Being happy with a job is more important than having a high salary. What do you think?

I listened a podcast episode that addresses how we know about what we really want.1) In this episode the interviewee, who is professor of psychology department, said that income does not correlate as strongly with happiness as people may think. Furthermore, researches show that income does not relate to happiness in longitudinal trends.2)

The more important thing is motivation. That means, if someone wanted to do their job or they think that they contribute to others through their job, they could really satisfied with their job even if they don’t have a high salary or high status. That is a much larger determinant of how much they are happy.

Although, human are always comparing to others. It’s a human nature. In my opinion, if you could not earn salary enough as compared to close others, you feel down and you are likely to end up dissatisfying your job. So, having a motivation that drives you to behave in a way that you could feel competent or satisfied is important, but that’s not enough. You need to earn the salary as much as you can satisfying when you compare to close others.

sources:

• 1. Intrinsic motivation is more important to our wellbeing than income. 26sec snip from Hidden Brain
  • “And what we found was that yes, in fact, income correlated with happiness, but it was a pretty small effect, a surprisingly small effect. A much larger effect was their motivation for doing the job. Was it something they wanted to do? They believed in it? They felt like they were contributing to the world by doing it. And that was a much larger determinant of how happy a person they were.”
• 2. Why Are Rich Countries So Unhappy? - Freakonomics
  • “At any given point in time, happiness and income are correlated in a country, across countries. But over time, when you look at long-term longitudinal trends, happiness and income are not related.”