and their findings lean towards good relationships with family and friends are highly correlation with happiness, health, and many aspects of financial success. The released a book summarizing many results a few years ago:
> and their findings lean towards good relationships with family and friends are highly correlation with happiness, health, and many aspects of financial success
The daily reminder about the pains of autism and depression :/
I read a great quote by someone, maybe Nietzsche, suggesting that when you encounter that which you struggle with you tell yourself the equivalent of "hell yeah, this is my struggle."
This is prime time. This is what I'm currently on earth to solve. I'm going to enjoy the process of trying to defeat it. Amor fati.
Of course, you don't have to think that way. But you're going to have one problem or another, either way, and that mindset shift just makes everything feel less hopeless and more in control, even if the problem persists for now.
He had an interesting observation: the popular saying "don't spend money on things, but on experiences" only goes so far. Spending on things can bring about experiences: the big house/cabin/cottage per se may not bring you happiness, but if it's a place that you can gather family and friends, that can bring happiness/meaning. His first car didn't bring him happiness because it was a car (and not even fancy), but because of all the road trips he did with his friends in it.
I just finished reading this book while taking a train for a weekend vacation. To your point, he mentions that if spending money doesn't make you happy, it's because you're spending it on the wrong things. You shouldn't spend money to get the respect of others, because it's fleeting, causes envy, and is the fast food of getting respect. You need to spend money in ways that give you new experiences until you discover what kind of spending DOES make you happy.
Reading the paper I have a repeating puzzlement, wondering if they are trolling or sincere. For example, about the benefits of delaying consumption to happiness:
...
For example, when asked to choose a snack from an
array that included apples, bananas, paprika-flavored crisps, and
Snickers bars, people overwhelmingly selected an unhealthy
snack if it was to be consumed immediately, but drifted toward
the healthier options when selecting a snack to be consumed the
following week (Read & van Leeuwen, 1998). Because the
present seems to be viewed under an emotional magnifying glass,
people gave in to the temptation of salty, sweet satiation when it
was immediately available, but when such satiation receded into
the future, this temptation no longer loomed large, freeing people
to select more virtuous options—and perhaps to appreciate the
abstract health benefits of a banana at least as much as the
more concrete deliciousness of nutty, chocolaty nougat.
...
I would say that delaying the pleasure in this case distances the pleasure anticipation from the decision, just like deciding to start going to the gym next week is much easier decision to do then deciding to start right now. Appreciation of the health benefits of next week's banana combined with the lesser, mediocre pleasure that will be felt eating it, might be better for the individual health then having that Savoy truffle right now, but no, the banana will never bring the same pleasure or happiness. Never.
Was this AI written? It seems confusing to me but I'm not an economist. I think another way to look at happiness and money is that while money doesn't necessarily buy happiness, it avoids unhappiness. So you remove a negative factor -- not having money, which is a position nobody wants to be in. This is similar to your overall health, friends, love, etc.. It's not that you need tons of them , but not having any of them is a problem, especially health.
"When you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both, it's health. If everything is simply jake, then you're frightened of death."
I think as long as you're not depressed because you don't have enough money I've seen people with much much less happier than extremely wealthy people.
I know someone extremely wealthy and he continuously says that he's bored, is depressed yet wants to make more.
Meanwhile I work daily with people on a normal/content wage and I feel like they're generally happier people?
I know people really struggling financially and they're constantly depressed.
I wonder how much any of those associations are with income per se versus career satisfaction per se?
I imagine people who are making more money are probably a better fit for their career, feel more needed, and so forth and so on. I do imagine there's some relationship with income and accumulating more money per se, but I wonder how strong that relationship is once you remove the effects of career satisfaction independent of monetary gain, if such a thing is even possible.
I guess it's hard for me to interpret these effects because there's so much going on in the background in terms of meeting life goals, feeling welcome where you're at and feeling like you're able to contribute what you're best at, and so forth and so on.
