9 ms·

Money and Happiness: Extended Evidence Against Satiation

88 points by ano-ther 2y ago

zwischenzug 2y ago
Wealth != income
- mlhpdx 2y ago
  That seems to be the finding here though there is very little to go on in the article. Were the high income people not wealthy or a mix? Were the wealthy people high income, higher income or lower income? Living paycheck to paycheck is likely stressful at any income. Having wealth likely less stressful at any income.
  - Earw0rm 2y ago
    If you're making 500k and living paycheck to paycheck, that suggests some insanely expensive habits, there's something wrong if you don't have the self-discipline to get a bit of financial leeway at that level. Either you're spending like there's no tomorrow, or you've over leveraged to try and live like someone wealthier still. And the actual material difference is in diminishing returns territory at that point, so there's got to be a psychological driver there.
derbOac 2y ago
Sometimes I wonder if it's the money per se, or what brings in the money, or both. My guess is the higher-paying jobs are more interesting and fulfilling; conversely if two people have equally stressful jobs, but one pays a lot and the other little, the high pay would mitigate against the stress ("this has these costs but at least it pays well"). This sounds obvious maybe but it's a bit different from money per se bringing happiness. It would be more about the perception of the work. I also am not sure what to make of life satisfaction as a happiness indicator. It's a single item reflecting one aspect of happiness; there's other components of well-being. The author acknowledges this but it feels like a critical issue.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  The money by itself means that you have more spoons [1] compared to everyone without money. All the little things that eat up time and attention even for totally non-depressed neurotypical people go away once you have enough money to pay people to do them. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory
  - tmountain 2y ago
    Kind of. There’s still the admin overhead of scheduling and coordination to get things done. Rich people typically have a larger surface area to cover (big houses, big yards, lots of cars, etc) and all the projects and maintenance that come with them requires a lot of phone calls and getting people to show up.
    - yetihehe 2y ago
      > and all the projects and maintenance that come with them requires a lot of phone calls and getting people to show up. They have people for that too. It's called personal assistant or secretary.
      - jajko 2y ago
        Concierge services, and for enough money whole company is set up. Rich folks value their free time the most in the world, so pay others to lose their (less worthy in financial terms) time on pesky daily grinds like maintaining stuff they own, investments, bureaucracy etc. Very few don't do it this way, basically all 'old money' work like that for generations, employing non-trivial amount of folks.
        yetihehe 2y ago
        > so pay others to lose their (less worthy in financial terms) time on pesky daily grinds like maintaining stuff they own, investments, bureaucracy etc. I agree with you, just one more thought: Imagine that you received ungodly amounts (20x your current salary) of money for something you like to do. And if you did i some more of that in a day, you would get even more money. And then there would be people sending you letter that they want to take care of your mundane things for about 0.8x of your current salary, which means you can do more of the thing you like every day. Wouldn't you take it? I probably would :(.
dukeofdoom 2y ago
This reminds me of the time I went to an all inclusive resort. It was fun in the short therm. Just ended up walking around buzzed the entire day / vacation. If you have an unlimited supply of something, then all your vices could be fuelled. And if that happens then are you strong enough to resist temptation. And if not, then you happiness will probably decrease.
- mettamage 2y ago
  I could do a resort for 6 days in my early twenties, unfortunately I was there for 14 days. It wasn’t fun
- em500 2y ago
  Markus Persson, after selling Minecraft for 2.5bln: "Hanging out in ibiza with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I've never felt more isolated." "In sweden, I will sit around and wait for my friends with jobs and families to have time to do shit, watching my reflection in the monitor." Fortunately if you're a billionaire you have plenty of time and opportunity to reflect and find something truly fulfilling. Persson, getting somewhat sensible again: "To people out there with real problems: I’m sorry the whining of a newly wealthy programmer gets more attention than yours. Stay strong." Anyway, the billionaire tier (or even just UHNWI >$30mln) are the extreme outliers. I would imagine that it can be really tough to form new close relationships or find life partners if they didn't before they got ultra wealthy.
keiferski 2y ago
These studies never seem to address the "keeping up with the Jones" factor, or more broadly, that social opinions shape how much we care about money. I think a lot of people would be near "maximum happy levels" [1.] with very little money, but are indirectly socially pressured into needing more money in order to buy more stuff. A few centuries ago, it was normal for kids to have only a few toys, adults to have a few dozen books, at most, and this was typical. I don't think kids then were less happy because they didn't have modern consumer abundance. Today, the social expectations on say, eating out at restaurants frequently, traveling for vacation, and so on are expensive, and to be a deliberately frugal person living in an urban area requires a lot of discipline and asocial behavior that wasn't necessary before. It would be interesting to do a study like this that selected people who care less about money, or at least cared less about the social expectations of money – and then see what an extra $500 or $5,000 would do. 1. Assuming their basic needs like food, shelter, clothing, parks, etc. are met with a decent level of quality.
- Buttons840 2y ago
  Yeah, if nobody can afford a computer, then people gather outside and talk and laugh and the kids play. If only you can't afford a computer, then you can't talk to anyone, who have all gathered online, and you can't know about community events, and you didn't see the latest meme people are joking about. So it's not about whether or not I can afford a computer.
  - coldtea 2y ago
    >If only you can't afford a computer, then you can't talk to anyone, who have all gathered online, and you can't know about community events, and you didn't see the latest meme people are joking about. So it's a win-win situation!
- crooked-v 2y ago
  > A few centuries ago, it was normal for kids to have only a few toys, adults to have a few dozen books, at most, and this was typical. That stuff was "keeping up with the Joneses", though. Check out the price for even a simple bedframe in the pre-industrial era. Such things may seem like 'simple' necessities to us now, but for people of the era, budgeting money and/or home-crafting time for even basics like clothes, furniture, and work tools was a major ongoing commitment.
