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.
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.
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.
>and all the projects and maintenance that come with them requires a lot of phone calls and getting people to show up.
That's not how this works.
You don't need much effort to "get the people show up": they'll do it because they need the money, and you have those.
Second, if you're rich, you have people managing the hiring and coordination of projects and maintenance, you don't even need to know how many people are in your overall staff.
I take your point, but it really depends on which threshold of rich we're talking about. Someone with say... 5M net worth is rich by most people's standards, but depending on where they live and their situation, they may or may not have the staff to take care of every administrative aspect of their life. 50M, sure... you've basically won life at that point, and you can outsource everything.
Monetarily, absolutely not, but that's not the point I'm making. I'm saying if money equals freedom, at the lower threshold of being rich, there are still many small things that will take up your time; thus, preventing you from maximizing potential happiness from said wealth.
Can someone worth $5m not just live in the same house they would if they were worth like $200k but have everything be strictly easier? Pay for lawn service, maid, gutter cleaners, tutors, reliable cars, etc.? Obviously if they choose to leverage themselves to the eyeballs and live in the biggest house they can get a loan for, they will still have to spin plates to keep it all together, but they don't have to do that.
That supports the article's thesis of a dose-dependent response to wealth.
I can tell you from personal experience and observation, that the amount of bother the small things bring to people with FU money goes down drastically, especially if you give up the 50+ hour (including commutes) day job.
My retired grandad said "one todo a day is enough". It's much, much, better...
I now am lucky enough to have enough money for everything I need and that means almost all problems are a payment away from being solved. 99.9% of the problems become really small. The amount of time spent on every little problem before was absurd.
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.
> 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 :(.
Definitely. I'm not suggesting money doesn't matter, I was thinking mostly about the question of whether or not happiness levels off after some point. I think my question was kind of whether at some point, it's less about the money and more about what's bringing in the money. Before that point the money itself would definitely matter.
Or maybe it's the money itself all the way through. Just a lot of possibilities.
It's hard to say because there are so many different preferences. For example, for people who just want to be by themselves, live in a secluded area surrounded by wildlife, a lot of money would help them fulfil that dream and be happy there. Money allows you to disconnect from the system. For others who like their job and just want enough to live "within the system", there might be a levelling off factor. Ambition to reach some level of social standing might be a factor too.
I feel it is important to note that you only get more spoons if you spend the money on spoons. Financial management habits are in direct opposition to non-investment spending, including on spoons.
Imo, humans are hard wired to care about relative social standing. Income is a measure/indicator of social standing, among other things. Ideologically, we're resistant to the idea that we care about our ranking. We should care about absolutes... so I think this one is hard to study.
Generally speaking, human satisfaction tends to be relative. Relative to where we were. Relative to expectations... Relative to parents. Relative to last year. Etc.
Some high paying jobs also come with high pressure and little free time which could harm life satisfaction. It could be that high earners that are likely to participate in such a study are the ones that have more free time to dedicate to spontaneous endeavors, therefore might already have a higher life satisfaction.
This bias can also exist for lower-paying jobs, however I would guess proportionally there might be more 80-hour/week type high responsibility jobs in the higher paying brackets.
> Sometimes I wonder if it's the money per se, or what brings in the money, or both.
Yes:
> One could draw a snap judgment from this analysis and conclude that money, in fact, simply buys happiness. I think that would be the wrong conclusion. Clever sociologists will always find new ways of “calculating” that marriage matters most, or social fitness explains all, or income is paramount. But the subtler truth seems to be that finances, family, and social fitness are three prongs in a happiness trinity. They rise together and fall together. Low-income Americans have seen the largest declines in marriage and experience the most loneliness. High-income Americans marry more and have not only richer investment accounts but also richer social lives. In this light, the philosophical question of what contributes most to happiness is just the beginning. The deeper question is why the trinity of happiness is so stratified by income—and whether well-being in America is in danger of becoming a luxury good.
Another factor: When you're wealthy, everything is low stakes. Elections don't matter, rent increases and food inflation don't matter, global warming doesn't matter, the future of your family doesn't matter (in the sense that it's all sorted thanks to the money). Even wars don't matter, because you have your bunker on private land in New Zealand. The problems that cause stress for even mid-high income people don't exist. Money becomes an escape hatch.
On top of that, you can go into financial risks that us mere mortals simply can't afford to do or have to include massive additional stressor in our lives, to improve your situation further.
> Sometimes I wonder if it's the money per se, or what brings in the money, or both.
There is a correlation between age and happiness. People of retirement age are generally happier than people in their forties. It's probably safe to conclude that retired people are happier than they themselves were when they were working. Even though they will have less income. So yes, what brings in the money matters: Not having to work makes you happier. Presumably the wealthy group correlates with not having to work. Or maybe only working a CEO-level job that consists of golfing with business partners and leaving the rest to others.
Way over generalized. Of course there are differences in stress levels of both jobs and people.
I'm sure there are servicemembers who are super-chill under fire, and there's also anxious dog-walkers, but to say there's no meaningful distinction between jobs is ridiculous.
> there's no meaningful distinction between jobs is ridiculous.
I do not say there is no distinction, I am saying how much someone gets stressed depends on their mental state, physical and emotional parameters that are not being taken care of. Its like if you try to make a city car perform on a level with racing cars it will break quickly - this is the same thing as stress.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> The rest is up to you. To your goals. To your motivations.