The other thing is the ordinate axis is hard for me to make sense of. Like, in Figure 1, life satisfaction goes from say, 2.7 to 3.2 on a scale of 1 to 4? That seems like a relatively narrow range to me, even if it is statistically significant, and my guess is those dots are hiding a lot of variability.
So maybe that's what people mean by diminishing returns? Not that there's no actual continuing increase, but that the increase is incredibly small on some absolute scale of happiness? It's hard to know what to make of the happiness numbers — if, say, consequential changes in some measure of happiness occur far below anything on that ordinate axis, none of these increases with income are of any practical significance.
People work hard for academic and career success. This will take decades. The plan is to make a lot of money with that success, have costly things/hobbies and derive happiness. It is driven by money as social status, which allows you to buy costly things and signal to others about your success.
Instead, find joy in cheap hobbies and ignore the status markers. Just do things for yourself, not for others.
> but the study conflates both into the same bucket if they both make, say, $400K/yr
Annual income is easy to measure, net worth isn't. People like to measure things that are easier to measure. :P This is part of how 'millionaire' has gone from 'someone who has a million dollars' (for some value of has) to 'someone who has a million dollars of income per year'
I guess annual income also hints at annual expenses which should be important for the study. There are people who constantly spend all they make, and probably score low on self assessed happiness. Also income != wage, can be passive.
I think for a study like this, a money-happiness correlation would need a more sophisticated definition of money, to account for peer pressure and spending.
For a given zip code - take p75 of pre-tax income, multiply by 50% - this would be a proxy of how much someone needs to spend per year to be comfortable with local cost of living and their peers. 50% takes taxes and savings out, call it spend/burn. Then someone's wealth could be a ratio of net-worth/burn. The higher the wealthier - people 25 and over essentially not needing to work, and people with < 3 are essentially in indentured servitude, even with high income. Control for age.
It is difficult to know when you 'have enough' money because like death, you never know what is around the corner. Most of us earn, save, and spend money during our working lives so that we can retire comfortably; but it seems like there is no magic number for when we have arrived.
How long will we live? What will our health be like? Would we like to travel? Leave the kids an inheritance? Give it away? All of these can influence the number.
The secret to amassing wealth is to always live beneath your means; but don't forget to enjoy yourself as you make the journey towards retirement.
Lots of people enjoy what they do. There's no reason any of the billionares HN complains about couldn't go retire but they don't. Most of them are busy AF. Because they want to be as clearly they have the funds to stop
Freedom is the only missing piece holding them back from pursuing what they think will make them happy. That freedom makes them happy today, happy with the hope of tomorrow's happiness. But a number of people find that pursuing that thing (whatever it is for them) doesn't actually make them happy. Now they're less happy, because not only are they not happy, but their dream of future happiness has also died.
I don't know about other people but certainly not for me. I was actually earning crypto passive income for 3 years not working and I was very happy. Now that income is gone, through no fault of my own (literally this was the best case scenario how it could have played out), and I now have to work for money again and I'm very unhappy.
I'm even more unhappy now because my life expectations are higher and I can't get to that level again until I'm 65...
Hearing people tell me this nonsense about money and happiness makes me even more miserable because my conclusion is "They don't appreciate money, yet they are given money... I very much appreciate money, yet I'm not given money..."
From my perspective, it seems almost like the system is only giving money to people who are incapable of appreciating it... Meanwhile I know from past evidence how I felt when I had money + time and that feeling was happiness. I knew it then, I know it now.
This may be a very tone deaf thing to say, but what really helps me is to just tell myself I am happy. It's certainly not fool-proof when faced with genuine problems, but I often find myself unhappy or annoyed for no particular reason. In those moments I just tell myself I have everything I need and life is great, and then it just feels better.
That said all the findings that these studies seem to gravitate towards like close relationships also align with my experiences as being powerful effectors.
that doesn't feel tone deaf to me, and is a legit strategy to kick-start deeper happiness and satisfaction. I a huge component of money-related unhappiness to me appears to be context, i.e. people who need more.