nmadden 2y ago
What is this? Is it a preprint or a peer-reviewed article? A blog?
- yshklarov 2y ago
  Check the "About" page. It's a self-published, non-peer-reviewed paper, written by a distinguished academic researcher.
  - ketzu 2y ago
    Oh it's Matthew Killingsworth, who was the first author of the one paper [1] about happiness I actually read! [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
  - nmadden 2y ago
    The About page doesn’t say anything about whether it was peer-reviewed or not (nor supplies any evidence that the author is “distinguished”). Maybe it was peer-reviewed and rejected, hence why a “distinguished” researcher would resort to self publishing? It seems to contradict other much larger-scale studies like https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0277-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0277-0
globular-toast 2y ago
What if the cause is the other way around? What if people who are happy are more likely to earn more? I mean, can you imagine working for someone who is gloomy and depressed?
- ketzu 2y ago
  Based on the results from an earlier paper of the author [1] the spread within the groups is very high. So there is no shortage of miserable people in the high income bracket. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
gmac 2y ago
I’m somewhat sceptical about this result, and the way it’s presented. Plotting income on a log scale obscures the fundamental point here, which is that each additional dollar matters less and less as you have more and more. And even if the line does keep going up against log income, this might be a US-specific thing.
- Incipient 2y ago
  The result is no less valid with a log scale. It's very typical to determine a linear regression on a log scale. It's a paper aimed at those capable of understanding statistics and analysis. It's assumed that the reader is sufficiently educated to understand the implications of a log scale. If that assumption is out, the rest of the article is going to be meaningless to the reader too. The article does say it has a US sample space too. I didn't read too much into it, for the more detailed conclusions, however from a skim read the high level conclusion "richer people are more likely to happier" is correlated within the given income bracket.
hexo 2y ago
"happiness science" that does not respect user setting for dark mode + having sticky banner on top is too much, way too much to take seriously
sgt101 2y ago
this seems to be "people who have to work are less happy than people who are free to do what ever they want whenever they want"
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  The question I'd ask of people making 500k is, what's stopping them from living frugally for a few years and then spending the rest of their life in the "do whatever you want" category. But I guess it's selection bias. If you're the sort of person who likes living frugally and otherwise doing whatever you want, you're less likely to end up making 500k to begin with. It's kind of like asking why are assholes and psychopaths over-represented in the ultra-rich, it's possible to make it to eight figure net worth on talent, hard work and good luck, but to make it that far and wanting to just keep on going says... something.
  - jajko 2y ago
    Frugal living is very easy when single, still OK when in couple with compatible person, but gets darn hard with kids. Not impossible, just much, much more constant friction, and choices done easily by you for you gets harder when they negatively impact your own children.
    - vouaobrasil 2y ago
      I'd argue that a lot of people who are wealthy and don't have children might influence the over all data. Not having children in itself can be a great source of happiness for some.
    - Earw0rm 2y ago
      True, but at $500k, being frugal means living a $250k standard of living, which is still way more than most people have. I guess it comes down to what you see as negative impacts. I'd never been further than maybe 1500 miles from home until my mid teens, so I don't feel like my kids miss out by not having the kind of globetrotter holidays that people on $500k can do. If I had that kind of money, I'd rather save it and escape the grind ten or twenty years earlier. But I guess if your $500k peers are all going to Dubai and Singapore with their families you might feel differently. Same with cars, clothes and so on. I'm not talking about barebones ramen living, more trying to take an objective view on the relationship between spend and quality of life, and outside of a few of the most expensive cities, there's a pretty sweet spot well below the 500k mark.
kaskakokos 2y ago
In my opinion, this research is very biased: Looking at the first 5 questions [1] I see a materialistic context that channels the answer towards a materialistic view of happiness, where of course money is key. Now, let's take the Aristotelian definition of happiness: It is about doing good and matching one's nature with one's actions. Then I would design questions like: - Do you feel that your life is interconnected with the lives of others? - When you reflect, do you feel that your life is what it should be? - Are you satisfied with your life? - In your daily life you do things out of obligation that do not correspond to your true nature? - etc. It all depends on what definition of happiness you take, and the one selected by the sponsors of the work I guess is not mine. [1]Source: https://go.trackyourhappiness.org/ https://go.trackyourhappiness.org/ - In most respects, my life is close to my ideal. - The conditions of my life are excellent. - I am satisfied with my life. - So far I have achieved the important things I want in life. - If I could live my life over again, I would change almost nothing.
- bux93 2y ago
  The questions used are only biased towards money, in so far as you believe that the ideal life requires materialistic goods, that excellent conditions require money, etc. Aristotle by the way, did not believe that people with insufficient means could ever be as happy/good as (read; experience levels of eudoimonia commensurate with) freeborn males with plentiful means; and he was big on "natural slavery", which the Stoics disagreed with.
- thrance 2y ago
  Didn't Aristotle use his definition of happiness (or virtue) to justify slavery ? Rich people do good by being rich, slaves do good by being slaves.
renegat0x0 2y ago
I remember my colleague from work who said that happiness is linear to amount of money. The more money the more you have vacations, houses, cars. Such view-point is very narrow and materialistic, but some people do think that way. I remember comparing this to having toilets in work. You will be happy with having at least one in your office. It will be good to have two toilets and it will bring more happiness, but what about having 10 toilets? It will not linearly provide more happiness to the office. It is good to have enough money to be able to live a convenient life. The rest is up to you. To your goals. To your motivations. Some people will never be satisfied just by having a big pile of cash only. If you play a game with infinite ammo, infinite health it becomes boring quite easily.
- visarga 2y ago
