HAPPINESS AND HIGH STANDARD OF LIVING

HAPPINESS AND HIGH STANDARD OF LIVING

Every human being has the right to live and,therefore, the right to find the wherewithal to feed,to clothe, and to house himself as well as his dependents. 

One has to fulfill some other needs besides these three, the aim being to avoid pain and to have a reasonably comfortable life. But, the trouble starts when one adopts that economic philosophy which states that multiplication and fulfillment of wants leads to higher standard of living and to greater happiness, and one, then sets to accumulate whatever and as much as one can by fair as well as foul means. 

This economic philosophy is erroneous and self-defeating and is the cause of many social, economic, political, and moral maladies of our times.In the first instance, one has to bear in mind that happiness is not the same thing as pleasure. 

Happiness depends more on the mental state of a person than on the fulfillment of desires and the gratification of senses. A man who is fabulously rich may have all sorts of comforts and yet may remain worried. By no stretch of imagination such a man can be called a happy man. 

On the other hand, a person not living in luxury or even in comfort may be happy as well as contented. Therefore, there may be a man, whose hands are full but whose soul is empty.It would be wrong to measure one’s standard of living on the scale of luxury goods. It would also be wrong to dissociate this term from the intellectual, moral, and cultural aspects of a person. 

For instance, there may be a person with high moral character who leads a life of voluntary non-possession or minimum possessions. He may be an intellectual of a high order, contented in mind and refined in the cultural sense. 

It would be wrong to say that his ‘standard of living’ is not high.Indeed the love for luxury and the identification of the ‘standard of living’ with possession of material goods does harm to the individuals, the nations and the international community. 

The wrong sense of values, makes people run madly after material things, throwing moral norms to the winds and losing peace in the process.Then those, who succeed in the rat race, consume more things at the cost of majority of the people who, in the

present age, are poor. Further,means of production, which,in every country are limited,are set up or transferred to produce goods that satisfy the wants of these materially affluent people, and lesser and lesser commodities which are consumed by the poor are produced because it is more profitable to cater to the demands of the ‘over rich’.All this multiplies the misery manifold.

Hence, it can safely be concluded that, beyond a limit, the multiplication of wants and their satisfaction do not promote happiness and certainly not in that proportion.