"Money can't buy you happiness" confirmed

Canada's National Post reports on the latest scientific research into what makes people happy.

Psychologists and economists have started to bring objective rigour to a field that was once thought frivolous or unscientific. Our sense of well-being is starting to give up its secrets, just like the atom and the genome before it. ...

Christopher Barrington-Leigh, an economist at the University of British Columbia, says the initial discoveries in this field have been "revolutionary."

"Income doesn't matter much [to happiness], so that's devastating for economics. And to the degree it does matter, it's relative, which is devastating for economics, because everything in economics is always assumed to be absolute benefits," he said.

He goes onto say that while a rising tide may indeed lift all boats, it doesn't mean that anyone will consider themselves better off. That is, they won't feel happier. So what does make people happy?

What they have found is that, if there is a key to happiness, it is belonging -- to families, clubs, sports teams, churches, the more the better. Belonging, what they call social connectedness, predicts happiness far better than wealth, health or intelligence. It even predicts how well one will recover from a stroke.

So is one reason for the rise of blogging that it gives - or at least potentially gives - a wide interconnectedness? Put another way, is what keeps me and others blogging is not so much that we actually add to the sum of human wisdom than that blogging is just an easily attainable form of social connectedness, and the content does not matter except to shape with whom we are connected?