like loneliness, interpersonal difficulties, mortality, and the search for personal meaning, can’t be solved by any amount of money so if you’re secretly hoping that by getting more of it these issues are going to disappear you’re sure to be disappointed.

You’ll be confronted by the exact same realities at that future date as you are now, with the added distress of realizing that you put your eggs in the wrong basket. You will have wasted all that time where you could have faced your issues squarely in order to find solutions that gave you some real relief instead of taking the counterfeit relief that came from believing your issues would go away on their own once you had more money.

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