"Money can't buy happiness" is a great mantra for rejecting the capitalist enshirining of wealth as a virtue. It's important to see happiness as something more complex than income.
The issue is that when interpreted as "poverty is no excuse for unhappiness", it loses all valid meaning.
Money can buy happiness in indirect ways. It is the same kind of liberal fake dreams sold to people, like everything is equal (it is not). If everything is perceived as equal, why will anyone try to change anything? Everyone becomes lazy, comfortable, sedentary and anti-revolutionary.
Moderate amount of money and financial independence is essential for happiness and wellbeing. Income does not directly determine happiness, but it can provide access to resources and opportunities for social interaction.
Basically, if you have very little of something, any additional amount of it will increase your satisfaction by a lot, but only up to the point of satiation, after which happiness will not increase further regardless of how much more you have.
But a three year old can understand this. Give them one ice cream, they’ll be delighted, give them ten, and they’ll start throwing up.
Yeah, law of diminishing returns, or Pareto frontier, whatever we can call it. The "moderate" amount seems to be where capitalist elite leeches tend to try and focus on as far as salaries are concerned, so that people keep themselves busy in the rat race, outpacing each other like enemies. Expensive brand stuff mostly exists to give this perversion an ecosystem.
Not to be confused with the fallacy that these essentials are exclusively the product of exchanging money-- while you can pay for better health and better safety, there are also things you can do with little to no money to improve those for yourself, though the freedom to do so unfortunately is not default and financial security does empower an individual to better use what resources are available to them-- maybe not everyone can trivially access hiking trails, or be in the health for it, and even then they should have a good pair of shoes, a water bottle, and reliable mode of transportation to/fro the trails, which again not everyone has unfortunately.
Imo, the idealistic answer is to work to ensure everyone an essential baseline level that can reliably empower them to live as healthy and opportune of lives as is reasonably possible, while of course having in place infrastructure and accomodations to those less fortunate in health and/or opportunity. I'd like to think this is more than a utopian idea, and closer to a reality than one might originally think, or perhaps I was somewhat unique or grossly digressed from the status quo in pessimistically believing that we might be far from this being a reality. Perhaps my pessimism was also influenced by my financial stress at the time, among the other throes of life.
The people I know all seem to understand the "after a certain point" concept. Up to a certain point, money is directly connected to happiness, and I my group understands that.
Still, a good meme (or whatever it's called). A reminder that most thing we want to believe are more important than money are only obtainable with money.
Context matters. This is an appropriate statement to make to someone who has enough to live a comfortable life but is always chasing more. But to say it to someone struggling to make ends meet is just incredibly disrespectful.
I'd argue it can by happiness in a very literal sense since you can pay people to do things you don't want to do, thus freeing up your time enjoy however you like.
Okay but for the vast majority of us living on the precipice of homelessness and always budgeting for how much ramen noodles we can afford it is crass and insensitive and this meme is calling that out.
Unless you are advocating mass redistribution of the ill gotten gains of capital please shut the fuck up with this condescending debate pervert bullshit.
