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.