  > It is good to have enough money to be able to live a convenient life. The rest is up to you. To your goals. To your motivations. Some people will never be satisfied just by having a big pile of cash only. It's about cultivation. If you spend much time developing interest and taste in a domain, you will enjoy happiness. You are building your capacity for happiness. Money is only part of the equation, it's like potential energy. As long as money is not a hinderance you can almost forget about it. Experience is the other part, how you invest your time.
- joss82 2y ago
  Yes, you are right that playing a game with infinite ammo and health is boring. However, this never happens in the real world: You buy a nice car, then a nice house, then go to nice vacations, eat better, healthier food. Then you realize that there are layers of nicer everything above what you consider "nice". Build a more ambitious company, and end up building rockets to explore the solar system and make humanity multi-planetary, cure illnesses, extend knowledge or education or peace.
- smusamashah 2y ago
  Toilet fulfills a need while money can be used to fulfill wants/desires. The upper limit of want has to be lot higher than the need. I don't think number of toilets is a good analogy
gottfired 2y ago
Now the real question is, how could people be happy before the invention of the monetary system?
jensenbox 2y ago
Is https://www.trackyourhappiness.org/ https://www.trackyourhappiness.org/ down for anyone else or is it just me?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
domatic1 2y ago
It's very complex and depends on everyone's life situation, I've had money issues in the past, I was stressed but at that time I had many friends and family close which made things ok. Now I am more successful and live abroad, but loneliness kills me, even though I have everything I dreamed of, I think back at the times I was "poor" and I was happier. I also tend to compare myself more with my successful friends and that makes me also a bit jealous. I don't think money will make you happy because there is always someone who has more and there will be always be better things you can't afford. Also we get used to everything fast, you will get used to your "Ferraris" at some point.. What makes you happy is having nice people you love around you and finding a purpose in life.
- moravak1984 2y ago
  In the end, what we all want is to have a good barbecue around friends...
  - ignoramous 2y ago
    Reminds me of Taylor Swift's speech at NYU Graduation 2022: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OBG50aoUwlI&t=369 https://youtube.com/watch?v=OBG50aoUwlI&t=369
moralestapia 2y ago
Matt Levine gave his opinion on this today (perhaps that's why it was posted here?). The major flaw in the study is that the HNWI survey was made in 1985, fourty years ago. Lifestyle and social behavior is much different now.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
From the article: > As the figure shows, the wealthy individuals are considerably happier than the high earners in the income group. Absolutely, 100%. Money has made me very happy. Once I saved up enough money from a high-paying job, I was able to quit and do whatever I liked. And I love every minute of it now. No 9-5, no wasting time doing things I don't want to do. The more money you have, the less you have to waste your precious finite time doing shit you don't want to do. Money allows you to pursue your hobbies, travel, and just have time to appreciate life. It does take less than people think. You just need enough to buy a cheap house in the middle of nowhere, an ability to give up some luxuries (big city life if you like that, new stuff all the time), and the intelligence to set up a few sources of relatively passive income and/or set up a way to make a little money from hobbies in a surfer-like part-time fashion.
- rozenmd 2y ago
  Thinking of doing this in the south-west of France. Decent houses (2-3 bedrooms, well insulated) go for around 300k (within an hour of a regional city like Toulouse).
- marban 2y ago
  Bonus: Not being recognizable or a celebrity.
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    Yeah, and you definitely don't need celebrity-level money to stop working full-time and just do whatever if you really figure out what makes you happy and discard the rest.
- kubb 2y ago
  How much in terms of millions in today’s dollars? For how many years does it last? Family? I’m in my mid 30s and I’m wondering if I can escape.
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    Well that depends completely on how ingenious you can become in setting up passive income sources and what resources you already have. Most people can do it and of course if you are married you need the support of your spouse. It just won't work if they have a very materialistic lifestyle and like fancy stuff for example. If you have kids, it's tricky but again not impossible. I've known some people that do it with kids so it can be done. But assuming that is true, what skills do you have? Can you relocate? What do you consider essential? Feel free to email me if you want with your situation if you want. My opinion is this: it is easier than you think but it requires some very unusual thinking and taking leaps of faith, and yes, it involves a little bit of what society might consider "risky" but less risky than people think. It requires a bit of discomfort but mostly of the mental kind. My belief though is that IF you are smart enough with your life, you can certainly escape.
DoingIsLearning 2y ago
My absolutely non-scientific gut feeling is that if billionaires were not as influential and carried as much weight as they do in media, that we would be able to assess them as mentally disturbed in no way different to Plyushkin's disorder or some strain of sociopathic behaviour. From a game theory stand point a billionaire won. Carve your name in history, you can choose to influence politics for the good, pour money into hard research problems in Healthcare, Environment, Energy. Go Genghis Khan and have a thousand children. They could do literally anything and yet choose to continue to increase value for shareholders and themselves, it seems illogical.
- schneebyte 2y ago
  I think they are just slaves of the system(s) like everyone else. We might perceive them as having more freedom or power but at the end of the day they are just a human and they will never be more than one. They live, they suffer, they die just like everyone else.
  - ElevenLathe 2y ago
    We're all in the same prison, but they are the screws.
abetusk 2y ago
Note that correlation is logarithmic, meaning that for a linear increase in happiness one needs exponentially more money. Fig. 1 in the article is a semi-log plot with a log plot of income vs (linear) life satisfaction. I suspect this study is confirming a result that's already well known because I've heard this result before (linear happiness scales for an exponential increase in wealth).
TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
This could just measure whether people with money feel more of a need to persuade themselves their life is a success. It's true that beyond a certain point you can buy what everyone wants, which is freedom - from capitalism. But there is ample evidence from the news of extremely high net worth people acting in ways that are petulant, destructive to self and others, and don't suggest happiness at all.