I feel like it's directionally like telling depressed people to just "stop being depressed". Works for me because of where I'm at currently but idk how generalizable it is.
Great analysis, but I would probably add that most (but not all) of those who end up with the six- and seven- figure salaries are smarter, more well-connected and socially adjusted, optimistic etc. Most _not_ all. And some are just really good bullshitters, of course.
Ever been to a third world country and seen happy people who make just a couple hundred bucks a month, yet are very healthy and happy? I have. It's very life changing.
Who are the historical figures that you revere the most? Did their positive influences upon your life originate from making and having money?
As always, correlation is not causation, so it's very possible that the people who tend to be happier also tend to maybe fit into society better and thus get higher paying jobs, not that you necessarily need to make X/year to be happier.
It is still interesting to see how the actual numbers shake out though, especially the section on how the income quintile groups actually scale linearly instead of log linearly with reported happiness.
Money definitely buys happiness for me. But I resent the amount of competition and how much bs I have to put up with to get it. It's definitely eroding the happiness. Especially when you engage in all the bs for years and still don't get much more money.
Harvard has been running longitudinal studies for several decades:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Study
and their findings lean towards good relationships with family and friends are highly correlation with happiness, health, and many aspects of financial success. The released a book summarizing many results a few years ago:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61273746-the-good-life
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
> and their findings lean towards good relationships with family and friends are highly correlation with happiness, health, and many aspects of financial success
The daily reminder about the pains of autism and depression :/
I read a great quote by someone, maybe Nietzsche, suggesting that when you encounter that which you struggle with you tell yourself the equivalent of "hell yeah, this is my struggle."
This is prime time. This is what I'm currently on earth to solve. I'm going to enjoy the process of trying to defeat it. Amor fati.
Of course, you don't have to think that way. But you're going to have one problem or another, either way, and that mindset shift just makes everything feel less hopeless and more in control, even if the problem persists for now.
A classic paper worth a read:
If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right
by Elizabeth Dunn, Daniel Gilbert, & Timothy D. Wilson
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10577...
Includes explicit recommendations (even in the short abstract)!
Books on happiness (research) have become a bit of a thing in recent years, but Dunn seems to have published one of the earlier ones in 2013:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15803098-happy-money
I'd also recommend Morgan Housel's various writings:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/231148075-the-art-of-spe...
He had an interesting observation: the popular saying "don't spend money on things, but on experiences" only goes so far. Spending on things can bring about experiences: the big house/cabin/cottage per se may not bring you happiness, but if it's a place that you can gather family and friends, that can bring happiness/meaning. His first car didn't bring him happiness because it was a car (and not even fancy), but because of all the road trips he did with his friends in it.
I just finished reading this book while taking a train for a weekend vacation. To your point, he mentions that if spending money doesn't make you happy, it's because you're spending it on the wrong things. You shouldn't spend money to get the respect of others, because it's fleeting, causes envy, and is the fast food of getting respect. You need to spend money in ways that give you new experiences until you discover what kind of spending DOES make you happy.
Reading the paper I have a repeating puzzlement, wondering if they are trolling or sincere. For example, about the benefits of delaying consumption to happiness: ... For example, when asked to choose a snack from an array that included apples, bananas, paprika-flavored crisps, and Snickers bars, people overwhelmingly selected an unhealthy snack if it was to be consumed immediately, but drifted toward the healthier options when selecting a snack to be consumed the following week (Read & van Leeuwen, 1998). Because the present seems to be viewed under an emotional magnifying glass, people gave in to the temptation of salty, sweet satiation when it was immediately available, but when such satiation receded into the future, this temptation no longer loomed large, freeing people to select more virtuous options—and perhaps to appreciate the abstract health benefits of a banana at least as much as the more concrete deliciousness of nutty, chocolaty nougat. ...