Which are limited by... your money. Money means options, the more of it you have, the more choices you have.
Of course happiness isn't O(n) with the balance on your bank account. Having money doesn't buy happiness. Buying happiness buys happiness. Money is distilled, fully generalized power. You have to exercise that power to get the benefit.
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
Our ancestors did not take it for granted to have a toilet. In fact, there are still people alive today who grew up with no family toilet, who later got one. Just as there are people who had to hand wash their clothes and their dishes, but now have a machine to do it.
I grew up without internet, and I didn't miss it.
Now, I will be miserable if you take away any of those things.
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.
> 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.
To be honest I was also thinking about minecraft creative mode. I find it boring. My kids find it boring. Maybe some youtuber do not. Maybe some people do not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
My point is more that if a person today used that past amount of stuff, they would still be "capable" of being happy. It's not the extra stuff that makes people happy today. The difference is that society has innumerable ways of pumping FOMO into your head, especially via advertising and social expectations.
In other words, if a group of people today made a town where everyone had anti-FOMO/consumerist values, kids only had a few wooden toys and not 5,000 Pokemon cards, etc., I don't think the lack of money and stuff would make them less happy.
This makes me think that a group like the Amish would be worth studying WRT money and happiness.
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.
>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.
That is not true, if you are forced to do a job that you have no interest for of course you will feel unhappy. Now being forced means on many levels, today in most developed countries you can survive even with basic jobs but you want to have a house of this size, a car of this brand etc etc then you are forced.
But if you find a job not because you want to keep up with your neighbour but the one which you personally see useful and do it with a sense of purpose then you can easily work extra hours and be happy.
There is a big difference between working when you want to, and working when you have to. Even if you find the most fulfilling job in the world, you may still wish you had more flexible vacation, possibility to work from home, etc. Working extra hours is nice when that is your choice, and it sucks when it means you have no time for things that happen in your personal life.
If I had enough money to be "early retired", I would probably still spend most of my days doing something meaningful, but the difference would be that I could take a break any time I would want to, change my focus anytime I would want to, etc. So it would feel completely different from having to follow someone else's rules.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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 ;)
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.
> Having blind-spots is life's greatest luxury. Pure psychological comfort.
There is nothing more wrong than this statement. There are way bigger things in life than comfort. And having blind spots will make you lose all your "riches" in one way or another. Aren't there enough stories of rich people going down with drugs, bad management, family issues etc?
Rich people have a huge psychological discomfort because they need to worry about staying rich 24/7. In that state they can't reach even a piece of mind, forget about states of bliss and beyond. Their only comfort is thinking they are better than others, that is a comfort of a fool and life will make sure one will pay for it.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
You just mixed up everything as did people in the article. Happiness is one thing, freedom of choice is another thing, comfort is a third thing, satisfaction is a fourth thing. These are all completely different things.
Its rather simple to understand, whatever job you were "wasting" time on, if there is at least 1 human being on this planet who does this same job and is happy then problem is not in this job, problem is with you.
If you have clear understanding of this you can do whatever job for any amount of hours and be happy. In fact I know thousands people working without being payed at all and they are way happier than highest income people you can imagine. Because they took time to learn how to keep themselves happy.
> Its rather simple to understand, whatever job you were "wasting" time on, if there is at least 1 human being on this planet who does this same job and is happy then problem is not in this job, problem is with you.
That makes no sense whatsoever and does not take into account preference. That's like saying "if there's at least one person that likes garlic ice cream, then you disliking it is just a frame of mind".
Your logic is strange. What if I found one person who managed to obtain enlightenment from meditation and achieve happiness in a concentration camp. Would you then say that other people not being happy in a concentration camp is their problem because they couldn't do the same thing?
> Would you then say that other people not being happy in a concentration camp is their problem because they couldn't do the same thing?
Yes, absolutely. And of course I'm not saying that concentration camps are any good or anything like that.
This logic may seem strange because in external situations what one person can do another can not do simply because of different capabilities.
But when it comes to internal experiences, if you had even 1 moment of happiness in your life that means you are able to create that experience. You just didn't unravel the mechanics of it, but some people did and by my own experience I can confirm that its possible to have inner experience be whatever you want independent of the outside conditions.
I do understand that, it's an interesting point of view. I appreciate it as I meditate. And there is something to it for sure. Your statement is certainly incontrovertible. I suppose it is better to separate the creation of happiness independent of current conditions from other variables.
Just to clarify - meditation means many things, we have 1 word in English but in Eastern culture there is a dozen or more different practices.
What they found out (seemingly very long time ago) is essentially that human experience happens from within. There are external situations which may stimulate that, but in the end it always happens from within. This is very easy to observe in people from different cultures/backgrounds having completely different responses to the same exact situation.
If that is established the next question is how do I create the experience I want? And what I want for myself is of course the utmost pleasantness. So they figured out many different methods, strange and exotic, but the important thing is they are working.
I did try a few of them and one did work in a huge way so I feel that I must speak up when people discuss such vital topics like happiness in primitive terms of "money make people happy", "freedom makes people happy", "family makes people happy" etc.
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.
It depends where and how you want to "escape". A million dollars will go a long way if you are single and living in Thailand. Won't go much if you have a family in London.
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.
Well, I am talking specifically about people who dislike cities, people who can't be happy 9-5. If you find cities a great value and having kids fulfilling, then obviously people who work "in the system" derive enough value from it to keep going in it. So, I wasn't referring to those types.
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.