more money, more problems
July 10th, 2008sure, it’s just another economic study, but my own observations tend to corroborate the findings in this article that wealthier people are more stressed:
Being rich used to get you into the leisure class. Money meant freedom — from work, money worries, household chores and screaming kids (via boarding school).
Now, however, the wealthy seem to be as besieged as ever. The leisure class has given way to what I call the workaholic wealthy — an elite of BlackBerry-crazed, network-obsessed, peripatetic travelers who have to keep scrambling to maintain their place in life.
According to research by Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning behavioral economist, quoted in an article in the Washington Post, “being wealthy is often a powerful predictor that people spend less time doing pleasurable things and more time doing compulsory things and feeling stressed.”
People who make less than $20,000 a year, for instance, spent more than a third of their time in passive leisure, like kicking back and watching TV. By contrast, those making more than $100,000 a year (I would call them affluent, not wealthy), spent less than a fifth of their time in passive leisure. “The richest people spent nearly twice as much time as the poorest people in leisure activities that were structured and often stressful — shopping, child care and exercise.”
