Many people I have talked with about happiness are really talking about non-anxiety. Basically defining being 'happy' as having zero anxiety and being 'un-happy' as worrying about (anxious) one or more things.

In that model not having debt relieves future obligation anxiety, owning a house addresses 'where will I live' anxiety, savings address 'what if something comes up' anxiety etc.

If that model held true for the survey participants then once you had enough income to offset your anxieties you would not get any more 'happy'.

Raise the baseline too high and you may never reach it, and never be happy, despite having a good life. Is that what you want?

Because it can be. Because we’re the richest country in the world and yet for some reason we force people into bankruptcy because they didn’t have health insurance on the day they had a medical emergency.

I want:

1. People not to have to worry about seeing a doctor because they can’t afford it.

2. People not to have to worry about having shelter.

3. People not to have to worry about where their next meal will come from.

4. People to be able to provide a solid, basic, decent life for themselves and their families.

5. People to be able receive an education without it being onerously expensive.

Among other things.

I don’t think these are intractable problems for a civilization that sent people to the moon, perform open heart surgery, and deliver energy consistently and safely to millions of people.

If you're always questioning if you're happy enough, you'll never truly reach happiness.

So one obtains shelter, and healthcare, and an education, and all those things you listed. And they're still not happy? If cake is the baseline, is more icing going to make that much better?

I have observed that people who reach that state aren't looking for "more money" so much as they are looking for something that is more fulfilling for them personally. And the article observes that as well.

Are you? When I just Googled "richest country in the world", not a single result placed the US in #1.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if the median salary in the US was higher than the median salary in Luxembourg/Ireland/Singapore/Brunei/oil-rich-middle-east. Along with a lower tax burden resulting in higher net pay.

This sums up pretty much.

It is not the Money ($) i need. But what I think is rather basic things to live.

A place called Home. It doesn't have to be free, it could be even be rented that I dont own it. But it should be affordable, without being anxious about Landlord kicking you out, or hike the rent to a ridiculous level so you cant continue to live. It shouldn't take your entire working life, 25 - 30 years of continuously working and giving 40% of your salary, what if you are sick in between this 30 years? What if you were fired? This whole living burden is what causes people anxious, and hence do not risk into taking another higher paid job and move up the ladder. The stagnation of wages.

I dont need a house, just a small flat, 150 Square Feet will do, with an open kitchen and a small toilet and shower. The whole flat is probably the size of many Americans's houses bath room. Hopefully along with Water pipes that doesn't include heavy metal like lead poisoning, hot water system that could shower longer then 3 min in Winter. Is that too much to ask for? I am not calling for free housing, but one that is affordable.

Food is Cheap, I used to live in UK with less then 1.5 pound budget per day. Good Quality clothes are actually not expensive in terms of production cost, most are rent, labour and marketing. And Medical is affordable if you have insurance.

So Food, Medical and Clothes are actually easily affordable in most developed countries. ( Name be one place that it isn't ) As long as you have a job. Any job in fact, even labour intensive job or lower end jobs could easily afford all of these.

So out of all the basic needs in Maslow thoery, shelter is the most expensive, most unaffordable, and also most anti competitive. But all government are very happy with that, as it is basically modern slavery.

The next level above financial independence is financial freedom (you can just get whatever you want, from shoes to houses) - off the top of my head I would guess this is probably around the 0.01%, which would be about 32k people in the USA. As an example of freedom, these people can buy nationality and avoid immigration limitations (going rate is ~$1-5m).

The article is way off just comparing salaries. There are 3 social classes in terms of having a meaningful lifestyle distinction - those who have to work for someone else, those who don't, and those who have full freedom to decide where they go and what they do each day. All they did was compare a bunch of people in the same social class (somewhat shockingly the Romans considered this equivalent to a slave class).

J suspect that ceteris paribus, being frugal reduces happiness - by definition, it's not getting things you want to get.

Once you can afford something that was way out of reach before, you buy it and after the first few moments you realize it is not as great as you expected. Do this a few times, and you'll learn what is important. The more wealthy people I know do have a slightly above average car and house, but IME the biggest difference is that they have far more extreme - both in amount and in price - experiences, i.e. weekend trips, fine wining and dining etc.

Higher earners tend to just upgrade and spend more (apartment, clothes, restaurants, hotels etc), and aren't really living that differently - that lifestyle can certainly soak up maximum income achievable in a salaried job.