cryptica 2y ago
Life has taught me that money is the most important thing there is. I don't understand how people could say that health is more important. What's the point of being healthy if you don't have money? You have to spend your entire life being a slave doing stuff you hate... Why bother existing? In that case, good health feels more like a curse. Family is more important? If you don't have money in this day and age, you can kiss your whole family goodbye... If you even managed to assemble one in the first place... Love doesn't matter when there is no money. There's no energy to engage in such abstractions. God is more important than money? Then give me all your money. See how fast your god turns against you. About as fast as your faith evaporates. Without money, the best you can do, the best you can be, just ain't good enough. Some people will say that money is not the only measure of success... Yeah sure, if you can live in a forest with no money and convince a partner to live there with you, that would be success. But good luck.
- mapcars 2y ago
  Happiness is more important than money. But you only found how to get it through money because of that you concluded that money is so important. That just means you did very little exploration and experimentation in your life, nothing else. What if there was a way to be utterly blissful without no money, no wife, no nothing? Well, who knows maybe there is ;)
  - cryptica 2y ago
    I think it's because money is so important that happiness cannot be found without it. Unfortunately, I was born indoctrinated (brainwashed) into this society's ways, so this has created expectations and baselines for what I consider to be the 'minimal comfort required to make existence worthwhile' - To unlearn all this stuff, to 'uncondition' myself from all the stuff I've been taught since I was an infant, is a difficult challenge. Not only, that, but because social relationships are critical for humans, I need friends and a partner who have also been unconditioned. Very hard to find. If such people even exist, they won't be found online by definition. So yeah, money is crucial. And I'm saying this as someone who doesn't have much money. You can be sure there is no bias there. The lack of money has forced me to confront my biases. I can't afford biases or blind-spots. I'm jealous of rich people, green with envy. What I'm most jealous of though, is their blind spots. Having blind-spots is life's greatest luxury. Pure psychological comfort. Whenever someone says that money is not the most important thing. I see someone with blind-spots who probably has money or is getting some kind of help; from friends, family or the system itself is geared to help them. They don't understand that the system itself is far from neutral. The system is essentially never neutral, no matter where you sit in it; it either helps you or works against you. I was there, on the other side, my idea of normal was an illusion. I didn't realize how fortunate I was until I found myself on the other side of the equation. To explain it concretely, the design of the monetary system works like a 'luck allocator'; it decides how lucky you are depending on the topology of your social network and your place within it. There are all sorts of barriers in place (conditioning/brainwashing) designed to prevent you from moving up in the topology. If you're wrongly placed in the topology, you will be perpetually unlucky. You will rarely see any opportunities no matter how good you are or what you do. You will be forced to accept only bad opportunities which exploit you and further entrench you in your place in the topology or shift you further down. The conditioning/brainwashing gets stronger as you approach the big money; that's why upward mobility is so difficult; wealthy people are conditioned to feel uncomfortable around you, no matter how good you are. It works in surprising ways. Rationally, they can see that you tick all the boxes, but in their gut, they feel like something is off about you and that prevents them from letting you progress. They don't even realize or appreciate how incredibly difficult it is for someone who 'feels off' to reach their vicinity and what kinds of skills are required to clear all the barriers. They don't understand that the people in their entourage who 'seem off' are probably often the ones they should prioritize because those atypical folks had to work the hardest to get here. Wealthy people are accustomed to comfort, especially psychological comfort. An individual who had to climb Mt Kilimanjaro while fighting off lions and hyenas cannot exude psychological comfort and familiarity in the same way as someone who was born with a silver spoon and never left home. It's hard to elicit the combo of "Wow, that person has seen things I cannot begin to imagine" and also "Yet they're so relatable..." Wealthy people don't make friends 'randomly' like the rest of us. That's why rich people all seem to know and mostly hang out with each other. They seek psychological comfort from people who have similar life experiences. They are in their position because of their their blind-spots, overzealous awkward-meter, their predictability. It's also why the distortions in our system are so hard to fix. Almost nobody who has the ability to fix the distortions, sees the distortions to begin with.
science4sail 2y ago
> The results suggest that the positive association between money and happiness continues far up the economic ladder, and that the magnitude of the differences can be substantial. Sometimes I wonder if the folk wisdom that "money doesn't buy happiness" is an attempt by the poor to make themselves feel better about their own life situations.
- Viliam1234 2y ago
  That, combined with the inability to distinguish between "often" and "always". Yes, there is one rich person whose life sucks, so money doesn't always buy happiness. But there are thousands of poor people whose lives suck, so maybe being rich actually significantly decreases the risk.
tqi 2y ago
The high net worth groups used for comparison were not asked the same questions ("nearly identical" is in the eye of the beholder) and were either international or from 1983(!?), so I think this whole exercise is a little dubious. Not saying the conclusion is right or wrong, just that I don't think this evidence is compelling. This actually gets to my gripe with a lot of meta studies, where authors often yada yada pretty significant methodological differences in the name of increasing the sample size.
- ASalazarMX 2y ago
  Still, it makes sense that it works like food. Food fills a basic need, and not going hungry does a lot for your happiness. Eating better and tastier food boosts happiness further, but there's a point where people will ingest gold leafs or extravagant meals because food isn't getting better and they've hit a satiation plateau. Our modern civilization has made money another basic need.
  - tqi 2y ago
    That is orthogonal to the point I am making, which is that accepting the conclusion of a study with methodological issues because the finding "makes sense" is a form of confirmation bias.
coderatlarge 2y ago
I know plenty of unhappy people with lots of money. I know plenty of happy people with very little money. Are they all outliers ?
yjkk 2y ago
[flagged]

