The paper is at [1].
It's by no means a random sample. (That would be pretty difficult.)
I wonder what you'd have to do to find the people who say "enough is enough?" It seems they're not customers of this firm.
Why Aren’t Rich People Happy With the Money They Have?
71–80 of 358 posts
Re: Why Aren’t Rich People Happy With the Money They Have?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel disheartened that you read my entire comment and chose to focus on one number and the ineptitude of my hypothetical investment strategy instead of focusing on the overall point I was trying (and I guess failing) to make. I regret saying anything at all. For the record, thousands of Australian university students live on less than US$10K per year. You seem to think we can't exist, but we do. > No way you could…
The number says "a comfortable life". University life is not the entirety of a persons life. And these numbers are for the US anyway, where university isn't free, and that alone would cost you more than $10k/year... in fact, far more than $10k/year. I think you need to revisit this in 10 or 20 years. I think you'll have a different opinion on this number. $10k is not comfortable. That is poverty. And the question was…
Nowhere have I said that $10K per year is comfortable. I have a dentist appointment tomorrow that I don't yet know how I am going to pay for. I can't remember the last time I got a Christmas or birthday present, or the last time I went on a holiday. It sucks, but there are people worse off than me. And there are three orders of magnitude between $10K and $10M. If anyone thinks they need $10M to feel secure and comfortable, than I honestly feel sorry for them. I think that's the kind of insecurity that would be very difficult to escape. Probably even harder to escape than poverty.
Again, I apologise if my comment/s seem impolite. I am not having a great day, but I don't mean to come across as disrespectful. I understand that I live in a different world to many of the people here on HN. I also think we may be talking past each other a little bit, using different definitions of "comfortable". I think it's possible that I don't know what comfortable is supposed to feel like, at least not the way most people here seem to be using the word. To me, comfortable is just having a loaf of bread in the cupboard, a roof over my head and a healthy body. I feel like that is all I need, and that's the point I was originally trying to make.
Re: Why Aren’t Rich People Happy With the Money They Have?
#73But isn't it the well oiled marketing and advertising industry that is keeping us constantly unhappy and forcing us to compare our own (projected) shortcomings against others? My hypothesis is that wealthier people are even deeper in this trap, as once you can afford nice clothes, accessories, cars, houses etc., you are immediately exposed to others in the same (or higher) wealth bracket, thus exacerbating these feel…
It isn't the marketing and advertising industry. Greed, Pride, Lust, Envy, Gluttony - 5 of the 7 deadly sins.. Aristotle might not have reduced it to such a short list, but he wrote plenty on similar ideas. So there's 2300 years on paper...
It's really human nature.
Re: Why Aren’t Rich People Happy With the Money They Have?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. We have been conditioned to use wealth - which is neatly expressed as a 1-dimensional value - as a proxy for merit. If we are asked to do something that in abstract we would consider stupid or pointless, but is now accompanied by a large amount of money, we accept with the presumption that no one would offer so much money if it weren't very important. Money provides a very simple, neat way of valuing every i…
> we accept with the presumption that no one would offer so much money if it weren't very important That seems to be overthinking motivation. If a sponsor was offering $500k for someone to stand on a streetcorner and sing Weird Al songs most people wouldn't consider that was an important job but they'd still do it for the money. Because the money provides opportunity to buy or do things that are worthwhile. Money is…
The example I thinking of is the common counterargument to "this job/industry/company is total BS": it can't be BS, because if it was no one rational would pay someone to do it. This presupposes that everything operates in a perfectly efficient market where pay corresponds directly to utility to someone, somewhere.
The 2008 financial crash, for instance, arguably demonstrated that a lot of practices in the finance industry weren't really creating value for anyone, just deceptively pushing up the value of something worthless in order to profit from it. But if you had approached someone making $500k at Bear Sterns in 2007 and said that, it would have touched off a whole string of rationalizations that basically amount to: "I'm being paid a lot of money, so this must be useful, otherwise I wouldn't be so rich" and potentially even "if you are so smart, why aren't you making $500k?"
And it's not just finance. I've had a version of that conversation often with Googlers when I criticize the company's bizarre and inexplicably messaging strategy were they seem to deliberately blow up any semblance of a good product. Their argument is ultimately, "we get paid $200k+ to do this and you work in a power plant, how could you possibly know any better than us?"
That's what I'm trying to get at with "money as merit".
