2024-02-16 13:14:37
They say money can’t buy happiness, and now a new study of native peoples around the world backs up that claim.
People living in small-scale societies on the margins of the modern world lead lives as happy and satisfying as people in wealthy, technologically advanced nations, researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Surprisingly, many populations with very low monetary incomes report very high average levels of life satisfaction, with scores similar to those in rich countries,” said lead researcher Eric Galbraith, a professor at McGill University in Montreal.
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This runs counter to the notion that economic growth is a sure way to increase the well-being of people in low-income countries, the researchers noted.
However, these global surveys tend to overlook people in societies where the exchange of money plays a minimal role in everyday life, and where livelihoods depend directly on nature, the researchers said.
For this study, researchers surveyed nearly 3,000 people from indigenous or primitive communities at 19 sites around the world. Only 64 percent of households surveyed had cash on hand, the researchers said.
Having little money does not determine the happiness of native peoples (Photo: REUTERS)
And yet, their average life satisfaction scores were 6.8 on a 10-point scale across all communities, and four had an average score above 8, on par with the happiness found in Scandinavian countries. rich, the researchers noted.
“This is so even though many of these societies have suffered histories of marginalization and oppression,” the researchers wrote.
Based on these results, the research team concluded that human societies can maintain very satisfying lives without necessarily requiring a lot of material wealth.
“The frequently observed strong correlation between income and life satisfaction is not universal, and proves that wealth, as generated by industrialized economies, is not fundamentally necessary for humans to lead happy lives,” he noted. the main researcher, Victoria Reyes-García, an anthropologist at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, in Spain.
The researchers said they can’t say why these communities report high levels of life satisfaction.
Previous research would suggest that family, community, relationships, spirituality and connections with nature contribute to this happiness, “but it is possible that the important factors differ significantly between societies or, conversely, that a small subset of factors dominate everywhere,” Galbraith said.
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