88 points by ano-ther 2y ago

zwischenzug 2y ago

Wealth != income

mlhpdx 2y ago
That seems to be the finding here though there is very little to go on in the article. Were the high income people not wealthy or a mix? Were the wealthy people high income, higher income or lower income? Living paycheck to paycheck is likely stressful at any income. Having wealth likely less stressful at any income.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  If you're making 500k and living paycheck to paycheck, that suggests some insanely expensive habits, there's something wrong if you don't have the self-discipline to get a bit of financial leeway at that level. Either you're spending like there's no tomorrow, or you've over leveraged to try and live like someone wealthier still. And the actual material difference is in diminishing returns territory at that point, so there's got to be a psychological driver there.

derbOac 2y ago

Sometimes I wonder if it's the money per se, or what brings in the money, or both. My guess is the higher-paying jobs are more interesting and fulfilling; conversely if two people have equally stressful jobs, but one pays a lot and the other little, the high pay would mitigate against the stress ("this has these costs but at least it pays well"). This sounds obvious maybe but it's a bit different from money per se bringing happiness. It would be more about the perception of the work. I also am not sure what to make of life satisfaction as a happiness indicator. It's a single item reflecting one aspect of happiness; there's other components of well-being. The author acknowledges this but it feels like a critical issue.

crooked-v 2y ago
The money by itself means that you have more spoons [1] compared to everyone without money. All the little things that eat up time and attention even for totally non-depressed neurotypical people go away once you have enough money to pay people to do them. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory
- tmountain 2y ago
  Kind of. There’s still the admin overhead of scheduling and coordination to get things done. Rich people typically have a larger surface area to cover (big houses, big yards, lots of cars, etc) and all the projects and maintenance that come with them requires a lot of phone calls and getting people to show up.
  - yetihehe 2y ago
    > and all the projects and maintenance that come with them requires a lot of phone calls and getting people to show up. They have people for that too. It's called personal assistant or secretary.
    - jajko 2y ago
      Concierge services, and for enough money whole company is set up. Rich folks value their free time the most in the world, so pay others to lose their (less worthy in financial terms) time on pesky daily grinds like maintaining stuff they own, investments, bureaucracy etc. Very few don't do it this way, basically all 'old money' work like that for generations, employing non-trivial amount of folks.
      - yetihehe 2y ago
        > so pay others to lose their (less worthy in financial terms) time on pesky daily grinds like maintaining stuff they own, investments, bureaucracy etc. I agree with you, just one more thought: Imagine that you received ungodly amounts (20x your current salary) of money for something you like to do. And if you did i some more of that in a day, you would get even more money. And then there would be people sending you letter that they want to take care of your mundane things for about 0.8x of your current salary, which means you can do more of the thing you like every day. Wouldn't you take it? I probably would :(.

dukeofdoom 2y ago

This reminds me of the time I went to an all inclusive resort. It was fun in the short therm. Just ended up walking around buzzed the entire day / vacation. If you have an unlimited supply of something, then all your vices could be fuelled. And if that happens then are you strong enough to resist temptation. And if not, then you happiness will probably decrease.

mettamage 2y ago
I could do a resort for 6 days in my early twenties, unfortunately I was there for 14 days. It wasn’t fun
em500 2y ago
Markus Persson, after selling Minecraft for 2.5bln: "Hanging out in ibiza with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I've never felt more isolated." "In sweden, I will sit around and wait for my friends with jobs and families to have time to do shit, watching my reflection in the monitor." Fortunately if you're a billionaire you have plenty of time and opportunity to reflect and find something truly fulfilling. Persson, getting somewhat sensible again: "To people out there with real problems: I’m sorry the whining of a newly wealthy programmer gets more attention than yours. Stay strong." Anyway, the billionaire tier (or even just UHNWI >$30mln) are the extreme outliers. I would imagine that it can be really tough to form new close relationships or find life partners if they didn't before they got ultra wealthy.

keiferski 2y ago

These studies never seem to address the "keeping up with the Jones" factor, or more broadly, that social opinions shape how much we care about money. I think a lot of people would be near "maximum happy levels" [1.] with very little money, but are indirectly socially pressured into needing more money in order to buy more stuff. A few centuries ago, it was normal for kids to have only a few toys, adults to have a few dozen books, at most, and this was typical. I don't think kids then were less happy because they didn't have modern consumer abundance. Today, the social expectations on say, eating out at restaurants frequently, traveling for vacation, and so on are expensive, and to be a deliberately frugal person living in an urban area requires a lot of discipline and asocial behavior that wasn't necessary before. It would be interesting to do a study like this that selected people who care less about money, or at least cared less about the social expectations of money – and then see what an extra $500 or $5,000 would do. 1. Assuming their basic needs like food, shelter, clothing, parks, etc. are met with a decent level of quality.