Re: Why Aren’t Rich People Happy With the Money They Have?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in the $10-30 million range you can live a comfortable life without having to worry about finances again This statement strikes me as very disconnected from the reality that the vast majority of people on this planet live in, and honestly, a little bit irritating. I'm well aware that many here on HN would be millionaires, but as somebody who grew up in poverty and is now a full-time uni student with no savings in t…
I would be very surprised if you could live worry-free with the investment proceeds of $100,000. You would have to earn 18% a year on that on average just to hit the poverty line in the US, and a more likely result would be living on 1/3rd of that. At just 6k/yr you would have food covered if you ate practically, or perhaps rent covered if you lived very modestly, but not both. Assuming that you meant something close…
> I would be very surprised if you could live worry-free with the investment proceeds of $100,000.
I think you have made the assumption that I would stop working. That might be the goal of many people, but it's not mine, and it's not how I would define being comfortable.
Aside from that, yes, I was using a fairly arbitrary number to make a point. I hadn't done the math. Which, here on HN, was probably a mistake. But for somebody who has never had more than $3K to their name, $100K in the bank still seems like a very comfortable safety net.
Re: Why Aren’t Rich People Happy With the Money They Have?
#76A while back I noticed that my HN karma was rising at a rate that would put me on the leaderboard, so I decided to make an effort to submit content and post quality comments just to see if I could crack the top 100. After a few months I did it, and kept rising up to a high of 85 (today I'm #88). Then I realized I was spending way too much time on HN, and how easy it was to fall into this trap of thinking I was doing…
In terms of machine learning money is the opposite of regularization. The more money the less regularization the more over-fitting to your specific self-chosen environment. A not rich person will have to learn to cope with obstacles. A rich person can remove obstacles. But it is impossible to remove all obstacles which will lead to increased hostility towards those remaining annoyances - like for example with SUVs in traffic. Calling a nice comfy SUV your owns means you removed obstacles like hot and cold weather (thanks to elaborate climate control), people literally look up to you in your SUV (big ego gains - less obstacles in terms of having to deal with disrespect), both due to direct in indirect conditions you won't have to deal with car problems. But when you are in traffic you'll also feel aloof and drive accordingly - like you own the street. But you cannot enforce it. End every so often there will be a conflict with a guy driving a ridiculous, old, little Toyota who won't give you way or won't let you zip into his lane. Now you are heated because this puny peasant isn't acknowledging your ego. And that's just one example.
Re: Why Aren’t Rich People Happy With the Money They Have?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we accept with the presumption that no one would offer so much money if it weren't very important That seems to be overthinking motivation. If a sponsor was offering $500k for someone to stand on a streetcorner and sing Weird Al songs most people wouldn't consider that was an important job but they'd still do it for the money. Because the money provides opportunity to buy or do things that are worthwhile. Money is…
The example I thinking of is the common counterargument to "this job/industry/company is total BS": it can't be BS, because if it was no one rational would pay someone to do it. This presupposes that everything operates in a perfectly efficient market where pay corresponds directly to utility to someone, somewhere. The 2008 financial crash, for instance, arguably demonstrated that a lot of practices in the finance in…
Not that this makes their messaging strategy any more coherent, but 200k is on the very low end of Google compensation; new grads have offers with total compensation north of that.
But they're just new grads, so obviously they can't know much, right?
Re: Why Aren’t Rich People Happy With the Money They Have?
#78I’m immediately reminded of the denouement of “This is Water”: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PhhC_N6Bm_s . It’s become/ perhaps always has been a little trite or on the nose, but it’s also not wrong. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will…
I don’t see how the advocacy for self-destructively putting everyone else on a pedestal and serving them first and yourself last follows from the rest of the quote.
Re: Why Aren’t Rich People Happy With the Money They Have?
#79There was a well written comment on Reddit a few years back about how your life changes at different levels of wealth: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_i... The main gist was that in the $10-30 million range you can live a comfortable life without having to worry about finances again. In the $30-100 million range you can start doing "rich people" things like have a private jet (though this m…
You're fucking crazy. $1m is enough.
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
Re: Why Aren’t Rich People Happy With the Money They Have?
#80A while back I noticed that my HN karma was rising at a rate that would put me on the leaderboard, so I decided to make an effort to submit content and post quality comments just to see if I could crack the top 100. After a few months I did it, and kept rising up to a high of 85 (today I'm #88). Then I realized I was spending way too much time on HN, and how easy it was to fall into this trap of thinking I was doing…
This might sound odd, but there is some real health benefits in perceiving oneself as having high social status. A few of those are better immune system, successful aging, lower stress hormones, lower risk for illness and depression, faster recovery, and just general higher energy and confidence. It can have a very strong positive effect on ones social network. It is a very powerful and deeply biological aspect of life.
Looking at research and listening to experts in this fields, it is really fascinating how anything can be made into a value system for social status. Not only that but we can participate simultaneously in multiple social circles with completely different value systems, and as one researcher put it, we tend to channel most of our self worth based on the system where we are ranked highest.
Strangely, money seems like one of the hardest method but also one of the most effective method to achieve this.