"Money can't buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery." - Spike Milligan

I more think it's impressive they manage to still be unhappy with absolutely no reason to be so.

Apparently there was a study done and your happiness levels out. Like if you got a big pay bump you'd be happier for a while but then back to baseline.

My boss used this to say that we don't need raises. I asked if we could prove it and me and her swap pays. She laughed and brushed me off.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

How does one obtain food, shelter, healthcare, a basic sense of security by having a stable and safe living space?

Oh thats right, you obtain all that with money, obtaining those things without money is either functionally impossible for the vast majority of people, or literally a crime.

Yeah, adding an infinite amount of money to one person doesn't meaningfully impact their ability to get those first two layers figured out.

Distributing money such that everyone has those two base layers... is quite literally the foundation for a happy, stable, productive society.

Liquidate the billionaires... assets, of course.

Money alone can't buy happiness, but it sure helps with the down payment.

As the saying goes, money can't buy you happiness but a lack of money can buy you a lot of misery. Enough money for a comfortable lifestyle, anything over that and we enter ego validation territory.

Money buys you the luxury of beeing in the position where money can't contribute to your happiness any longer.

Eh, some could also be solved with more time off.

Meh. I grew up dirt poor, and I am now what past me would have considered successful.

Funny thing about it, though, I'm still me. I'm that same dirt poor teenager, just older. It didn't change me like I thought it would.

Absolutely, the lack of money will make you unhappy. Without a doubt. But I've never got a 20% raise and felt 20% happier. You're always gonna be who you are, money or not.

Ya the only people who say this bullshit are those that have never experienced hard ship before.

Honestlyyyy.

My biggest issue rn is credit card debt. My dog needed multiple surgeries and my car needed fixed. I have 2 maxed out cards and no interest until November. It's only like 6k to pay off, but it's still overwhelming because I've never had to deal with this type of thing before. I think I can get it all paid off before November, but it's still a daunting task.

Rip my fun summer plans.

Money absolutely does buy happiness until you're in middle class and in a fulfilling job. (If you're rich but in a shit job, it means you might have the option to work less or look for a better position.)

Money does not buy you happiness applies to people who are already rich and are looking for money to fulfill needs way high on the Maslow hierarchy. In fact, much of the tyranny and cruelty within stratified social systems comes from miserable rich people believing they should be happy due to their vast wealth and power yet are not. And our capitalist society has messages everywhere that promise that a new car, (yacht, vacation, lover, religion, etc.) will totally fulfill them and they don't.

I mean we've had three billionaires shoot themselves into space. If that's not an obvious plead to the gods or the cosmos for a taste of nirvana I don't know what is.

Curiously, this is a thing that Jesus (and every other divine-ish wise guy) knew about: If we give away our vast fortune and live simply with that experience and wisdom, fulfillment comes. But it means overcoming greed for wealth and power, which is quicker, easier, more seductive.

ETA: For those of us outside the ownership class, though, money improves our base Maslow hierarchy (better housing, HVAC, better water, better food) and gets us out of precarity (or worse, scarcity) which make us desperate and miserable (which accounts completely for elevated crime in poor neighborhoods). Money buys us out of that hell hole. The only thing better than not being there is to also have the perspective of not being there, which can lead to maybe helping others behind you out... Unless you're Clarence Thomas. (He's a very special case.)

I've always said if money can't buy happiness then what's the point in having it.

Getting 99 salary increases does feel unrealistic though

Money does buy you happiness. It just has diminishing returns.

So the best way to maximize happiness is to take the money from those that have maximized its effect and give it all to the poor.

Past a certain point, money can't buy any more happiness. Sure, you have a house, but what is it worth if there's no one to share it with?

This image post could have been a text post.

I'm really pissed of this "I'm sad 'cause I'm poor. So if I had money I would be happy."

(Poverty imply sadness) does not imply (wealth imply hapiness). That's basic formal logic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraposition The Contraposition is (not sadness imply not poverty). So, If you are happy, you have money.

Expressed differently, if all the poor are sad, we can state that a happy person is not poor. But we cannot state anything about a rich person being happy or not.

Happiness is connected to contentment, feeling you have enough.
There are people living in their cars who are happy, and elon musk, with all the money in the world, very much doesn't look like a happy person.

but it surely helps a lot, i mean i dont ask to be a billionaire, just enough for place to living, and i dont have to worry about food. and maybe with a pc gaming :) and i hope i dont need to go to hospital because sickness. just die while im asleep.. just burn my body or give it to some lion. i dont care

pardon my english

Money can't buy you happiness, but it can give you the foundation and support to look for it.

*pay increase above actual inflation/bill increases.

My pay has gone up every year, but each year I end up poorer as my bills eat the extra, plus some more!

Money can't solve all your problems but it can solve most of them.

I'm very close to paying off all my student debt. You'd think I'd be happier with the extra 250 a month now going to me, but.... it's really not a life changing amount. I can afford better groceries, and can save a bit for a rainy day. Other than that, nothing much really.

Financial independence would be life changing. Not seeing a large portion of my income going to rent, but to a property that I own and can happily invest time and effort into. That would be amazing

Monet can buy "stress free lifestyle" which happiness is a byproduct

Yes. Financial independence would give ample time for me to escape abuse but alas, I'm trapped under family's false insights and paranoia.

Nobel Laureates Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton at Princeton University published a study in 2010 showing that money buys happiness only up to about $75k per year (in 2010 dollars, for Americans), at which point happiness plateaus and more money doesn't meaningfully buy more happiness.

