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Comment by kemiller2002 | Hacker News Reader

kemiller2002

To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes on the matter, "Whoever said that money doesn't bring happiness has clearly never tried being poor."

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There's a corollary from some founder (one of the Instagram guys?):

There's really only 3 kinds of money.

There's "I don't have to worry if I'll make rent or be able to buy groceries this month" money.

There's "I don't have to think about prices or when I go out to dinner" money.

And then there's "I can take unpaid time off whenever I feel like it, and travel to where I feel like" money.

Past that, everything is just bigger numbers.

It always resonated with me, because (a) it phrased money (which doesn't really matter directly) in terms of outcomes (which do matter directly), (b) it coalesced things down into a few, very different outcome buckets, & (c) it made the observation that in terms of life outcomes, there's definitely a ceiling: unless you're looking for ways to blow money, there's a cap on how much you can reasonably spend.

Bill Gates' description of that ceiling: "I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars, there’s a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that. But once you get much beyond that, I have to tell you, it’s the same hamburger."

Maybe hamburgers are not the thing you should be spending your money on.

There are all kinds of projects that are potentially useful but not necessarily profitable. Having more millions of dollars means you could do more of them.

This is essentially what very wealthy people do with their money. They purchase changes in the world around them and so shape the world to more closely fit their own ideals.

I see it a lot like obesity. Too little is very bad. Too much is also bad. But there's nothing to flag when you have too much.

You see people here complaining that they can't go from $500k to $600k and everyone says that they're being greedy. But the dissatisfaction is a lot stronger at that range, and it only goes up when people become millionaires.

I think it's quite important to check that you're eating because you're hungry and not out of habit/greed/pride.

Seems to me that this is an effect of selection. Why are people not satisfied with having million dollars? Because the personality type who could become satisfied with having million dollars, would probably also be satisfied with having half million dollars, so they are unlikely to ever have the million dollars in the first place.

People who want "exactly one million, not less, not more" are less frequent in population than people for whom no amount of money is ever enough.

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