I would say that delaying the pleasure in this case distances the pleasure anticipation from the decision, just like deciding to start going to the gym next week is much easier decision to do then deciding to start right now. Appreciation of the health benefits of next week's banana combined with the lesser, mediocre pleasure that will be felt eating it, might be better for the individual health then having that Savoy truffle right now, but no, the banana will never bring the same pleasure or happiness. Never.
(link to the full version easily found in google: https://dunn.psych.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/1-s2-0-...)
Was this AI written? It seems confusing to me but I'm not an economist. I think another way to look at happiness and money is that while money doesn't necessarily buy happiness, it avoids unhappiness. So you remove a negative factor -- not having money, which is a position nobody wants to be in. This is similar to your overall health, friends, love, etc.. It's not that you need tons of them , but not having any of them is a problem, especially health.
"When you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both, it's health. If everything is simply jake, then you're frightened of death."
I think as long as you're not depressed because you don't have enough money I've seen people with much much less happier than extremely wealthy people.
I know someone extremely wealthy and he continuously says that he's bored, is depressed yet wants to make more.
Meanwhile I work daily with people on a normal/content wage and I feel like they're generally happier people?
I know people really struggling financially and they're constantly depressed.
I wonder how much any of those associations are with income per se versus career satisfaction per se?
I imagine people who are making more money are probably a better fit for their career, feel more needed, and so forth and so on. I do imagine there's some relationship with income and accumulating more money per se, but I wonder how strong that relationship is once you remove the effects of career satisfaction independent of monetary gain, if such a thing is even possible.
I guess it's hard for me to interpret these effects because there's so much going on in the background in terms of meeting life goals, feeling welcome where you're at and feeling like you're able to contribute what you're best at, and so forth and so on.
The other thing is the ordinate axis is hard for me to make sense of. Like, in Figure 1, life satisfaction goes from say, 2.7 to 3.2 on a scale of 1 to 4? That seems like a relatively narrow range to me, even if it is statistically significant, and my guess is those dots are hiding a lot of variability.
So maybe that's what people mean by diminishing returns? Not that there's no actual continuing increase, but that the increase is incredibly small on some absolute scale of happiness? It's hard to know what to make of the happiness numbers — if, say, consequential changes in some measure of happiness occur far below anything on that ordinate axis, none of these increases with income are of any practical significance.
People work hard for academic and career success. This will take decades. The plan is to make a lot of money with that success, have costly things/hobbies and derive happiness. It is driven by money as social status, which allows you to buy costly things and signal to others about your success.
Instead, find joy in cheap hobbies and ignore the status markers. Just do things for yourself, not for others.
Every Thursday, the ice cream man comes down our street. The price is usually around ~$20 to buy happiness for a family of 4.
Hi, effective altruist here. I'm going to start a fund to buy your family $50,000 of ice cream a year to maximize total happiness.
> What is the shape of the relationship between money and happiness, and what are its implications?
1. money != income.
2. Zip codes.
3. Age.
4. Social class.
a) 65 year old professor living in Woodside, CA, with a net worth of $250,000K
b) 35 year old HVAC business owner living in Fresno, CA, with a net worth of $2,000,000
First is poor, second is rich, but the study conflates both into the same bucket if they both make, say, $400K/yr
> but the study conflates both into the same bucket if they both make, say, $400K/yr
Annual income is easy to measure, net worth isn't. People like to measure things that are easier to measure. :P This is part of how 'millionaire' has gone from 'someone who has a million dollars' (for some value of has) to 'someone who has a million dollars of income per year'
I guess annual income also hints at annual expenses which should be important for the study. There are people who constantly spend all they make, and probably score low on self assessed happiness. Also income != wage, can be passive.
I think for a study like this, a money-happiness correlation would need a more sophisticated definition of money, to account for peer pressure and spending.
