Why You Will Never Have ‘Enough’ Money

Written by Tom Baker, Third year, Psychology and Sociology, Glasgow University

Money cannot buy happiness. It can, however, buy a great deal of things that bring happiness. From products of the utmost luxury to basic necessities required for survival, our system is one in which money is the master key that can unlock all the gates of desire. In some ways, this simplicity seems ideal – everything you could ever want or need is accessible through the same system. However, this ubiquity often leads money to become the object of our desire, rather than the means to which we can capture this desire. Like appreciating the window without seeing the view, we are conditioned (literally) to think of money as the goal, the reason, the point. Yet this goal is inherently unattainable, and consequently deeply unsatisfactory. You will never have ‘enough’ money; because there is no such thing.
Human beings are motivated by drives. Like our fellow animals, our most basic drives are those geared towards survival – hunger, shelter, reproduction. Because these drives are biological and innate, they can trigger unconscious and irrepressible responses. This is the basis on which the physiologist Ivan Pavlov based his famous study into classical conditioning. A dog will salivate (an unconditioned response) when presented with food (an unconditioned stimulus). Pavlov took this a step further: by pairing the sound of a bell (a neutral stimulus) with the appearance of food, the dog could be conditioned into salivating when hearing just the bell (now a conditioned stimulus), even when no food was presented. Thus, it was shown that animals can be trained to elicit a biological response to an unrelated stimulus.
This can be taken further, as additional stimuli can be conditioned to be associated with already conditioned stimuli. For example, someone who smokes often is likely to have conditioned themselves into craving nicotine when they see a packet of cigarettes. Now say this same smoker often smokes after drinking beer, they are likely to also condition themselves to crave nicotine when they drink beer. If this connection is strengthened, it can progress to the point where just looking at a beer makes this person want nicotine – a completely different substance, yet associated with the observed stimulus, so not an unrelated one. This is known as second order conditioning, and is one of the reasons why quitting an addiction can be so difficult, as there will be many stimuli that elicit this same response.
B. F. Skinner then introduced the theory of operant conditioning, in which rewards and punishments are given and taken away from animals in order to teach them to act in certain ways. He found that giving a reward (what he called positive reinforcement) was the most effective way to teach animals through operant conditioning. Meaning an animal was most likely to pull a lever if it led to receiving a pellet of food.
However, after a while, the animal would stop pulling the lever. Why? Simply, because it was full. This is the limitation of using biological drives (also known as primary reinforcers) to encourage behaviour – they can be satiated. The satiation of hunger in humans involves the bloating (distention) of the intestines and stomach, and the release of hormones like leptin, which work to decrease hunger and increase energy expenditure. These are biological reactions that happen outside of our control, and make sure that we do not (and to an extent cannot) overeat. In simple terms, it’s hard to be hungry when you’re full.
But conditioned stimuli cannot be satiated. Pavlov’s dogs did not have a biological drive for bells, the smoking addict does not have a biological drive for cigarette packets, they are motivated by what these things represent. Put a human being in a box, and every time they pull a lever, rather than giving them a meal, give them a token that represents a meal. Then extend the influence of this token; it could represent a meal, or it could represent a packet of cigarettes, or a designer bag, a videogame console, a car, a private island. How many times would they pull the lever? Would they stop?
Money is this token. Although it is gained through work often much less inane than pulling a lever, at a basic level this metaphor works as a simple simulation of the modern working environment. We perform a behaviour, and we are rewarded. However, instead of being rewarded with primary reinforcers which would serve to directly satiate our biological drives, we are rewarded with secondary reinforcers that represent a way to satiate these drives.
There are benefits to this. Primarily, a higher degree of freedom. If our workplaces rewarded us with meals, we would have less freedom over what we get to eat (school dinners every day). In addition, the wide flexibility of money means we can use it to purchase luxuries, things that aren’t necessary to survive, but may be necessary to thrive.
But let’s consider the alternative. For example, in the industrial era and up into the 20th century (and in some cases even continuing up to now) many working class factory jobs had lunch included. Although we may now have more power over our meals, that doesn’t necessarily mean the meals we eat are better. In fact, many British people have very little knowledge (or even interest) in the skill of cooking or healthy eating – all the more so now that food tech and home economics are rarely taught in schools – and for many children, the meal they eat at school will be the only healthy food they eat that day. Perhaps if meals were given as rewards for work (with the added reward of not having to prepare it) the nation’s health may also improve.
The argument for the overhaul of luxuries is harder to make and tougher to swallow, but there are some already existing schemes that could act as a blueprint. For example, many companies (including the civil service) offer reward incentives to their workers which can range from discounts of products from partner businesses, to free cinema tickets every month.
Although completely getting rid of our monetary system would be difficult (and is not necessarily what I am suggesting), there are alternatives; and, most importantly to this argument, these alternatives are satisfying. There’s a common agreement amongst most people that “all food tastes good when it’s free” – my mother would often comment that chips tasted better when stolen from someone else. While these comments are often said in half-jest, there is some fundamental truth to them; the immediate satisfaction of biological drives is inherently satisfying, especially when you’ve worked for it. Getting your invoice may give you a rush of dopamine, but it’s hardly satisfying, and often comes with the small voice in the back of your mind saying “I wish it was a little bit more…”
This is a dissatisfaction that exists in all of us to some level, but for some it is insatiable. The existence of billionaires (and trillionaires), people with far more money than one could ever realistically spend, attest to this fact. These people are consumed by their dissatisfaction, they amass hordes of wealth to no foreseeable end. This may initially seem harmless, but when one takes into account that money one has is money that another doesn’t, the issues begin to surface. For instance, in 2021 then billionaire Elon Musk challenged the UN to prove how to end world hunger with $6bn; if they could, he offered to donate that sum. When the UN’s World Food Programme responded with a $6.6bn detailed proposal, there was no reply from Musk. A year later he bought X (then Twitter) for $44bn. Musk’s desire to infinitely grow his capital prevented many others from surviving a year of hunger.
In conclusion, you will never have ‘enough’ money. It is a dissatisfying reward, as it does not inherently satisfy any fundamental biological drives. Although it does mean there are wider freedoms in what we can have, this doesn’t necessarily mean we take what is best for us. This can be both damaging to ourselves and, in more dramatic cases, other people. Although there are larger societal changes that could be made to address this dissatisfaction, they cannot be realised without a major social shift. On the personal level, however, by acknowledging the power money has over us and by understanding the fact that it will never innately satisfy us, perhaps we can better examine our own relationship with money in a more rational and mature manner.