I’ve seen poverty that I suspect is out-of-bounds, for many folks on this forum.
I can say that the most astonishing thing, to me, is the healthy attitude, of many of the folks I’ve met, that live under those circumstances.
“Healthy” does not mean “happy.” They desperately want to escape their circumstances, but they do accept their challenges, and do their best to live [a hard] life.
I haven’t experienced what you have to that extent directly. I was poor growing up by American standards, and that is a different bar.
I’m curious about your take on this - Someone being able to enjoy their kids growing up, or see the value they bring to the people in their lives, or feel the importance in their role in keeping everyone alive, is a large part of my definition of happiness. It goes more towards ‘contentment’? Or purpose.
It includes processing the hard things, and finding the value in getting through them too, and the feeling of being good at what someone does and who they are.
For others, their definition of happy is the excited state of enjoyment (laughing, glee, etc).
For most, it’s a mix of the two.
Near as I can tell, getting rich often requires a significant degree of not being reasonable or content with the status quo. Sometimes ‘getting rich’ here is more about not being poor. Sometimes, it can be ‘there is never enough’.
Being content for someone in that state can happen of course, and after someone gets to a certain degree of wealth, tools to make it easier to get or maintain it are more readily available, but so are tools to hurt oneself. I’ve seen a lot of people hurt themselves on this front over the years.
A lot of the contentment elements here are also quite difficult to feel productively for someone with material wealth. Mucking out a chicken coop because it’s nasty and you need healthy chickens to survive is a very concrete thing with a clear chain from ‘problem’ to ‘solved’.
Trying to get Alpha out of stocks is not.
They deal with very tough situations, but have learned to find happiness in them.
A lot of emotional misery is found in other groups, often groups with more material wealth, because they haven’t learned to find happiness in their circumstances.
Happiness is just as often about letting yourself be happy than anything else, and that’s a cultural and emotional situation independent of circumstances.