You should have asked her why she came to the US
She said that the people of her community prioritized happiness, not that the people prioritized community happiness. That might, for example, mean working less to enjoy more free time at the cost of maximizing profit. And, indeed, we can see in the data that the average worker in Greece takes 9 more vacation days each year as compared to their American counterparts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...
Not to mention the unrelenting psychic toll of working low wage jobs in a country with a weak social safety net.
Which may suggest that the "American way" is to work fewer hours per day, and then try to cram in some fun after work, whereas the Greeks allow themselves to delve into more fun over the span of entire days instead of short spurts. It is possible that more happiness is derived when one is able to enjoy themselves in larger blocks of time, even if the total quantity on a time-unit basis ends up being the same as anyone else. That would support both scenarios in the comments, even if they seem contradictory on the surface.
But, as with earlier comments, this is all based on hypotheticals for the sake of illustration. There is no indication of what the speaker from the greater thread was actually talking about.
Why? Because I am the most happy when working at a high paying job with loots of interesting problems to solve.
I would be the least happy working at a high paying job with nothing to do.
Happiness is a comparator, not a number. Money on the other hand can be counted, and thus can be measured. I am 100% sure every Greek ever would be more happy with more money given nothing else changed. Only somebody who found happiness through suffering would ask for less, and be more happy with less.
Money means even less.
>Why? Because I am the most happy when working at a high paying job with loots of interesting problems to solve.
Yes, people have been conditioned to be working.
Money is a way to transfer resources. Resources make people happy. Somebody with no food for 3 days is happy when they finally get food. Money buys food, therefor money can buy happiness. People like to say the opposite, but they forget money can also buy unhappiness, or when talking bout the extreme cases where somebody has 20 billion, would 1 more billion have any affect on their happiness? Oh shit, we are back to WTF is even happiness. For all we know 1B more to the 20B guy might make them more happy because they are now richer than their enemy or some other happiness driven from the count of money.
We can break this down in other ways too. Some people say family is what makes them happy. I can tell you that a family of 12 with no money is less happy than a family of 12 with enough money. Its the difference between having shoes, or eating in may cases. Its clear that happiness is a compactor, and money can change the outcome.
Not really. "1 money" is just a promise to deliver 1 unit of value in the future. But what characterizes the unit? What is the difference between one unit of value and two units of value?
In reality, we don't really know. It's a continual quest to try and figure that out and it changes on a whim.
Plenty of Greeks have no interest in going back because they want the "American" life, but there's no question you ate better in the village, had more community, or had a sense of history - what you didn't have was more than ~35k euros a year, if you were lucky.
Maybe the relative poverty fosters that kind of culture, and a high earning society necessarily becomes atomized, or perhaps atomized societies fosters high earning.
Everyone knows everyone in a ghetto. Gated communities often don't know their next door neighbors.
People sometimes have rose-colored glasses about emigrating to the US.
Eventually, they were rotated to Germany. As soon as they arrived, she was off to England. 6 weeks later, she was back, and did not complain about the US again.