Meh. I grew up dirt poor, and I am now what past me would have considered successful.

Funny thing about it, though, I’m still me. I’m that same dirt poor teenager, just older. It didn’t change me like I thought it would.

Absolutely, the lack of money will make you unhappy. Without a doubt. But I’ve never got a 20% raise and felt 20% happier. You’re always gonna be who you are, money or not.

Nobel Laureates Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton at Princeton University published a study in 2010 showing that money buys happiness only up to about $75k per year (in 2010 dollars, for Americans), at which point happiness plateaus and more money doesn’t meaningfully buy more happiness.

Years later, Matthew Killingsworth at the University of Pennsylvania published a study showing that happiness didn’t really plateau with money, but kept increasing at $75k and beyond.

They got together to see if they could reconcile their different findings from pretty similar methodologies.

As it turns out, Killingsworth’s data did show the same plateau, at pretty much the same place, if you focus only on the least happy 20%. In a sense, the Kahneman data was focused on only measuring unhappiness, and didn’t properly distinguish between people who were kinda happy, people who were moderately happy, and people who were really happy.

So now the most widely accepted analysis is that there are people who are deeply unhappy, for whom giving them more money might not make them emotionally better off, at least past $75k in 2010 dollars. But for the rest of us, the majority of people will continue getting happier with more money, well up to the $500k income.

Here’s a write up of the collaboration

Sure, but poverty is a lack of money. The inability to sustain oneself healthily. Once you have “sufficient” money, having even more won’t make you happier.

Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can give you the foundation and support to look for it.

This image post could have been a text post.

Money can’t buy you happiness. But stress due to lack of money destroys people. Working as a volunteer at a homeless shelter has taught me that atleast here in the Netherlands quite some of them stay homeless not because there are no options to get of the street, but because with these options comes all the stress of having to pay the bills. That goes to show how rough it must be to live with financial stress, because living on the street itself is terribly rough, and still some prefer it.

There was definitely a point in my career where I was making 50k CAD/year and it was a bigger change than my previous job when I went from 40k to 45k. I’m in a HCOL area.

I was able to have rent my own small 1 bedroom apartment (price has more than doubled since then 🤮), go on small little trips locally, finish paying off me debt, buy a few nice things, and actually save money.

Over the years my salary increased a lot as I retrained as a software developer, and sure, the money is nice and I can buy more nice things and save more, but the big change was at 50k when it finally felt comfortable.

If it was 50k then though, given rent increases and other cost of living increases, I’m not sure you’d get that same experience until 70-75k now though.

A few years ago I was stealing water from a construction site so my partner and I could flush the toilet. Parked in a development lot in the middle of the night, watching for security guards while I filled a bunch of plastic organizer bins in the back of a van.

We were several years into a total financial crashout from a combination of major health problems, deaths in the family, and a floundering job market. Things are better now, but I can say at least that I know now what it feels like to lose everything and claw your way back out of the hole. I don’t recommend it, it sucks.

Our nation doesn’t want you to succeed. Remember that. In order for the wealthy to stay wealthy, there has to be a class of people who have less or nothing so that money retains value. We’re the richest fucking nation that’s ever existed, many times over, so if we really wanted we could end poverty, we could end hunger and disease and make a glorious world where everyone is comfortable and able to aim for their own dreams without risk of losing everything and having to steal water to flush the fucking the toilet.

We’re not in that world for the simple reason that a tiny fraction of people want to have things and they want other people to envy them.

Well duh. Just apply for a leadership position. Double the stress for a dollar raise!

As the saying goes, money can’t buy you happiness but a lack of money can buy you a lot of misery. Enough money for a comfortable lifestyle, anything over that and we enter ego validation territory.

Money probably really doesn’t make you happy. Most of the things that make me happy have nothing to do with me being able to buy crap I don’t need.

But that dumb sentiment hides the fact that a lack of money can definitely make you miserable.

Only the people that never had stress over dentist of vet bills will suggest money is somehow not a massive factor in determining your quality of life in a capitalist society.

Honestlyyyy.

My biggest issue rn is credit card debt. My dog needed multiple surgeries and my car needed fixed. I have 2 maxed out cards and no interest until November. It’s only like 6k to pay off, but it’s still overwhelming because I’ve never had to deal with this type of thing before. I think I can get it all paid off before November, but it’s still a daunting task.

Rip my fun summer plans.

I’m very close to paying off all my student debt. You’d think I’d be happier with the extra 250 a month now going to me, but… it’s really not a life changing amount. I can afford better groceries, and can save a bit for a rainy day. Other than that, nothing much really.

Financial independence would be life changing. Not seeing a large portion of my income going to rent, but to a property that I own and can happily invest time and effort into. That would be amazing

Happiness is connected to contentment, feeling you have enough.
There are people living in their cars who are happy, and elon musk, with all the money in the world, very much doesn’t look like a happy person.

Getting 99 salary increases does feel unrealistic though