The actual headline of my source was "Poor Americans who attend church regularly are happier than rich Americans who never go," reporting on a study by behavioral scientist William von Hippel. The post states:
What's happening? Rich people already have most of what money buys. What they lack is what churches provide for free: weekly, repeated contact with people who know your name.
But that isn't the whole story. For those that never attend church, the survey found that 26% of wealthy Americans stated that they were very happy versus only 19% of poor Americans. The gap was even larger for those who attended church regularly: 52% of the wealthy considered themselves very happy versus only 36% of the poor.
And from a 2024 article entitled "Can Money Buy Happiness for Millionaires?"
What’s especially noteworthy is the huge gap in happiness between the richest and poorest people. Low-income participants reported an average life satisfaction just above 4 on a 7-point scale, while the wealthiest groups scored close to 6 out of 7. In other words, income and wealth accounted for more than half of the difference in life satisfaction between people with low incomes and those with a perfect life satisfaction score.
Another key finding in the study is that the happiness gap between wealthy people and middle-income earners is much larger than the gap between middle- and low-income earners. For example, people earning $70,000 to $80,000 a year are a lot closer in happiness to those with low incomes than they are to the ultra-wealthy. In fact, the jump in happiness for the wealthy compared to middle-income earners is nearly three times as large as the difference between middle- and low-income groups.
In other words: Middle incomes are far from the peak of the “money-happiness curve,” where levels of happiness are highest.
Or as David Lee Roth is supposed to have expressed it: "Money may not buy you happiness....but what it CAN buy you is a big enough yacht to pull up alongside it!"
My favorite line from above: "Rich people already have most of what money buys. What they lack is what churches provide for free: weekly, repeated contact with people who know your name." IMHO that is about all they can offer is contact with others...and it ain't free. The hat always gets passed around...and some even demand your money. I would bet another research project would show that churches prefer wealthy attendees as opposed to the penniless. In the end just about everything in life is all about the money.
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