I really do not understand how people talk about "Being rich / being a billionaire will make you fundamentally unhappy". Damn if I had all the money I have so many good-willed projects I want to throw money at!
1: not unhappy is weird phrasing. Substitute not sad or not angry or not hungry or whatever for your particular state of unhappiness.
> Money can very much buy happiness. Most of the things that make you unhappy can be remedied with money
Was it too hard to read beyond the first comma?
Nonsense. Most of the things that can be remedied with money are not the truly painful things of life either.
Will money save you from heartache? From the pain of losing a loved one? From being lonely? From having no respect from your peers? From losing your health to incurable cancer?
At that point, all money can do for one is make them even more pathetic.
Have you done the math of what life consists of for most people?
It's 9-to-5. Your life is DOMINATED - by large order of magnitude - by involuntary wage slavery. Where you literally sell away your time for pennies on a dollar to a highest bidder.
That is the most painful thing in life, bar none, there is nothing worse than this. This is what ruins most of your health, ages you the most, causes most of the stress, which seperates you from spending more time with your family and loved ones and being free and doing what you want.
Unless the wage-slavery happens to be of enjoyable type for you. Which is bit of an outlier, lets be honest.
> From having no respect from your peers?
Most people automatically give respect and admiration to people with money, regardless if it's deserved or not.
> Will money save you from heartache? From being lonely?
Being a 9-to-5 wage-slave is ten times worse than heartache or loneliness. Or most other things.
If you're lonely and aren't able to distract yourself from heartache and you have boatloads money, you have SKILL ISSUES of the most severe kind.
Money has brought nothing, but pure joy in my life.
Then there's the 7 to 2am second job, the 5 to 7 on Saturdays and Every Other Sunday.
Just to not actually have health insurance which is accepted at anything but the worst health care facilities in the region, with a 6 month waitlist for basic check-ups and a 60% fails or cancel for those appointments and reschedule 3 or more months away.
We are all ONE semi-serious illness or injury away from living out of a shopping cart under an overpass.
Money isn't the cure to ALL problems, but if the only problems you have left are the ones that cannot be solved by money, quit whining about being luckier than practically and statistically EVERYONE else. It is unbecoming and makes you look the fool.
How far from the nearest Walmart Superstore do you live?
Ask the cashier/clerk there and at your local gas station if if they can afford to live anywhere but with their parents or a handful of roommates.
Visit a chain food establishment where a lunch for two costs less than $40, and talk to the back-of-house staff; the ones washing dishes and cooking food. Ask them about retirement fund plans and employee provided health insurance options.
If you're fortunate enough to live farther away from these parts of the American economic realities, I would expect that 20 to 40 minutes drive on a freeway can get you pretty close to it.
If you don't go to those places; ask your Door Dash or Uber Eats driver about why they drive instead of working at those stores... and pay them with a C-note for taking the time to help broaden your perspective.
Try looking at the view of current America through the eyes of someone who is non-white, non-male, non-tech or tech-adjacent. It's a stark contrast to the sanitized view from the isles of Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Erewhon, or PCC and from Sweetgreen, Cava, and the True Food Kitchen.
Im not talking from a small sample set of anecdotal observations over a short period of time, but from a wide consensus of travel, first hand interactions, and living experience. In different states, over a 35 year working history, in a variety of situations, and direct relationships with a much larger than average network of family members. I have over one hundred cousins - not counting spouses, their children and grandchildren, on each of my patriarchal and matriarchal sides.
Not joking, my ancestors have been here, on the ground, since the Clovis era (between 9000 and 13000 years ago in the Rocky Mountains) and the early 1630's - one of my direct forefathers was a Colonel who reported directly to Washington. So I have every reason to wish the country was living up to it's stated intentions and potentials. It simply isn't, not recently, but also not for a VERY long time before now. The conditions I describe are the lived experience of many Americans, and appear to have played an outsized role in the results for the nation today.
Maybe, I'm wasting my keystrokes - username trollbridge might be the clue that this is an argumentative tone question without any real intention of truthful discourse.
In that case, consider this response for the benefit of the broader HN community. We all need get outside our own bubbles, and find ways to uplift the people who do the work we rely on and provide support for the community in ways which are not being delivered by the system. It's not ok to pretend to not need a functioning society to thrive in.
In fact, it's almost a direct relationship.
The biggest impact isn't in the material objects it has allowed be to buy, but in the freedom it provides to self-actualize, to pursue activities and build skills that would've been near impossible if it weren't for money.
For example, money can pay for better medical care.
And money does certainly buy health in the US.
More cynically, wealth makes it both easier to attract a romantic partner (fixes loneliness) and harder for them to later leave you (prevents heartache).
So, if you squint a little, money fixes 5 of the 5 listed problems.
Define happiness, but there's a baseline for not being miserable (I have enough to eat etc) and then there's actual satisfaction with your life.
If you doubt the thesis, consider the extreme examples of Musk and Trump. they have infinite wealth and power and are demonstrably, publicly miserable.
The consistently happiest people I've personally met are Buddhist monks of various sects, who have nearly nothing in terms of money or physical possessions.
I define happiness as whatever the person before me defined it as. GP defined it as good health, love and respect of others. Thus, my reply to GP was focused on how money can be turned into good health, love and respect of others. Your definition of happiness is completely different. So of course my reply to you is going to be completely different. The definition of happiness we're operating on has changed since my last comment, after all.
You are conflating two diametrically different claims. One is that money makes people inherently happy. Which is so obviously wrong it's not even worth talking about. It's also something nobody in this comment section said. Least of all me.