Buttons840 2y ago
Yeah, if nobody can afford a computer, then people gather outside and talk and laugh and the kids play. If only you can't afford a computer, then you can't talk to anyone, who have all gathered online, and you can't know about community events, and you didn't see the latest meme people are joking about. So it's not about whether or not I can afford a computer.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >If only you can't afford a computer, then you can't talk to anyone, who have all gathered online, and you can't know about community events, and you didn't see the latest meme people are joking about. So it's a win-win situation!
crooked-v 2y ago
> A few centuries ago, it was normal for kids to have only a few toys, adults to have a few dozen books, at most, and this was typical. That stuff was "keeping up with the Joneses", though. Check out the price for even a simple bedframe in the pre-industrial era. Such things may seem like 'simple' necessities to us now, but for people of the era, budgeting money and/or home-crafting time for even basics like clothes, furniture, and work tools was a major ongoing commitment.

nmadden 2y ago

What is this? Is it a preprint or a peer-reviewed article? A blog?

yshklarov 2y ago
Check the "About" page. It's a self-published, non-peer-reviewed paper, written by a distinguished academic researcher.
- ketzu 2y ago
  Oh it's Matthew Killingsworth, who was the first author of the one paper [1] about happiness I actually read! [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
- nmadden 2y ago
  The About page doesn’t say anything about whether it was peer-reviewed or not (nor supplies any evidence that the author is “distinguished”). Maybe it was peer-reviewed and rejected, hence why a “distinguished” researcher would resort to self publishing? It seems to contradict other much larger-scale studies like https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0277-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0277-0

globular-toast 2y ago

What if the cause is the other way around? What if people who are happy are more likely to earn more? I mean, can you imagine working for someone who is gloomy and depressed?

ketzu 2y ago
Based on the results from an earlier paper of the author [1] the spread within the groups is very high. So there is no shortage of miserable people in the high income bracket. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120

gmac 2y ago

I’m somewhat sceptical about this result, and the way it’s presented. Plotting income on a log scale obscures the fundamental point here, which is that each additional dollar matters less and less as you have more and more. And even if the line does keep going up against log income, this might be a US-specific thing.

Incipient 2y ago
The result is no less valid with a log scale. It's very typical to determine a linear regression on a log scale. It's a paper aimed at those capable of understanding statistics and analysis. It's assumed that the reader is sufficiently educated to understand the implications of a log scale. If that assumption is out, the rest of the article is going to be meaningless to the reader too. The article does say it has a US sample space too. I didn't read too much into it, for the more detailed conclusions, however from a skim read the high level conclusion "richer people are more likely to happier" is correlated within the given income bracket.

hexo 2y ago

"happiness science" that does not respect user setting for dark mode + having sticky banner on top is too much, way too much to take seriously

sgt101 2y ago

this seems to be "people who have to work are less happy than people who are free to do what ever they want whenever they want"

Earw0rm 2y ago
The question I'd ask of people making 500k is, what's stopping them from living frugally for a few years and then spending the rest of their life in the "do whatever you want" category. But I guess it's selection bias. If you're the sort of person who likes living frugally and otherwise doing whatever you want, you're less likely to end up making 500k to begin with. It's kind of like asking why are assholes and psychopaths over-represented in the ultra-rich, it's possible to make it to eight figure net worth on talent, hard work and good luck, but to make it that far and wanting to just keep on going says... something.
- jajko 2y ago
  Frugal living is very easy when single, still OK when in couple with compatible person, but gets darn hard with kids. Not impossible, just much, much more constant friction, and choices done easily by you for you gets harder when they negatively impact your own children.
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    I'd argue that a lot of people who are wealthy and don't have children might influence the over all data. Not having children in itself can be a great source of happiness for some.
  - Earw0rm 2y ago
    True, but at $500k, being frugal means living a $250k standard of living, which is still way more than most people have. I guess it comes down to what you see as negative impacts. I'd never been further than maybe 1500 miles from home until my mid teens, so I don't feel like my kids miss out by not having the kind of globetrotter holidays that people on $500k can do. If I had that kind of money, I'd rather save it and escape the grind ten or twenty years earlier. But I guess if your $500k peers are all going to Dubai and Singapore with their families you might feel differently. Same with cars, clothes and so on. I'm not talking about barebones ramen living, more trying to take an objective view on the relationship between spend and quality of life, and outside of a few of the most expensive cities, there's a pretty sweet spot well below the 500k mark.

kaskakokos 2y ago

In my opinion, this research is very biased: Looking at the first 5 questions [1] I see a materialistic context that channels the answer towards a materialistic view of happiness, where of course money is key. Now, let's take the Aristotelian definition of happiness: It is about doing good and matching one's nature with one's actions. Then I would design questions like: - Do you feel that your life is interconnected with the lives of others? - When you reflect, do you feel that your life is what it should be? - Are you satisfied with your life? - In your daily life you do things out of obligation that do not correspond to your true nature? - etc. It all depends on what definition of happiness you take, and the one selected by the sponsors of the work I guess is not mine. [1]Source: https://go.trackyourhappiness.org/ https://go.trackyourhappiness.org/ - In most respects, my life is close to my ideal. - The conditions of my life are excellent. - I am satisfied with my life. - So far I have achieved the important things I want in life. - If I could live my life over again, I would change almost nothing.

bux93 2y ago
The questions used are only biased towards money, in so far as you believe that the ideal life requires materialistic goods, that excellent conditions require money, etc. Aristotle by the way, did not believe that people with insufficient means could ever be as happy/good as (read; experience levels of eudoimonia commensurate with) freeborn males with plentiful means; and he was big on "natural slavery", which the Stoics disagreed with.
thrance 2y ago
Didn't Aristotle use his definition of happiness (or virtue) to justify slavery ? Rich people do good by being rich, slaves do good by being slaves.

renegat0x0 2y ago

I remember my colleague from work who said that happiness is linear to amount of money. The more money the more you have vacations, houses, cars. Such view-point is very narrow and materialistic, but some people do think that way. I remember comparing this to having toilets in work. You will be happy with having at least one in your office. It will be good to have two toilets and it will bring more happiness, but what about having 10 toilets? It will not linearly provide more happiness to the office. It is good to have enough money to be able to live a convenient life. The rest is up to you. To your goals. To your motivations. Some people will never be satisfied just by having a big pile of cash only. If you play a game with infinite ammo, infinite health it becomes boring quite easily.

