many many many studies link happiness to social status and money, ,this includes depression/happiness in old-age. Anyone who doesn’t think theres a life-time connection to a large extent in most people, between money, and happiness have never had a chronic disease or acute disease or any dysfunction that needed medical treatment.
For example, if you need a tooth pulled now and you can afford it, and someone can afford it only in 2-3 months, well, theres a huge difference in quality of life there.
But anyawy, it is only a correlation (a very very strong one) its not like money exponential increases happiness despite all other environmental factors in life. Having a fist sized tumor in your brain, money might not be of much comfort.
But the most important point here is that , money/status is only a *correlation to happiness, because happiness, like every other personality trait, is to a very very very large extent heritable, probably up to around 50%. So you could have a very rich/high status person that has come from a long line of ancestors plauged with depressive and anxiety filled natures, and you can have poor people with low status, who have happiness,due to a predisposition to easily being happy.
I’ve read studies that show that weight is not a predictive factor for heart-attack as much as social status is. That is, smaller people who have poor status/low money, take more heart-attacks than fat people, who have lots of money. (I imagine that fat people with no money are at particular risk) but apparently low status/money = stress, which lowers the immune system (at longterm doses, stress at a shorterm dose, boosts your immune system. Short-term stress is constantly triggered by infectious agents/etc) but long-term stress, isn’t so good.
(or say, shorterm stress could mean your blood is about to be spilled exposing your insides to the horror viruses/bacteria of the outside world)