The hierarchy of needs help explain this. Whatever is the lowest need will take priority and convince us that's all we need, and you can achieve all of these without great material wealth. Some extremely poor countries and communities are not safe; they are ravaged with war, crime and corruption, so naturally their safety needs aren't met. There are also poor communities that are safe, they have a strong community, and working to benefit one's community as a primary value naturally fills all the other needs. No one else in these communities will attack the other's self esteem and sense of belonging by telling them they need the newest car or house to be seen as successful, if they valued that and perpetuated that value onto it's people like rich countries do, then they would feel the need to constantly buy more. People's sense of security, belonging and esteem are strategically attacked by marketing and politics to convince people they need to buy another product to fulfill that need and divide them amongst each other, the easiest way to protect their interests is to have the poor fight amongst each other for the promise of wealth.
Growing up poor I felt that as long as I had security I would be happy, romance and connection weren't a priority or were seen as a means to achieve safety, but once I did achieve that suddenly the need to be loved overruled and that took priority. As I see it we definitely need a minimum of wealth in order to have economic security and not have to worry about that factor, but once people reach that they are then convinced they have to worry about retirement, they need at least a million to be able to stop working in their old years, so even then they are convinced they don't truly have economic security until their retirement is payed for, it's all a plot to keep us unhappy by attacking our lowest needs so that we are more productive and allow the rich to accumulate more power to turn the world more into their image, which becomes their ideal of self-actualization. The wealthy who do not have this goal usually fuck off to retire early, while the ones who do make everything worse for the rest of us. Like
>>226316 mentions, the hedonic treadmill shows that even those who win the lottery or suffer from medical problems hit large feelings of happiness or pain before the feeling normalizes to baselines months later, this serves an ev
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