Caden Proulx
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Do you know the century-old debate on whether money can buy happiness or not? It’s becoming increasingly easy to agree that it can, but maybe Jessie J would disagree with me.
This question doesn’t get at the crux of the issue, though; the question isn’t whether money can buy happiness, but rather how inaccessible happiness is — especially the income needed for it.
As we just saw in the 2025 elections, affordability was a defining factor in people’s votes across the political spectrum. Normally, I’d ask for a little more specificity; is it affordable housing, cheaper groceries, childcare or something else? But the fact is that prices are up in all categories — it is just too expensive to be an American right now.
Obviously, you can find happiness in a myriad of ways. But how is it fair that someone can access more recreational resources than another just based on wages and salaries?
Finding happiness specifically through outdoor recreation is one of the most important things we can do for our mental health. But even here in Fort Collins, where there is more free public transportation than most places, it is still really hard to get to these outdoor spaces.
Worse off, though, are the people who have to keep moving farther outside of cities just to be able to afford their desired living place — or places their family lived in for generations — due to gentrification.
As my fellow columnist pointed out, a person who makes the federal minimum wage can barely afford to buy certain clothing staples. This is absolutely absurd, and it’s only getting worse.
We are simply leaving people further and further behind, to the point where they can’t take care of themselves or their loved ones adequately. Recreation is not the first expense most people think about, and often it’s not even a thought: recreation or groceries? It seems like a no-brainer.
It’s a reality far too common in America: putting our physical and mental health in jeopardy just to get by and survive, serving the capitalist machine all over again next week. Now with SNAP benefits being cut, around 600,000 Coloradans are still experiencing freezes.
While this type of physical and mental wellness is important across all stages of life, it is crucial for early and adolescent development. It’s been found that recreation in adolescence promotes a host of things, like the development of autonomy, motivation and goal-setting skills, competence, social and emotional skills and identity formation, all alongside the numerous physical benefits.
This is widening an already huge disparity in low-income child outcomes, turning out a generation of children who will be worse off just because they couldn’t pay to access transportation, the skatepark or a computer lab.
“We have to do better to provide equal opportunity to equally funded and maintained recreational and outdoor areas.”
In 2005, environmental journalist Richard Louv introduced the idea of Nature-Deficit Disorder. NDD refers to the negative effects experienced by adolescents who do not spend enough time in nature, which is becoming more common among youth due to rising urbanization and technological forms of entertainment. NDD has since been reaffirmed in the field of psychology through numerous research studies, but is not yet recognized as a clinical diagnosis.
Our brains are wired to respond positively to being in nature from hundreds of thousands of years of being hunter-gatherers. When we can’t feel that connectedness, we are often unregulated, causing a myriad of adverse symptoms. For an adolescent, this can stunt development dramatically.
Propositions LL and MM, which both passed in Colorado, are great — incredible, even. But if these fueled-up bodies can’t access places to exert energy in healthy physical activity, they aren’t gaining the full benefits they could be.
If anyone remembers Fuel Up from grade school, the fun part as a kid was not eating a balanced meal; it was getting to go outside for at least 60 minutes with all of your friends in great weather, feeling really good after. As of 2013, only around 42% of kids ages 6 to 11 met this minimum of 60 minutes of physical activity. This alarmingly dropped to only 8% among children 12 years old to the end of adolescence.
Wealthy white families can access recreational spaces at a much higher rate and in better conditions than lower-income families. This includes instances in which rich people buy all the properties near good public schools, pushing lower-income families further away from the place that normally provides this recreation.
We have to do better to provide equal opportunity to equally funded and maintained recreational and outdoor areas. This direct positive correlation between income level and the physical and emotional development of America’s vulnerable children is disgusting. This is why wealth redistribution is such a popular topic right now, even though we already have forms of it in the United States; these programs, like SNAP, leave people out for not meeting an artificial federal threshold.
So until we have meaningful economic change, even if money doesn’t directly cause happiness, it does lead to greater access to essential protective factors proven to increase happiness and overall success.
Reach Caden Proulx at letters@collegian.com or on social media @cadenpru.