In mathematical terms money might not be sufficient to make you happy, but it's a necessary condition indeed.
Musk certainly doesn’t seem to be a poster child for eudaimonia, being allegedly addicted to drugs.
Have a nice ceremony and present a medal for winning capitalism.
One million dollars and not a penny more. Enough for most people to live comfortably, but not enough to buy governments, or for the upper classes to never need to work again to maintain their lifestyle and privilege.
No human being needs or deserves a hundred million dollars.
But the point is kind of to eliminate the upper classes and scale the economy back into the reach of most people. So there would be no FAANG salaries. The cost of everything (healthcare, education, housing) would go down. It would place a hard limit on political influence that isn't too far out of reach of current Congressional salaries and would probably limit pork barrel politics and insider trading as well. It would end inherited wealth and maybe even limit the length of copyright.
That's an admittedly naive and utopian view and I'll admit there are bound to be complexities and externalities I'm not taking into account because I'm not an economist. But it's either that or we seize the means of production and put the rich to the guillotines until the sewers choke on their blood. And then something something luxury space communism.
Some of his friends are disappointed in him because he works as a dev in a huge company and now "sits on his millions".
They seem to think it's better to be a king in the Middle Ages than just a regular rich person in modern society. They forget that the lives of kings in the Middle Ages were absolutely terrible.
The wealthiest group of people (on the whole) is the 70-95th percentile.
If we were to have the toppling of "the rich" that brought about meaningful change to the "poor", it would necessarily include the toppling of the ~$200k income households.
The labor classes only need to be maintained like machines or draft animals, kept just alive and well enough to afford the rent on their lives so they can continue to create value.
The collective reactions to this aren't mental illness, they're trauma responses. Capitalism is accelerating towards its final form and the shock is giving people PTSD.
A group of people are trudging through the desert with limited water arduously pumped from scattered wells. Do you ration water such that everyone gets equal amounts or such that those sweating the most get the most.
Solve this dilemma accounting for the fractal parameters that go into it, and you'll have a utopia.
This whole "should we ration so everybody gets some" is complete BS. There is an abundance of resources that are concentrated to a few and the rest made to suffer. We don't have to ration, we have to prevent the greedy from hogging it all. It's quite the opposite.
A person in a society has a right to the minimum of essential ordinary resources (food, shelter, clothing) to function as a general matter. (We have a right to pursue other goods, and in some cases a right to them once had, but we cannot say we have a right to them per se and before the fact. We have to be careful to distinguish between the two, as undisciplined and entitled people consumed by appetite tend to be unprincipled and like to inflate the list of “essentials” in self-serving ways. There’s certainly a pathology of envy at work as well, and we should in no way naturalize envy.)
In a situation of scarcity where there isn’t enough for everyone (which does not apply to the developed world), there is no solution that could satisfy that right universally. There is therefore no injustice committed when such basic resources are not distributed accordingly. Whoever gets their share gets it; whoever doesn’t simply doesn’t. You would expect competition here. Now, you could be charitable and self-sacrificial and give up your own share for another, but you have no such obligation to do so, and thus no one has the right to your share. Such charity would be an extraordinary act that transcends mere justice. It is entirely voluntary, even if heroic.
> and you'll have a utopia
Well no, you wouldn’t. This is the fallacy of consumerism and homo economicus. Even if everyone were rich, you would still have plenty of misery. The idea that human well-being is rooted in mere consumption - full stop - is at the root of so many ills. There is no well-being without virtue.
Progressive tax on income
Progressive wealth tax
Universal basic income
Universal healthcare
Housing as a human right
Done
Instead of trudging through the desert, or escaping a sinking ship, or surviving in a dog eat dog jungle, I prefer to compare modern society with a large boarding house, where every one has to cooperate a bit to make it work reasonably well.
A poltical philosopher from the XXth century once wrote: "At the end of the day, all we are trying to achieve is a basic level of decency, for which all that's required from citizens is the simple politeness commonly found in any boarding house."
Maybe it's not an optimization problem?
If you truly wanted data, you could so easily Google (as I did), and find the below sources that back up the comment you're responding to. There are myriad papers and sources.
But I think your comment doesn't seek insight so much as it seeks to discredit and dismiss... in, frankly, a pretty lazy attempt. If you're going to be dismissive, put some effort in, man! ;)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10710064/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5976254/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5137920/
https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/02/11/chronic-stress-predispo...