I think this is what the article inadvertently pointed to, that the higher salaries could lead to a sense of frustration that nothing really changed.

If you no longer have to work, and you choose not to work because your current job isn't ideal, it can be hard to get the motivation to search for a new job. At the same time, without work, it can be hard to find purpose.

So you might be stuck in a situation where you aren't working and struggling to find meaning.

If you have financial independence, you have the choice to work or not, and if you do work, to do whatever work you find most meaningful.

Without financial independence, you have no choice but to work, and for the vast majority of people without financial independence there isn't much choice of what kind of work to do either.

There are plenty of financial reasons, but isn't that what we're talking about? If you have enough money that you don't have to work for the rest of your life, you probably have enough money that you can spend your time on whatever act of creation you find fulfilling.

That's just as common in many other non-Western cultures, such as Japan, South Korea, China. All three are materialistic and work-centric. Japan has extreme work identity, South Korea is barely a notch lower than Japan on that. Both put the US - and the entire West - to shame on work-centric life (for better or worse depending on your views on such things). China today is one of the greatest materialistic work cultures that has ever existed. You see it in all of China's markets and businesses today, and the move from rural to urban to seek greater materialism and elevated work identity. It's an intense fever there, eg:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/china-plans-bu...

Purpose without existential risk of failure is not usually perceived as genuine.

If you have enough money and only put a fraction of it to use, you might create things, but you're never really risking anything. I'd wager more people join the military for purpose than the local paintball team, not despite but because the former really puts your life at risk.

Says who? That may be associated with lutheran ethics of hard work, but doesn't look like an universal nor an essential requirement. Was Mother Theresa devoid of purpose because there's no way she could fail at taking care of people?

That's certainly the line that society wants people to believe. A lot of people want a job that gives them a sense of purpose, but I'd be surprised if as much as 2% of the workforce think their job gives them a sense of purpose right now. I think we're just lucky that the majority of people don't question whether or not their job is ultimately necessary, and choose not to bother when they realise it's a waste of time.

One of them was the president of an insurance company and he was ousted in a Machiavellian political maneuver, because he fully expected to hold that position until his health failed him or he died at the post.

You can see it in the current crop of 80-year old politicians in my country. One of them wants to go up for re-election and he would be in power until he was 90 years old...

Volunteering and creative experimentation fills that gap just fine.

No, it's before tax income.

Income Variables. Participants were asked to report monthly household income rather than yearly income to facilitate responding. Respondents were asked the question, “What is your total monthly household income in [local currency], before taxes? Please include income from wages and salaries, remittances from family members living elsewhere, farming, and all other sources.” Households were defined as a person’s home that had its own cooking facilities, which could have been anything ranging from a one-room flat to a single house.

From the study's supplementary information: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...

Dollars are also represented as International Dollars, which are adjusted for the local purchasing power, expressed in units equivalent to one USD in the US.

I'm my parents' last child and am soon to graduate Grad school and enter 'the working world'. I can definitely feel their relief in knowing decades of parental sacrifices and obligations have paid off and finally come to an end.

Savour that pride and relief -- you've earned it.

Cooking, cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, driving to places, filling out tax returns, shopping for clothes or household goods....

Fully automated solutions for any of the above either do not exist or are prohibitively expensive.

The alternatives are not prohibitively expensive, on the contrary. You have restaurants, apartments, parks and public transport as alternatives.

It seems to me that quite some people here want to get rich to afford hiring people to manage things that they don't actually want to own. That's why I think more money doesn't make you more happy, as happiness comes from the sense of accomplishment, not from being able to command an army of workers to work on things you don't care about.

That's often due to them actually wanting those things but not for themselves but for showing them off as status markers.

I'd still hate the tax returns, but others like cooking and mowing I enjoy when I'm free of time constraints.

Robots are miserably bad at this, so far.

Some kind of organization is ideal, because I often live out of the clean laundry hamper and it's a chore to hunt for stuff every time you need clothes.

With a human you never have to worry about software upgrades, charging batteries, or wake up in a cold sweat in fear of your hired help violating Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics.

Well, that could mean that robots may too violate the laws of robotics!

I open a car factory. It is fully automated.

See?

Besides, the original question is totally boring if you allow human automation. Of course I can hire someone to do labour. No one needs that explained to them.