I wonder if the "money can't buy you happiness" people ever lived in a car.
I wonder if the "money can't buy you happiness" people ever lived in a car.
but what is it worth if there’s no one to share it with?
You can pay people for that.
That is because money can’t buy happiness.
A lack of money can cause unhappiness though.
I’m all but certain the whole “money can’t buy happiness” shtick is just classist propaganda to keep the peasants poor by trying to build some kind of weird pride in staying poor.
Money can buy freedom, and while freedom doesn’t guarantee happiness, it’s a pretty fucking important ingredient.
If people have not experienced hard ship and they are still unhappy, they are qualified to tell you that the lack of economic problems does not bring happiness.
Just by pure logic.
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
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.
Yeah, life always seems to throw expensive problems at people all at the same time. I thought I had a pretty good nest egg saved up, and then boom… Car shit the bed, cat needed surgery, wife had a hospital stay, and a few other big life events. All while the economy is in the garbage, inflation is in the high double digits, (due to the aforementioned hospital stay) the wife is out of work, and any hope of a social safety net was being dismantled right in front of me.
I didn’t even consciously realize how stressed I was about money, until I realized I had fallen back to pirating my PC games instead of just buying them. I hadn’t been a prolific pirate since my broke college student days… And then suddenly there I was again, browsing FG’s site for the latest repack, so I could install it in between shifts.
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
A few years ago I was stealing water from a construction site so my partner and I could flush the toilet. Parked in a development lot in the middle of the night, watching for security guards while I filled a bunch of plastic organizer bins in the back of a van.
We were several years into a total financial crashout from a combination of major health problems, deaths in the family, and a floundering job market. Things are better now, but I can say at least that I know now what it feels like to lose everything and claw your way back out of the hole. I don’t recommend it, it sucks.
Our nation doesn’t want you to succeed. Remember that. In order for the wealthy to stay wealthy, there has to be a class of people who have less or nothing so that money retains value. We’re the richest fucking nation that’s ever existed, many times over, so if we really wanted we could end poverty, we could end hunger and disease and make a glorious world where everyone is comfortable and able to aim for their own dreams without risk of losing everything and having to steal water to flush the fucking the toilet.
Yes you name important reasons, also migration both legal and illegal. Legal migration also from within Europe, for example there are quite a lot of Polish homeless people here. Often they came here to work, but they lost their job and the housing that was part of the job, and they stick around for a while, thinking to turn things round, but things get worse when they start drinking. Often their best chance is to go back to Poland, because there they social security rights, which they don’t have here. But they feel shame to go back and face their defeat. It’s heartbreaking sometmes, not very proud of how my country treats foreign workers…
There are many schizophrenic homeless people, but people with bad tempers that get themselves into fights all the time. I Often
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.
I’ve also heard that this advice really only scales until you hit the cost of living price for your area, which supports your idea.
Its not necessarily “money won’t make you happier”, it’s more “poverty makes you sadder”
The part that really sucks is you don’t get to really understand this until you’re in your 30s/40s. We spend all this time trying to fill a hole in ourselves that can’t be filled with stuff.
There are people reading this right now who are like “yeah, right”…
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 have 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.
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.
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 bullionaires… assets, of course.