visarga 2y ago
> It is good to have enough money to be able to live a convenient life. The rest is up to you. To your goals. To your motivations. Some people will never be satisfied just by having a big pile of cash only. It's about cultivation. If you spend much time developing interest and taste in a domain, you will enjoy happiness. You are building your capacity for happiness. Money is only part of the equation, it's like potential energy. As long as money is not a hinderance you can almost forget about it. Experience is the other part, how you invest your time.
joss82 2y ago
Yes, you are right that playing a game with infinite ammo and health is boring. However, this never happens in the real world: You buy a nice car, then a nice house, then go to nice vacations, eat better, healthier food. Then you realize that there are layers of nicer everything above what you consider "nice". Build a more ambitious company, and end up building rockets to explore the solar system and make humanity multi-planetary, cure illnesses, extend knowledge or education or peace.
smusamashah 2y ago
Toilet fulfills a need while money can be used to fulfill wants/desires. The upper limit of want has to be lot higher than the need. I don't think number of toilets is a good analogy

gottfired 2y ago

Now the real question is, how could people be happy before the invention of the monetary system?

jensenbox 2y ago

Is https://www.trackyourhappiness.org/ https://www.trackyourhappiness.org/ down for anyone else or is it just me?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

domatic1 2y ago

It's very complex and depends on everyone's life situation, I've had money issues in the past, I was stressed but at that time I had many friends and family close which made things ok. Now I am more successful and live abroad, but loneliness kills me, even though I have everything I dreamed of, I think back at the times I was "poor" and I was happier. I also tend to compare myself more with my successful friends and that makes me also a bit jealous. I don't think money will make you happy because there is always someone who has more and there will be always be better things you can't afford. Also we get used to everything fast, you will get used to your "Ferraris" at some point.. What makes you happy is having nice people you love around you and finding a purpose in life.

moravak1984 2y ago
In the end, what we all want is to have a good barbecue around friends...
- ignoramous 2y ago
  Reminds me of Taylor Swift's speech at NYU Graduation 2022: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OBG50aoUwlI&t=369 https://youtube.com/watch?v=OBG50aoUwlI&t=369

moralestapia 2y ago

Matt Levine gave his opinion on this today (perhaps that's why it was posted here?). The major flaw in the study is that the HNWI survey was made in 1985, fourty years ago. Lifestyle and social behavior is much different now.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

From the article: > As the figure shows, the wealthy individuals are considerably happier than the high earners in the income group. Absolutely, 100%. Money has made me very happy. Once I saved up enough money from a high-paying job, I was able to quit and do whatever I liked. And I love every minute of it now. No 9-5, no wasting time doing things I don't want to do. The more money you have, the less you have to waste your precious finite time doing shit you don't want to do. Money allows you to pursue your hobbies, travel, and just have time to appreciate life. It does take less than people think. You just need enough to buy a cheap house in the middle of nowhere, an ability to give up some luxuries (big city life if you like that, new stuff all the time), and the intelligence to set up a few sources of relatively passive income and/or set up a way to make a little money from hobbies in a surfer-like part-time fashion.

rozenmd 2y ago
Thinking of doing this in the south-west of France. Decent houses (2-3 bedrooms, well insulated) go for around 300k (within an hour of a regional city like Toulouse).
marban 2y ago
Bonus: Not being recognizable or a celebrity.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  Yeah, and you definitely don't need celebrity-level money to stop working full-time and just do whatever if you really figure out what makes you happy and discard the rest.
kubb 2y ago
How much in terms of millions in today’s dollars? For how many years does it last? Family? I’m in my mid 30s and I’m wondering if I can escape.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  Well that depends completely on how ingenious you can become in setting up passive income sources and what resources you already have. Most people can do it and of course if you are married you need the support of your spouse. It just won't work if they have a very materialistic lifestyle and like fancy stuff for example. If you have kids, it's tricky but again not impossible. I've known some people that do it with kids so it can be done. But assuming that is true, what skills do you have? Can you relocate? What do you consider essential? Feel free to email me if you want with your situation if you want. My opinion is this: it is easier than you think but it requires some very unusual thinking and taking leaps of faith, and yes, it involves a little bit of what society might consider "risky" but less risky than people think. It requires a bit of discomfort but mostly of the mental kind. My belief though is that IF you are smart enough with your life, you can certainly escape.

DoingIsLearning 2y ago

My absolutely non-scientific gut feeling is that if billionaires were not as influential and carried as much weight as they do in media, that we would be able to assess them as mentally disturbed in no way different to Plyushkin's disorder or some strain of sociopathic behaviour. From a game theory stand point a billionaire won. Carve your name in history, you can choose to influence politics for the good, pour money into hard research problems in Healthcare, Environment, Energy. Go Genghis Khan and have a thousand children. They could do literally anything and yet choose to continue to increase value for shareholders and themselves, it seems illogical.

schneebyte 2y ago
I think they are just slaves of the system(s) like everyone else. We might perceive them as having more freedom or power but at the end of the day they are just a human and they will never be more than one. They live, they suffer, they die just like everyone else.
- ElevenLathe 2y ago
  We're all in the same prison, but they are the screws.

abetusk 2y ago

Note that correlation is logarithmic, meaning that for a linear increase in happiness one needs exponentially more money. Fig. 1 in the article is a semi-log plot with a log plot of income vs (linear) life satisfaction. I suspect this study is confirming a result that's already well known because I've heard this result before (linear happiness scales for an exponential increase in wealth).

