Comment by Liftyee
17 hours ago
True. Money is just an instrumental goal. I was thinking about how some have 1000x more money but not 1000x more happiness. Enjoyment doesn't scale.
17 hours ago
True. Money is just an instrumental goal. I was thinking about how some have 1000x more money but not 1000x more happiness. Enjoyment doesn't scale.
Yes money helps you achieve the goals on Brad’s list.
It is a luxury to not have to worry about having enough of it.
As other comments already stated and have stated, money should never be the goal, it's the middle. Having money allows you to not worry about some of those topics, or having more time for them. If you don't have more it means you must worry about that. Having money means you don't: you don't have to worry about rent, health insurance, paying for experiences, food, etc. It's true, you don't need that much money, but still.
Goodhart's Law in operation.
It just doesn't scale linearly. There's substantial evidence that happiness scales logarithmically with income.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-pritchard-on-liberal...
I don't know, self-reported happiness seems like an awfully unreliable metric. For one, I've noticed that projecting unhappiness is much more of a faux pas in rich circles. On its own this could account for much of this relationship.
It depends on your current situation. For some, 1.5Xing your money can add 100x happiness
Past being a millionaire or so, making money is a clicker game. It's something you do just for the fun of seeing number go up. And just like a clicker game, past a certain point you're no longer making the money through your own efforts, but by acquiring assets that can make the money for you (like buying the grandmas that bake cookies for you, etc.), so the game becomes determining the right mix of assets that let you acquire more, that you can then plow into more assets for even bigger growth.
The super rich aren't making more money because they think more money will buy them correspondingly more happiness. It's a game to them played at massive real-world scales.
> acquiring assets that can make the money for you
Any ideas beyond real estate?
Index funds.
Businesses
Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, is on the record saying he is 'not often happy.' Somehow I doubt he'd give up half his wealth to double his happiness, though that's just a guess based on his other obvious character flaws ;)
Sometimes I wonder if he would be willing to give up half of his wealth to make everybody as unhappy as himself.
Well, considering the SpaceX IPO, I think that him giving up the majority of his wealth early on to make SpaceX employees hilariously rich worked out well for them
My favorite book about this is "The Happiness Trap," because it makes the simple point that we didn't evolve to be happy all of the time. It makes a really good case for learning to live with the range of emotions and suggests ways of creating a contented/good/whatever life with what you've got.
He should get off Twitter, that place can make you miserable.