The day I became a millionaire
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There are certainly diminishing returns, and it's much easier to appreciate a modest amount of money when you have the experience of living on less. And the security of having a large number in your bank account probably matters much less to the kind of person who starts their own business in the first place rather than working for someone else (ironically enough).
But if you spend it intelligently, and don't make the mistake of sacrificing quality of life for it, having more money genuinely can make life significantly more fun.
I did a lot of soul-searching during my twenties and came to the same conclusion. Yes, more money can make a seemingly-large impact on your life. But the relationship is vague.
A Lamborghini only makes sense to buy if you can understand the difference between it, a Ferrari, and other similar supercars. A Tesla is only really useful if you have a garage to park it in that has a charge plug.
Plenty of people buy things that ultimately reduce the quality of their lives by introducing pains in the neck. They may take pride in these pains in the neck, but then the increase in quality is coming from the pride and not the purchase. One could almost as easily just buy something like Tesla stock if they're not quite up to owning a Tesla.
My soul-searching ended when I realized that it was moving through life's phases and stages smoothly and easily that was true joy in life. To take things simply and not go nuts with planning and optimization. DHH's philosophy really appeals to me for that reason, and it's no accident that I really like his web framework too.
That other, very long, post in this thread illustrates the vagueness of the money / happiness connection. Making money is almost effortless once you have the requisite social skills. Jobs fall into your lap, when you have a business, people fall over themselves wanting to do business with you. All you have to do is choose how much of it you want. It's not having those skills that will ultimately make you unhappy, not lacking the money. To make the money, you work on those general people skills, not on any one particular vehicle to dollars.
This line really hits home for anyone growing up lower-middle class.
I don't think very many people are so shallow as to believe that money will make them happy beyond a certain threshold of satisfying basic needs and security. Sometimes people can be depressed or sidetracked by other issues and can go through periods of life, maybe even long periods, where they believe certain materialistic or wealth-enabled options will make them happy. But then again, lots of people also fool themselves into believing that religion will do that, or getting married, or having a baby. It works out for some people; it doesn't work out for others; and in general we all can't read too much into how it worked for other people.
But where I get super frustrated is with a number of things that become ever more important yet ever less accessible to non-wealthy people. Particularly: legal protection and medical security.
Basic insurance in the U.S. is pretty shitty. My mother, for example, is a courtroom clerk and judge's assistant in a small town in the Midwest. She's a government employee (of the county where she lives) and she hasn't been given a raise in over 5 years because it's either the insurance gets cut more than it already has been or else pay freezes. She has over 25 years of experience as a paralegal and judge's assistant and is a wizard with motions and lots of other legal documents, in addition to being exceptionally personable and polite to the many human beings who have to come through her office dealing with difficult court-related circumstances. Yet per year she earns less than $15,000 above the national poverty line in America, and even in her lower-cost-of-living area it's extremely hard on her to make ends meet, and especially to deal with many of the health downturns that accompany ageing.
She only has 3 weeks of vacation (and she is even so gracious as to consider herself lucky(!) to have this). She's in her mid fifties and has worked a full career and gets 15 days of paid time off, which must also be used for her sick time if needed. She can't even take time off to help others in our family with childcare or holiday travel or anything because she has so few days of her own.
Would a million dollars magically make her happy? You damn well better believe it would. Would it totally solve all of her problems and make the essence of life more valuable or meaningful to her ... no, of course not, and that's pretty irrelevant.
I also have experience with very frustrating legal issues as well. I don't want to go on about an anecdotal situation, but my sister is tied up in a very expensive custody battle with the biological father of her son. The father in this situation has been arrested and convicted of many minor offenses, ranging from drug possession charges to fraudulent checks, but the custody issue came about because he was charged with a very significant set of crimes that place my nephew in pretty serious danger.
Yet the particular state that I live in has some of the most antiquated laws about child protection in these cases. Virtually 100% of the time, the state sides with the reasoning that it's always in the best interest of a child to be with both parents, no matter what sort of crimes either parent has committed, even to the crazy extreme that our attorney has shown us case law in which a young girl was actually raped by her father and then later forced to have supervised visitation with him. In some cases, even against this state's own Department of Corrections guidelines, they will conduct supervised visits at a jail or prison.