Years later, Matthew Killingsworth at the University of Pennsylvania published a study showing that happiness didn't really plateau with money, but kept increasing at $75k and beyond.

They got together to see if they could reconcile their different findings from pretty similar methodologies.

As it turns out, Killingsworth's data did show the same plateau, at pretty much the same place, if you focus only on the least happy 20%. In a sense, the Kahneman data was focused on only measuring unhappiness, and didn't properly distinguish between people who were kinda happy, people who were moderately happy, and people who were really happy.

So now the most widely accepted analysis is that there are people who are deeply unhappy, for whom giving them more money might not make them emotionally better off, at least past $75k in 2010 dollars. But for the rest of us, the majority of people will continue getting happier with more money, well up to the $500k income.

Here's a write up of the collaboration

"Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable."

~~Clare Boothe Luce

The problems of poverty might be easier to deal with. Not discounting that. But a salary increase under capitalism does not solve the fundamental depression you feel from alienation.

Not to say I don't have it better. I do. But the emptiness is not solved by a higher wage. It only has allowed me to have the time to become more reflective and depressed by the alienation of my labor.

To have more time and freedom to reflect on the suffering of these systems that I benefit from more than others do.

The money can't buy you happiness people are rich.

There was definitely a point in my career where I was making 50k CAD/year and it was a bigger change than my previous job when I went from 40k to 45k. I'm in a HCOL area.

I was able to rent my own small 1 bedroom apartment (price has more than doubled since then 🤮), go on small little trips locally, finish paying off me debt, buy a few nice things, and actually save money.

Over the years my salary increased a lot as I retrained as a software developer, and sure, the money is nice and I can buy more nice things and save more, but the big change was at 50k when it finally felt comfortable.

If it was 50k then though, given rent increases and other cost of living increases, I'm not sure you'd get that same experience until 70-75k now though.

I just want to talk.

I made it big. Huge. Motherfucking huge. I bought and paid off my house in 2 years, was taking 5 major trips a year, had all the bullshit.

Wasn't ever a materialist and was frugal, not cheap. Tried to take the lessons of my grandfather who grew up in the depression with literally nothing, and where he taught me over many years that everything is priceless and worthless at the same time. He was 1000x the father to me than my booze-bag sperm-donator male called my "dad".

That piece of wire on the ground might save your life. It might just be another piece of shit. One day you go and buy some wire for $11 because you need it, other times you walk past $11 of free wire laying there because you have no immediate need or want for it. I was too spoiled and precious to get it. I want my meat packaged on a Styrofoam tray and there needs to be cartoons on things. No you shouldn't make me a home made metal detector out of a broken FM radio, lacquered wire and a 9V battery because then I won't be cool.

Through my life and path, I discovered no matter how much material stuff, no matter how lovely the accouterments of my life, no matter how many "freedoms" and experiences I had stemming from my financial wherewithal, there was an underlying thing at the core, the kernel of my being, that had been neglected my whole life. For I was never taught to see it and know it. I hated myself and hated my life and refused to look through the telescope to see that.

I didn't really find any of this out until I had a humiliation that provoked the beginning of my thoughts of personal transformation. I later heard Miles' Kind of Blue for the first time, by myself, in a separate bed from my pill-popping wine-guzzling wife, wearing Bluetooth headphones. I had smoked a grain of cannabis, my first return to it in about 20 years. Something touched me and I cried. One photon of light hit me somewhere and I couldn't unsee it.

I later arrested my rage-drinking, or demon-drinking as I sometimes say. When the magical fairy wand didn't dispense the fairy dust on my life and render everything into utopia, I intuited my power-drinking was a mere behavior and really had effectively nothing to do with the underlying issue. Or perhaps it did in the same sense that water in a boat isn't the issue, it's the rotted holes and splits in the hull.

I aimed myself at discovery and self-transformation and opened myself to anything from which I could take something useful and apply it to my own perspective. After getting into 5 years of heavy therapy which I pursued with vigor, something happened. I connected to that thing that I didn't know existed.

My life exploded, I effectively went insane, but not insane enough to lose sight of that photon. I lost everything because I was not able to care for myself. I ballooned to 135kg.

I had $280,000 in my chequing account at one point, 100K of random investments, and I was living in my car and eating at shelter. I was fucked.

Anyhow.

Now my shit is together. I have 1BR apartment and I will never ask or take more. I refuse. I pull things out of dumpsters, clean them, use what I can and give away the rest. I repair electronics and sell them to survive in part. My community is Harkness Station, a bus shelter in the freezing cold snowbank called Winnipeg, where people live - many suffering addiction and abandoned by humanity. These are my friends and I bring them home-cooked food, water, tea, sugar-laden 3am coffee, hygiene, relief of all sorts. My friend Alex who did 4 years hard time for an armed-robbery he set-up, spoke to me about getting sober 2 days ago. He's heard my story but I've never heard those words on his lips before.

Hear what I'm saying please.

I got an inheritance from my sperm-donors estate and gave it away. There were more than 5 zeroes digits on it.

I am moving to Zen. All of the problems in my life are my own creation.

My grandfather gave me something priceless. My new community at Harkness showed me you can live with nothing.

We put all of this together and I can say with confidence I'll live in a car (which I don't have anymore because I gave it away), eat at the "missions" and be happy as a motherfucker. Whatever bro. I'm happy inside, I can care for me, and I need nothing but basic elements of mechanical survival. edit: How silly of me. I forgot the most important thing of all, perhaps so intuitive to me it needed not be said, but I think it should be said. I also need the love of humanity and connection to community for we are all one. And where I have no community I will make one because I also need that.