I’m biased since this a fantasy of mine. Still have a huge thing for Vera Farmiga from her role in “The Departed.”
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Jmakin is basically DiCaprio in the way women respond to him. I strongly suspect he looks like he has no soul.
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The way I would briefly summarize the relationship between money and happiness is that money isn’t sufficient for happiness, and it’s not strictly necessary, but it sure doesn’t hurt (up to a point).
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My theory is that once you have enough money to take care of basic needs you can pursue happiness, but once you reach a certain level of wealth, you have less time for the pursuit of happiness because you have to worry about spending some of your money to take care of the rest of your money.
lol i wouldnt go this far
I think what leads to happiness is very much a mental health topic. So I think that leaving it here is fine, but so is moving it. I don’t care much either way.
This is supported by the data as well. I’m pretty sure that ongoing research in this area confirms that average “happiness” increases with income, but at any given income level there is a wide dispersion of happiness. This is what the saying “money doesn’t bring happiness” really means - if you are a maladjusted person with bad relationships and poor wellness habits then you will probably be miserable no matter how much money you have
Subsequent studies have undermined this conclusion somewhat. There is some evidence that average happiness just keeps going up and up and up for all income levels.
Happiness is kind of overrated, imo. Can these studies account for the fact that I’m miserable but my kid’s doing great? This doesn’t mean I’m happy, but my life is going well. I’m skeptical that we can quantify wellbeing (which is distinct from and more important than happiness) in any useful way.
The studies are definitely plagued by definitional issues (what is happiness) and “data” based on people responding to subjective questions about their state of mind. There is also a big political bias at play. People that want to cut taxes on high earners cherry pick results that suggest wellness increases non stop with income, and vice versa.
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This is likely so. I think even more common is if you are well off but have a job where you are regularly in contact with someone that is much better off (think wealth management advisor or tax lawyer) then many of those people will be miserable because they’ll always think about what they don’t have. So there are many many factors at play but there is kind of overwhelming evidence that there is a trend between making more money and being happier. The debate between researchers seems to be more about how the slope of that curve varies between income groups and whether there are better ways to measure happiness. But it’s probably a mistake to disregard all of that work just because it conflicts with some world view we have.
This is possibly true because I don’t think any of the studies measure anything other than correlation. To rationally try to identify chicken vs. egg on this you’d have to take big cohorts of people and measure their happiness / income level at one point in time and then remeasure at a later point in time and then try to parse all the changes. That would be really interesting and I’m sure someone is working on that.
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I can say for sure if I inherited 10 million and could spend the rest of my life traveling, helping people, and not working I’d be way, way happier than making 100k and some job.
Working sucks, even when I had a super cool job like poker which I enjoyed but having to play so much and depend on it to live really sucked the fun out of it.
Maybe if I could crush high enough stakes that I only needed to play like 20-40 hours a week.
That’s why I don’t understand super rich people still working tons of hours. It’s a sickness and I think deep down most are miserable
People need purpose in their lives. Some people do well at finding their own purpose helping people and whatnot, some find it with children, some need something more structured like a job. There are better and worse ways to find purpose and working 80 hours a week is probably not a very good one.
Back when we were doing the Meyer-Briggs thing, the INTP profile I found had this, accurate for me:
19. You don’t know where (or how) to find meaning.
You see other people find a sense of purpose in what they do — things like being a parent, going to church, or their jobs. For you, these things don’t seem to scratch that itch, and you find many sources of “meaning” to be downright absurd. You’re intimately familiar with the feeling of being adrift in life, and the struggle to find purpose. Many INTPs flirt with nihilism. Others spend years focusing on the search for meaning rather than any one “purpose” itself.
Maybe it’s true that you’d be OK just drifting but I think you’d be in a minority there. If I suddenly had infinite money I’d like to think I would have the self awareness to do something like volunteer in an animal shelter, something prosaic to give some structure to my life. If I just drifted it’d turn into a disaster inside a year.
The above is why I never had children btw, like people talk about kids energizing their life with purpose and it’s always been clear to me that this wasn’t going to work for me.
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I may have missed it, but this recent thread seems to miss an important question: what is happiness?
The experience of happiness is not different, between income levels. A rich person experiencing happiness, and a poor person experiencing happiness, are experiencing the same happiness, the same emotion. Do people agree with this?
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Yeah I think that’s correct. Everyone experiences ups and downs, I think a lot of the research is about measuring the frequency and intensity of these experiences. They do stuff like have people log a daily record of the way they felt the prior day and then count the good and bad days.
What is happiness? It’s peace. … If you’re talking about bliss, about highs and lows, about ecstacy, those are different. They come and go, and I’m sure they are easier to buy. Happiness, peace, and love, are fundamental, however.
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Happiness is a warm burrito.
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Most people ime confuse pleasure with happiness.
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No doubt. Just a reminder though that the specific happiness measurement studies that kicked off this conversation typically don’t ask people to rate “happiness” on a 1 to 10 scale or something. A common approach is to try to remove the definitional issues by asking a set of questions about satisfaction with various parameters that are collectively thought to contribute to happiness. “Satisfaction” is itself subjective but the good studies do work at trying to remove as much interpretation as possible.