The custody issue has dragged on and on, and I have personally contributed a very large amount of money to fund our legal effort to seek supervised parenting time and potentially termination of parental rights.
If we weren't pumping a ridiculous amount of money into the legal case, it's almost guaranteed that this would just be another run-of-the-mill case where the court looks contemptibly upon both parties, and pre-judges them both to be "lowlifes" merely for even having to be in court at all, and just goes by the status quo parenting time guidelines without even spending 10 seconds to think about the actual potential for harm to the child. Trust me, if I could give you all of the details, it would make you scream in disbelief and frustration.
And here again, it's purely an issue of money. Do you have a spare $100,000 lying around to throw at a court case? Well, then your child gets to be protected and supervised. But if you don't cough up the dough, your kid's safety don't mean shit.
So do I think I'd be happier with a million dollars? You bet your ass. Not because I want to own materialistic things or do bored billionaire shit like create my own cryonics rocket so that aliens can unthaw me in a thousand years, or surround myself with attractive people who will have sex with me because of my Lorentzian money distortion field even though from a genetic selection point of view I have zero business being with such people.
I just want to have a damn family holiday where me and my family are not maxing out our blood pressure because we're worried about how my ageing mother will pay the medical bills for her quite normal and expected age-related conditions, or how my sister will come up with enough money to pay an attorney $1500 to create a motion objecting to an inappropriate child supervision arrangement proposed by the other party. Do you think a millionaire would have to put up with this shit?
Yeah, my basic needs are met. I'm sitting in a warm room using the internet right now and I have enough food. But fuck me if money wouldn't seriously make me happy.
The hilarious thing: I'm very happy to work for it too. I don't expect my parakeets-as-a-service business to disrupt everything and win me precious, precious VC dollars. All I want is for my labor to be fairly compensated and for employers to do simple things, like give people fair insurance and vacation time.
I've experienced the medical situation first hand. And, it is a slippery slope. Untreated or poorly treated -- or "put off" -- one problem can lead to second, and the next, and a spiraling decay of health. And health is the foundation upon which all else is built. It seems ridiculous that a society the professes to and insists upon "the best" from its members, makes so little concerted effort to foster that foundation.
And, unfortunately, in a society that seems to be increasingly focused on the self and attitudes centered around some sort of zero sum gain perspective, reasonableness and compromise seems to be supplanted with legal warfare. Where, like all warfare, (personal) resources play a primary role in determining outcome.
There were things I wanted to achieve, but they were never focused on financial outcome, until I fell increasingly behind these eight balls.
Simple things -- the beauty of a day and place; good company; the comfort and well-being to fully enjoy these -- have always been the most enjoyable to me. The creative focus and accomplishment I used to experience before the health issues increasingly limited it -- and it used to be strongest when what I did helped someone else.
I've had to rethink some of my early education and training -- and it has not been an easy course. Because generosity, while still a primary force in the world at large, is NOT always reciprocated. And these days, it is increasingly NOT a reliable rule in areas that have a primary, profound effect upon our lives.
And THIS, perhaps, is a real sign of decay in our society. Or, I was raised under a delusion borne of some short-term aberration in how the world works.
Either way, I reflect more often on the adage: You can't take care of others until you've taken care of yourself. Perhaps I still don't want to consider that as primarily a financial dictate. Neither, however, do I any longer wish to have financial constraints threaten my ability to take care of the basics in this regard, for myself or for my family.
"Once you've made enough money to cover all your basic wants and needs, everything else is just keeping score." - Joel Plaice Sr.
There are a lot of ways to screw it up: investing poorly; living an unsustainable lifestyle; owning (and having to maintain) too much stuff; losing the desire to work and/or contribute meaningfully; putting too much emphasis on image over substance; sustaining superficial/self-serving relationships; falling prey to legal vultures; etc...