Statistics about income not making people happy are common. I wonder how wealth/savings affects it. If the $1.2 million worker hadn't inflated his lifestyle, he

Statistics about income not making people happy are common. I wonder how wealth/savings affects it. If the $1.2 million worker hadn't inflated his lifestyle, he'd be free to take any job he wanted, or even perform his own job the way he thought best, safe in the knowledge that he would be financially fine if let go. It seems that a lot of people who reach high incomes never maintain slack in their lives. As much as possible I've tried to keep expenses lower as my income grew. And to watch in advance what the big possible causes of such lifestyle inflation are: expensive real estate, expensive car, private school, large vacations or purchases made on debt with no plan to fund them, etc The janitor study cited here is interesting, but I wonder if they controlled for disposition. Cheery people may simply be good at finding meaning in what they do, no matter what they do. And the opposite. For instance, the fund manager could think "if I do my job well, I am allocating capital well and helping companies succeed and helping the economy grow faster than it otherwise would." I am sure that some content fund managers do think that. But is it merely dispositional, in the same way that not keeping your expenses low may be dispositional?