TheOtherHobbes 2y ago

This could just measure whether people with money feel more of a need to persuade themselves their life is a success. It's true that beyond a certain point you can buy what everyone wants, which is freedom - from capitalism. But there is ample evidence from the news of extremely high net worth people acting in ways that are petulant, destructive to self and others, and don't suggest happiness at all.

cryptica 2y ago

Life has taught me that money is the most important thing there is. I don't understand how people could say that health is more important. What's the point of being healthy if you don't have money? You have to spend your entire life being a slave doing stuff you hate... Why bother existing? In that case, good health feels more like a curse. Family is more important? If you don't have money in this day and age, you can kiss your whole family goodbye... If you even managed to assemble one in the first place... Love doesn't matter when there is no money. There's no energy to engage in such abstractions. God is more important than money? Then give me all your money. See how fast your god turns against you. About as fast as your faith evaporates. Without money, the best you can do, the best you can be, just ain't good enough. Some people will say that money is not the only measure of success... Yeah sure, if you can live in a forest with no money and convince a partner to live there with you, that would be success. But good luck.

mapcars 2y ago
Happiness is more important than money. But you only found how to get it through money because of that you concluded that money is so important. That just means you did very little exploration and experimentation in your life, nothing else. What if there was a way to be utterly blissful without no money, no wife, no nothing? Well, who knows maybe there is ;)
- cryptica 2y ago
  I think it's because money is so important that happiness cannot be found without it. Unfortunately, I was born indoctrinated (brainwashed) into this society's ways, so this has created expectations and baselines for what I consider to be the 'minimal comfort required to make existence worthwhile' - To unlearn all this stuff, to 'uncondition' myself from all the stuff I've been taught since I was an infant, is a difficult challenge. Not only, that, but because social relationships are critical for humans, I need friends and a partner who have also been unconditioned. Very hard to find. If such people even exist, they won't be found online by definition. So yeah, money is crucial. And I'm saying this as someone who doesn't have much money. You can be sure there is no bias there. The lack of money has forced me to confront my biases. I can't afford biases or blind-spots. I'm jealous of rich people, green with envy. What I'm most jealous of though, is their blind spots. Having blind-spots is life's greatest luxury. Pure psychological comfort. Whenever someone says that money is not the most important thing. I see someone with blind-spots who probably has money or is getting some kind of help; from friends, family or the system itself is geared to help them. They don't understand that the system itself is far from neutral. The system is essentially never neutral, no matter where you sit in it; it either helps you or works against you. I was there, on the other side, my idea of normal was an illusion. I didn't realize how fortunate I was until I found myself on the other side of the equation. To explain it concretely, the design of the monetary system works like a 'luck allocator'; it decides how lucky you are depending on the topology of your social network and your place within it. There are all sorts of barriers in place (conditioning/brainwashing) designed to prevent you from moving up in the topology. If you're wrongly placed in the topology, you will be perpetually unlucky. You will rarely see any opportunities no matter how good you are or what you do. You will be forced to accept only bad opportunities which exploit you and further entrench you in your place in the topology or shift you further down. The conditioning/brainwashing gets stronger as you approach the big money; that's why upward mobility is so difficult; wealthy people are conditioned to feel uncomfortable around you, no matter how good you are. It works in surprising ways. Rationally, they can see that you tick all the boxes, but in their gut, they feel like something is off about you and that prevents them from letting you progress. They don't even realize or appreciate how incredibly difficult it is for someone who 'feels off' to reach their vicinity and what kinds of skills are required to clear all the barriers. They don't understand that the people in their entourage who 'seem off' are probably often the ones they should prioritize because those atypical folks had to work the hardest to get here. Wealthy people are accustomed to comfort, especially psychological comfort. An individual who had to climb Mt Kilimanjaro while fighting off lions and hyenas cannot exude psychological comfort and familiarity in the same way as someone who was born with a silver spoon and never left home. It's hard to elicit the combo of "Wow, that person has seen things I cannot begin to imagine" and also "Yet they're so relatable..." Wealthy people don't make friends 'randomly' like the rest of us. That's why rich people all seem to know and mostly hang out with each other. They seek psychological comfort from people who have similar life experiences. They are in their position because of their their blind-spots, overzealous awkward-meter, their predictability. It's also why the distortions in our system are so hard to fix. Almost nobody who has the ability to fix the distortions, sees the distortions to begin with.

science4sail 2y ago

> The results suggest that the positive association between money and happiness continues far up the economic ladder, and that the magnitude of the differences can be substantial. Sometimes I wonder if the folk wisdom that "money doesn't buy happiness" is an attempt by the poor to make themselves feel better about their own life situations.

Viliam1234 2y ago
That, combined with the inability to distinguish between "often" and "always". Yes, there is one rich person whose life sucks, so money doesn't always buy happiness. But there are thousands of poor people whose lives suck, so maybe being rich actually significantly decreases the risk.

tqi 2y ago

The high net worth groups used for comparison were not asked the same questions ("nearly identical" is in the eye of the beholder) and were either international or from 1983(!?), so I think this whole exercise is a little dubious. Not saying the conclusion is right or wrong, just that I don't think this evidence is compelling. This actually gets to my gripe with a lot of meta studies, where authors often yada yada pretty significant methodological differences in the name of increasing the sample size.

ASalazarMX 2y ago
Still, it makes sense that it works like food. Food fills a basic need, and not going hungry does a lot for your happiness. Eating better and tastier food boosts happiness further, but there's a point where people will ingest gold leafs or extravagant meals because food isn't getting better and they've hit a satiation plateau. Our modern civilization has made money another basic need.
- tqi 2y ago
  That is orthogonal to the point I am making, which is that accepting the conclusion of a study with methodological issues because the finding "makes sense" is a form of confirmation bias.

coderatlarge 2y ago

I know plenty of unhappy people with lots of money. I know plenty of happy people with very little money. Are they all outliers ?

yjkk 2y ago

[flagged]