Why money is not the answer | Hacker News Reader

Why money is not the answer

nightoftheknight.com

19 pointsshawnhbk10 comments

I agree with what was said. Just having money doesn't make you happy.

But money provides a safety net for you to pursue what makes you happy (sometime money itself can be helpful, as it finances your pursuits that do make you happy).

I'd love to quit my job and spend all my time on a pet game, or spend all my time painting. But something needs to pay the bulls. As an indie game dev, it's unlikely that's achievable. Most good artists (and I'm a bad one, just to clarify) don't make enough money to make a comfortable living. Sure, there's concept artists who've been in various industries when these industries were cradles, but the economy of then and now is vastly different. So, most people lives revolve around making money.

Now I earn enough to live comfortably, but that wasn't always the case. It sucks when your life revolves around money, but you're not rich. I think this is the reason why most people pursue money: they want to feel safe and comfortable; not because there's some online money leaderboard

> I read somewhere that around the $ 60,000-a-year mark. Your happiness level doesn’t go up the more you earn.

The "happiness caps out at 60-75k" meme has been pretty well debunked at this point. Even the author of the original study that came to that conclusion now agrees it was a result of limitations in the design of the study.

> Using this data, which constituted over 1.7 million experience samples, Professor Killingsworth found that larger incomes “were robustly associated” with both greater happiness and greater life satisfaction. Further, there was no observed plateau in either happiness or life satisfaction at $75,000 or any other level. As income increased, positive feelings increased, and negative feelings decreased. [0]

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnjennings/2024/02/12/money-b...

I guess money for the point of money is the issue. If you have some higher goal like doing something in the world or running a business, then more money probably helps with that.

and even if the first study hadn't been questioned, $75,000 in 2010 when it was published, the midpoint of a 60-90k range iirc, is equivalent to $104,000 today.

edit: I'm not advocating greed is good or anything. I have some personal bias against this study, not due to the author or results. It's that the first I heard of it, a literal billionaire was using it to defend flat worker salaries vs significant executive bonuses that year.

Money in the bank doesn't make you happy it just helps you get to sleep at night. A sleepless night on the other hand will make me unhappy.

> I’m still single at 37, and the idea of having kids and a family is gone.

Some men have their first child well after 50. It's not gone. And I know several men who have been very happy marrying a woman with kids and raising them as their own.

Indeed, I'd think a woman around that age who wanted to have kids would be delighted to find a man who wants to give it a go. The biological clock is a bit more acute for women.

I read about an analogy - people are climbing a ladder they don't really understand, and become rather shocked upon reaching the top and realizing it didn't take them where they wanted to go.

"The answer is chasing—"

the answer is not chasing.

Let me have enough first and I’ll find out for myself, thanks.

Also, this kind of pablum is obvious class warfare psyop. “You don’t have money, but you’re so happy!” say the billionaires with their own private space launch facilities while the middle class collapses.

No. Disgusting. Don’t carry their water for them.

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