The other claim is that money can be exchanged for things that indirectly will make some given person happier than without those things. In short - that money can buy happiness. Both "can" and "buy" are extremely important here. "Buy", as in money itself is useless unless it's exchanged for something. It's this something that you exchange money for that's supposed to increase happiness, not money itself. "Can", because everyone has a choice what they do with their money. You can use the same money to buy something that will make you happy, or to buy something that will not. Musk and Trump are extreme cases of people who could buy happiness but chose to buy something else instead, and are therefore deeply unhappy despite their wealth.
What do these "Buddhist monks of various sects" eat? Where do they get food from? Is eating part of what makes them happy, or just something they're forced to do to continue living? If it was somehow possible for them to continue living without eating, do you think they'd stop eating?
What do these Buddhists do when they're not eating? I assume whatever it is, it's what makes them happy. And the more time they dedicate to it, the more happy they become. By not eating, they'd free up time to do even more of the thing that makes them happy.
In real world, these Buddhist could stop growing food by hand and instead ordered catering. They would be exchanging money for more free time, which in turn would increase their happiness. Is that not so?
Really. The mere fact of having large chunk of cash and resources, without necessarily even spending it as such - per say, can make people inherently happy-ier.
I'll give you an example: You can say NO whenever you wish. It reduces stress without having spent a single penny of it. It changes your attitude to life by mere fact of having it. Even if don't say NO (because situation doesn't call for it), having the mere option to say it at any given moment - makes you inherently happier and have a healthier attitude to life.
So not even this point stands. Money can make people inherently happy-ier. Without as much as even spending a penny extra as you would have had before you got the "big stash".
Trump/Musk without money would be more miserable I surmise.
Probably yes. If you consider dating to be a numbers game, money moves things into your favor greatly and will give you a chance to move past.
> From the pain of losing a loved one?
Money will help greatly, because for many people getting over loss involves therapy which costs money.
> From being lonely?
Money for many people buys companionship.
> From having no respect from your peers?
Given that people associate respect with money excessively, probably yes as well.
> From losing your health to incurable cancer?
Your chances of surviving cancer greatly scale with money.
Sure, there are limits to it, but absolutely access to money is tremendously pushing things towards happiness. I think it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise, at least in a capitalist society we all live in.
The problem isn’t that money doesn’t buy happiness, it’s that it can remove your ability to endure the necessary amounts of unhappiness in life.
If you need your car to earn money, and you don't have the money or other resources to repair it if it breaks - that's a huge uncertainty and a huge source of stress and worry. Liquid funds can remove that source of stress. More drastic examples would include rent or food.
That's why liquid funds can remove impediments and distractions from your life, but once all of those are gone, then what?
Nonetheless, there are more stressors from other things that come along with that... like making personal choices to assist other people with housing, food, and transportation needs, because that's just what you kind of do when you've taken care of that for yourself but you see people around you with various kinds of needs.
There's certainly a point of diminishing returns, and I'd even agree that it is a cliff. Once you have a decent place to live, and your day-to-day worries about paying the bills are covered, and unexpected emergencies do not threaten your ability to get to work, keep your job, and pay your rent, then for most people more money has a diminishing impact on happiness. But that amount of money is quite a bit more than the poverty line.
I'm willing to test this theory out, send me some money.
When people with 1X see people with 10X or 100X and go hey! Why aren't you doing more? That gives me hope. When these people succeed, they are exactly the type of people who will give back and derive happiness from it. The right person who acquires wealth can do a lot of good in the world.
What a hyper-capitalist statement. You are living a sad life if money and status is all that is driving you.
This person is free to do what they like. Family, friends, hobbies, philanthropy, … But apparently they have been stuck in a hamster wheel, chasing money and status their whole life, without ever stopping to think what they actually want or like, what is important to them.
Use the free time to learn some Zig! And start a life of happily giving back powerful and useful GPL software to put your own 2 cents on the mountain of society building blocks that allowed you to thrive in such a way to begin with.
A lot of the really valuable open source software gets written by people who aren't wealthy and have full time jobs doing something other than writing open source software.
If you can't buy happiness either one of these is true:
1. You don't have enough money to buy it. Buying happiness isn't cheap.
2. You have skill issues.
Most people simply don't have enough money to test the hypothesis that "money can't buy happiness", for them earning money involves a lot of struggle and selling their time, and all sorts of opportunity costs.
Thus for working class people having more money is intrinsically linked to selling more of their time or "working harder" (having two jobs, overtime).
Therefore it seems unintuitive to them that having more money will bring hapiness. After all they have to work so hard for it and sell a piece of themselves for it.
And then there, of course, people with skill issues.
The more money I have, the happier I become. Money has brought nothing, but pure joy in my life, it has made me smile more!
But spending your life pursuing an unsatisfiable goal (because the goal is “more”) probably isn’t good for your happiness.
Not to mention, there are very satisfying ways to contribute to things you think are important that don’t necessarily involve a lot of money.
Meanwhile, people who get rich by accident often seem able to improve their own lives and those of others with their money. The recent article about the founder of Craigslist comes to mind.
You should probably have a billion dollars, you would do great things. But you probably shouldn't become a billionaire to get there. Being rich doesn't make one unhappy, but getting there does.
That relentless grind changes a person, much like the ring.
I echo the sentiment in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630565
I think this is quite defeatist thinking. A thousand people who donate $400 is also $400k and is well within the realm of most people here. A lot of non-profits also want the thousand people that donate $400, because $400 yearly from thousand people is much more robust long-term funding.
Recently a well-known Dutch journalist, who started an organization to critically follow big tag (and take them to court when necessary), raised 1.3 million Euro. Most of it is from people like you and me, who can chip in 10 Euro monthly. It's reliable, because most people just have a recurring donation set up.
Not to detract from mitchellh's pledge, because ideally you get both types of donations.
The wealthiest man on the planet looks to be quite miserable, insecure and bitter most of the time.