For a given zip code - take p75 of pre-tax income, multiply by 50% - this would be a proxy of how much someone needs to spend per year to be comfortable with local cost of living and their peers. 50% takes taxes and savings out, call it spend/burn. Then someone's wealth could be a ratio of net-worth/burn. The higher the wealthier - people 25 and over essentially not needing to work, and people with < 3 are essentially in indentured servitude, even with high income. Control for age.
It is difficult to know when you 'have enough' money because like death, you never know what is around the corner. Most of us earn, save, and spend money during our working lives so that we can retire comfortably; but it seems like there is no magic number for when we have arrived.
How long will we live? What will our health be like? Would we like to travel? Leave the kids an inheritance? Give it away? All of these can influence the number.
The secret to amassing wealth is to always live beneath your means; but don't forget to enjoy yourself as you make the journey towards retirement.
Lots of people enjoy what they do. There's no reason any of the billionares HN complains about couldn't go retire but they don't. Most of them are busy AF. Because they want to be as clearly they have the funds to stop
Money provides freedom, not happiness.
Money makes so many things easier. How leverage that ease determines if it brings you happiness.
If you're free, you're free to pursue happiness.
For most people, freedom is the only missing piece holding them back from being happy so that distinction melts away for them.
Freedom is the only missing piece holding them back from pursuing what they think will make them happy. That freedom makes them happy today, happy with the hope of tomorrow's happiness. But a number of people find that pursuing that thing (whatever it is for them) doesn't actually make them happy. Now they're less happy, because not only are they not happy, but their dream of future happiness has also died.
I don't know about other people but certainly not for me. I was actually earning crypto passive income for 3 years not working and I was very happy. Now that income is gone, through no fault of my own (literally this was the best case scenario how it could have played out), and I now have to work for money again and I'm very unhappy.
I'm even more unhappy now because my life expectations are higher and I can't get to that level again until I'm 65...
Hearing people tell me this nonsense about money and happiness makes me even more miserable because my conclusion is "They don't appreciate money, yet they are given money... I very much appreciate money, yet I'm not given money..."
From my perspective, it seems almost like the system is only giving money to people who are incapable of appreciating it... Meanwhile I know from past evidence how I felt when I had money + time and that feeling was happiness. I knew it then, I know it now.
This may be a very tone deaf thing to say, but what really helps me is to just tell myself I am happy. It's certainly not fool-proof when faced with genuine problems, but I often find myself unhappy or annoyed for no particular reason. In those moments I just tell myself I have everything I need and life is great, and then it just feels better.
That said all the findings that these studies seem to gravitate towards like close relationships also align with my experiences as being powerful effectors.
that doesn't feel tone deaf to me, and is a legit strategy to kick-start deeper happiness and satisfaction. I a huge component of money-related unhappiness to me appears to be context, i.e. people who need more.
I feel like it's directionally like telling depressed people to just "stop being depressed". Works for me because of where I'm at currently but idk how generalizable it is.
related: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-pritchard-on-liberal...
Great analysis, but I would probably add that most (but not all) of those who end up with the six- and seven- figure salaries are smarter, more well-connected and socially adjusted, optimistic etc. Most _not_ all. And some are just really good bullshitters, of course.
Ever been to a third world country and seen happy people who make just a couple hundred bucks a month, yet are very healthy and happy? I have. It's very life changing.
Who are the historical figures that you revere the most? Did their positive influences upon your life originate from making and having money?
As always, correlation is not causation, so it's very possible that the people who tend to be happier also tend to maybe fit into society better and thus get higher paying jobs, not that you necessarily need to make X/year to be happier.
It is still interesting to see how the actual numbers shake out though, especially the section on how the income quintile groups actually scale linearly instead of log linearly with reported happiness.
Sometimes is a miscalculation why people are not happy with what they have, mostly because they see another bigger number.
Money definitely buys happiness for me. But I resent the amount of competition and how much bs I have to put up with to get it. It's definitely eroding the happiness. Especially when you engage in all the bs for years and still don't get much more money.