Why Aren’t Rich People Happy With the Money They Have?

I had no money in Uni. My parents were boat people with no money either.

Not long after Uni, I had 100K in my account. Comfy, no mansion, no car.

The first thing I spent more than a couple of grand on ever was dental work. Felt great to fix the crossbite.

But here's the thing. You could just be alone your whole life, no wife, no kids. I've got friend who do that, and indeed they can live on near minimum wage and be perfectly happy.

Once you decide you want a wife and kids, the budget changes. By a lot. You'll need a bigger place to live. You'll want to send the kids to private school. You'll need a bigger car.

This can easily add up to several million depending on exactly what you mean.

For the record I did go on to buy an expensive sports car. Not worth it, surprise surprise.

Studying. I learn (not skim or read but study like I did in uni) new things all the time for the past 30 years and it does not get boring while it costs very little to do so (I do not need diplomas or certificates but I am hard on myself and I do do exams if I can find them like it is real).

I understand how ridiculous this may sound. There’s a presupposition of access to capital / employment. A large chunk of the world doesn’t have access to that, to no fault of their own. But don’t discount yourself that quickly — a non-trivial amount of people have created and captured an insane amount of value. It doesn’t seem entirely fair, and to be honest, sometimes it isn’t.

Re: $100k, completely sane and reasonable expenses add up quickly. You’ll be surprised what costs rear their heads as you have more liquidity. You’re better off being broke while you’re in University and, once you’ve finished, learning the ropes and demanding compensation for your productive hours. You can calibrate your income against researched market rates / cohorts of friends if you’d like to optimize, and nobody will fault you for it — in fact, it’s expected.

You’ll figure this all out but for now it doesn’t matter: everybody here is giving you sound advice (based on pre-assumption of: University-educated individual), you just can’t see past the iron wall of academia yet. It’s a much bigger world than you can imagine, with a lot of opportunity to generate wealth if that’s what you’re interested in. (It doesn’t have to be, but some sort of optimization in this direction is helpful for general contentment given your pre-supposed opportunities: not everybody gets to attend college.)

Has to do with society functioning as a genetic algorithm: look into a-life like the work of Danny Hillis. You don't make gains when one 'solution' dominates over all others, that's called a plateau. Currently we're at a very low plateau where meddling with finance instruments or collecting rents of various kinds is the only effective way to wealth, and where most innovation will just get you broke and out of the game, because the risk of failing is far too severe.

In history we've had far better conditions for innovation (for instance, the dawn of personal computers) when people were generally more well-off but the disparity between extremes (Gini) was far smaller. This wasn't true for all populations, but I mean the populations that supported technological innovation.

You have to have whole thriving populations of individuals with bits of the eventual answer, including bits that aren't in themselves self-sufficient, in order for crossover and inter-pollination to give you new heights of innovation. Part of that is challenging (disrupting) existing 'best answers', something that's already in the DNA of silicon valley. Right now the best answer is just to get wealthy by any means necessary, preferably by collecting rents and bringing nothing to the table (to work or develop new things would be redirecting energy that can be used to just collect rent and extort money out of the system: it's disadvantageous to make anything new or better when you can engineer the existing system to your benefit)

There is no way Gini inequality helps innovation at all. Innovation has to do with populations of actors that are all reasonably capable of addressing a problem, not seeking a single optimal individual who will do all your innovating for you. Our incentives are literally backwards.