Money Quotes: The Price of Happiness
From The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need by Juliet B. Schor:
Twenty-seven percent of all households making more than $100,000 a year say they cannot afford to buy everything they need. Nearly 20 percent say they “spend nearly all their income on the basic necessities of life.” In the $50,000-$100,000 range, 39 percent and one-third feel this way, respectively. Overall, half the population of the richest country in the world say they cannot afford nearly everything they need. And it’s not just the poorer half.
From Salon.com:
Oprah Winfrey, talking to Harvard business school students studying her business model about making lots of money and what’s really important in life: “In the beginning, the money is to get nice things. And once you’ve gotten those nice things, I think some of the most unhappy people I know are the people who’ve acquired all the things and now they feel like, ‘What else is there?’ What else is there? What else is there? And that feeling of ‘what else is there’ is the calling—is the calling trying to say to you [that] there is more than this. There is more than this.” (Working Knowledge via Gawker)
From former lawyer Opinionista:
If you ask me (or even if you don’t, I’ll still tell you), law schools should reduce all the boring pedantic crap like Chirelstein and Calamari (no offense) and instead add to all first-year reading lists a book called “Dynamics of Faith.” Written by theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, it’s a basic but amazing primer on the secret to happiness. At the risk of waxing philosophical, I’ll boil the book’s message down to a few sentences:
Faith, or the key to man’s (and woman’s) happiness, is simply the state of being ultimately concerned. Concerned with what? Something that truly deserves it. If you spend life being ultimately concerned with things that are not worthwhile, you’ll end up in a state called “existential disappointment.”
Bernise Ang said,
February 26, 2006 at 1:08 pm
Hi Jasmin, we got your contact from Siva of RMBR - we need to get in touch to talk sustainable development! Please email me asap. Cheers!
The Worsted Witch » I Shop Therefore I Am said,
April 16, 2006 at 3:08 pm
[...] I’m a huge fan of the work of Juliet B. Schor, the author of The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need and Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, so of course I devoured her piece on consumerism, “Cleaning the Closet: Toward a New Fashion Ethic,” in Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the Twenty-first Century (which, quite ironically, I’m now tempted to purchase because it does such a bang-up job of divvying up the state of the planet among some of our best minds, who then present their solutions so plainly, accessibly, and stirringly that you want to have all of their hemp- and organic cotton-diapered babies.) [...]