250k USD seems utterly insane but I’m not American admittedly. And I do think America vs rest of developed world vs developing world is a key point informing this discussion.
Edit: income, unsure from your previous post whether it was savings vs income (I mean maybe 250k per year can’t rent a 2br)
I’ve come to the conclusion that once basic needs and comforts have been provided for, most of what we think about as happiness is dependent on the things that money cannot buy.
If you dropped me today into the lifestyle of a 750k or even 750MM person, creature comforts would improve and that would perhaps provide a temporary lift.
But soon I would revert to having all the same concerns and anxieties and annoyances that have long since been programmed into my brain. The same boredom when bored, the same loneliness when alone, the same agitation when stuck in traffic or a slow-moving line, the same questioning of the meaning and significance, or lack thereof, of my existence. The same moments of depression that arise out of nowhere.
More money and more luxurious stuff simply doesn’t eliminate most of what causes us to be unhappy most of the time.
No question that kids equals need for more money.
Main point is that there’s a baseline of “enough,” and that baseline will differ according to life needs (kids, no kids, cost of living where one lives, etc.), but once that baseline has been reached, 10xing or 100xing how much money you have isn’t going to eliminate most of the reasons we find ourselves to feel unhappy on a day-to-day basis.
I’m far from wealthy but my financial picture is drastically better than it was a decade ago. Most of my financial concerns are now gone. But I still experience most of same emotional highs and lows I did when I was dirt poor. And most of that stems from things that have nothing to do with money.
Income. Mortgages for 2br run around >$5k a month here. (60k total). With children it can get tight if that’s household earnings.
Ah yeah USA is unique then. 60k (factoring in the USA deductible hypothetically) of 250k towards hypothetical mortgage is the average in Australia and what a lot of people deal with. I think it’s on average over 35% (edit: 41.4% per some study provided by mortgage aggregator Lendi [so grain of salt])of after tax income that goes towards mortgage/housing now.
I mean the average doctor graduates with 200k in debt, and then does a 3-7 year residency with a pay of 15-20 bucks per hour or so depending on how you calculate it so that debt grows a lot. Making 750k in a year would allow me to slam my debt away very quickly, or make it so I could work as much or as little as I want. It would be a massive increase in either my income or my free time. Either one would be massive for me.
There doesn’t have to be a unified global definition of happiness that applies in each and every study, the goal isn’t to identify the One True Happiness, its to identify habits, behaviors, and traits that consistently result in people reporting higher levels of “happiness” as per the study. For example, if you get people to cultivate a sense of awe then they report higher levels of happiness across a range of conceptions of happiness. So it turns out that the insights don’t come from arguing about what happiness “really means”.
I think having kids changes how much having more money affects your peace of mind. I think if I didn’t have any, I’d be closer to your mindset. But still not quite that.
This reads like someone who doesn’t have any, but if you do, that’s a very impressive mental state that you’ve achieved. One of the hardest things is to feel like you have enough.
I think the best way to interpret the science is that the variances across these wealth strata mean a lot less than variances across core happiness aptitudes like awe, empathy, compassion, etc. If you have a really well developed happiness profile then there are diminishing returns for sure but you’d also be more likely to be able to mobilize $750 million with a great sense of purpose and fulfillment.
I think this is true but there seems to be a misconception that making money and happiness eventually become incompatible, like at some point you must surrender happiness to keep accumulating wealth. I think that is very unlikely, most keys to happiness are easily attained with an investment of time to build pro social habits, and the richer you are the more time you have.
This sounds like someone who makes a few mil and relaxes, not someone who gets to $750M. Hard to see how those people can ever go balls out to get to that level, then just relax and smell the roses.
I don’t think we really know. There’s some selection bias in which multimillionaire we hear about all the time. The toxic narcissists make the news more than the benevolent patrons.
I think the valuable insight is that happiness is more a result of a set of behaviors and attitudes than it is a result of a set of profile markers.
I think I remember that one being that parents are less happy while raising their kids, but in the long run end up with happier lives overall. That makes sense to me. Raising kids sounds horrible, but having raised children to adulthood seems like it’d be pretty rewarding. And sitting around in your old age without kids is probably pretty sad for a lot of people.
The first 5-7 years of having kids just plain sucks. They cost a fortune, dictate your schedule and don’t really provide any positive feedback. I’ve found ages 8-12 to be immensely rewarding and fun.
Well its all smooth sailing from here I’m sure, I hear the teen years are nothing but relaxing good times!
My happiness more or less peaked when I was able to max the obvious retirement and then have more cash than I know what to do with so I put it in SPY to see it lose 19% in a year or, now, pay 6k to remove our popcorn ceilings and be confined to a bedroom for a week. Cool.
For me at least, I always felt that the one word “secret to happiness” was progress. I always looked back at times of happiness and misery and that word for me always seemed to be the key for me - from my youth, to recovery, building and so forth. When I got dormant in that area, depression would set in.
It always made sense why folks who won the lottery ended up miserable. There’s an assumption of a permanent dopamine hit or something but once you’ve got served everything there really isn’t anything to look forward towards in a sense.
Not having to throw away such a large % of your life working to make money seems like the most valuable part of being rich.
Swinging back around to billionaires sucking