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Comment by darren0 | Hacker News Reader

It will not make you unhappy. It will just not make you happy. Big difference. The saying "money can't buy happiness" is in fact true no matter how much people want to rationalize the opposite.

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What that always leaves out, however, is that no/little money can very much cause a lot of unhappiness.

The amount of money to get over that hump is small. Many people in poverty are happy. If you are at the very bottom with not enough to eat and such money can buy happiness, but you can be below the poverty line and still be about as happy as everyone.

This is a lie that people with money tell themselves to make themselves feel better about not giving away more of their money (ironically, proving themselves correct).

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.

Quite a bit indeed. Forbes ran an article a few months ago claiming that a family of four with two incomes needs to be earning a combined $400K to be able to reasonably afford the paid child care needed for both parents to be working.

That hump is slightly above the average income level, so I wouldn't call it small. And it doesn't flatten at the hump -- people with more money are still generally happier, but the correlation does drop a lot.

No it's not. It might vary by country and culture but in the west that amount has consistently been found to be well over the poverty line and more often over double the median household income.

> The saying "money can't buy happiness" is in fact true no matter how much people want to rationalize the opposite.

I'm willing to test this theory out, send me some money.

People conflate the ideas of happiness, and comfort. Money buys access to increasing levels of comfort, but comfort becomes normalized very quickly. Once you've become accustomed to a certain level of comfort, the luxury of it wears off and it becomes a new norm. You also have an expectation to, at a minimum, maintain wealth so that you don't lose access to your current level of comfort.

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.

A recent example: https://vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-have-no-idea-what-to-do-with-...

> Everything feels like a side quest, but not in an inspiring way. I don’t have the same base desires driving me to make money or gain status. I have infinite freedom, yet I don’t know what to do with it

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.

The whole section about him working for DOGE to "embark on a journey to save our government" tells you everything you need to know about him.

Point and laugh at the man who is honest about what he feels

OTOH, that’s probably how they got rich, and why I’ll never be.

I mean, the answer is so obviously in front of our faces right now... :-)

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.

It's surprising how few people do this; mitchellh is the exception that proves the rule.

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.

"money can't buy happiness" is a poor mans cope. It's a comforting lie for proletariat, the opium for the goycattle.

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!

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