THAT'S MEN:People on lower incomes enjoy more leisure and with increased leisure comes greater happiness, writes Padraig O'Morain
A RECENT COLUMN on the emergence of "money therapists" in the US was remarked on by many people after it appeared.
That's a sign of the times. Previous columns on money have drawn little or no comment - including those suggesting that the link between money and happiness is very weak indeed.
The lack of reaction, I expect, was due to the notion that times were good and that all this money must be, simply had to be, making us happier.
We just weren't ready to be told that people who have less money and fewer worries are happier than those of us who are better off and who work harder.
Let's take a look at some of the information which passed us by as the Celtic Tiger was roaring.
First, it seems that once you can meet your basic needs, extra income makes relatively little difference to your happiness level.
Most of us believe that a win on the euromillions would make us significantly happier. But research study after research study shows that this is not so.
The trouble with this finding is that it's counter-intuitive: it's not what you would expect and, more importantly, it feels wrong even when you know the facts.
And what was that about people with less money being happier? Research from the US - where, remember, there are few safety nets in the welfare sense - suggests that people on lower incomes enjoy more leisure than those on higher incomes. It is the increase in leisure that brings the increase in happiness.
People on higher incomes spend more time on a combination of working, shopping and childcare, all associated with higher stress levels. Think about it - the dash to the creche or school, followed by the dash to work, followed by the evening dash to creche or childminder, the dash home, the dash to the supermarket: hardly a recipe for relaxation.
Of course, the more you earn, the more foreign holidays you can afford. But have you the time to go for a walk in the park, to sit and read a newspaper, to actually let relaxation seep into your bones? These things might just be more important to your quality of life than ramping up three or four foreign holidays a year, not counting weekends in Barcelona and shopping trips to New York.
The disconnection between money and happiness isn't just a matter of the amount of dashing about it involves. There is also the question of normalisation, of getting used to having more.
So if you win the lotto, you are going to get a very big shot of happiness when it happens and you will be photographed jumping up and down.
A year later, though, you will not be jumping up and down - life with money will feel normal and your happiness level will not be significantly greater than it was before the win.
In an article a couple of years ago, I quoted the following from Isaak Walton, writing in the 17th century: "I have a rich neighbour that is always so busy that he has no leisure to laugh; the whole business of his life is to get money, more money, that he may get still more.
"He considers not that it is not in the power of riches to make a man happy; for it was wisely said that there be as many miseries beyond riches as on this side of them."
We are in a period right now in which many people, lulled by the recent economic boom, are learning that "there be as many miseries beyond riches as on this side of them".
But the message from the research mentioned here, as well as from Isaak Walton, is that if we can provide for the basic needs of ourselves and our families - often easier said than done, I admit - then the loss of the extravagance that came with the Celtic Tiger is no loss at all.
• Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor. His book, That's Men - The best of the That's Men column from The Irish Times, is published by Veritas