Life is fucking easy. One push ordering for almost anything. Cushy houses with hvac.
We make life hard by buying into the narrative that it's hard and we're all helpless. This cheats us out of our development and ability to handle real conflict.
This easy life you describe requires mountains of people to support it, who themselves are mostly being crushed by it.
Also a lot of low-paying jobs are customer service in some way. Smiling is sort of a prerequisite for getting paid.
Like for anything in life, it depends on the market you're in, and where you are situated on the acumen distribution (low acumen drivers don't make a lot, while high acumen ones do). Narrative thinking likes cherry picking the worst cases and then representing those stories as normal. But reality is always a bit more complicated.
Many Lyft drivers are immigrants, either between jobs, or are doing it full time. I don't directly ask them how much they make, but I tell them in my homeland of Canada, if you're on welfare and disability, you make CAD$x and it's good enough money for a single person. Most Lyft drivers are like: "that's way, way less than what I make doing this." (some tell me they make US$3-4k/month, working 6 day weeks. This might sound like too little, but realize that not all COL is the same, and for an immigrant, this is a great gig with optionality -- you can always turn off the app).
Then you might say, oh, they're blind to the depreciation hit their cars are taking. But good, high acumen, Lyft drivers often drive second-hand Priuses which depreciate slowly and have great mileage, and they track expenses like a hawk. If you go to the Lyft subreddit, good drivers know all the tricks -- optimize for high yield windows, avoid dead miles, avoid blind quests, and the cap hours deliberately. It's the ones with less acumen that drive a new car with low MPG on financing, and don't optimize.
So don't generalize and catastrophize (catastrophizing amplifies depression -- in cognitive behavioral therapy, they teach you to guard against that). Just stop it. Everything in life is a distribution.
I'm not saying driving a Lyft is aspirational, but for some immigrants who are doing it to support their family, it's a less-bad option than many others.
I even had a few drivers pushing me to get married (I'm single) because they said, once they get home from a day of driving, they get to go back to family. "It's less lonely," they tell me. In some ways they're happier than I am, even though I make nominally more than them.
Has this approach of ordering people to feel or think a certain way ever actually worked for you? Do you think this is a good way to have a respectful discussion with someone?
> some tell me they make US$3-4k/month
So let's run with that number, say 3.5k/month average. That's $42,000/year: They're independent contractors, so they have independent employment tax which is about 2x of standard w-2 taxes. A quick online calculator tells me that would amount to 8,370.90 in my state. The lions share is federal medicare and social security tax though; state tax on this is practically nothing here.
* They must have a car. Quick search says a 2024 prius is around $25k. Monthly payments at 9.6% (prime rate for a used car, all new immigrants start out with perfect credit, right?) at 60 months is around $550. Let's say insurance is $100. Ignore fuel and maintenance for now.
* So now we have 2800/month after taxes and 650/month just to work. The remaining 2150 needs to cover everything else. Food, housing, utilities.
* This doesn't even consider health insurance. Let's hope they qualify for a subsidized plan, because they sure can't cover it on this income. I guess they have the "don't get sick" plan that's so popular these days.
Oh and all this for working 6 days a week. Which if that's the case they're not clocking 8 hours days. Even conservatively you should assume that's 10 hours a day.
And on top of all that you said they're supporting a family?! So 3 or 4 people on 2150/month?
All that so they can work 60 hour weeks, barely see their wife and kids, and be one accident or medical emergency away from total financial ruin.
But you're right, they're rich in spirit and after all, isn't that what really matters? They really do have it so much better than you.
Imagine how much worse it is for people who don’t make as much as I do.
Yet “mental illness is the only rational response.”
Happiness = Reality − Expectations
Most of material Reality is fine. The part of Reality that’s broken is spiritual/emotional. The expectations causing unhappiness aren’t for more money or stuff, they’re subconscious, millions of years deep, baked into the species of tribe, offspring, transcendence, cosmic order.
Leftism spent half a century screaming that those instincts are bigotry, that family is oppression, that religion is a mental illness, that wanting roots or rituals or a legacy is fascism.
You can’t propagandize the human soul out of its own operating system. The subconscious still demands what it demanded in 200,000 BC. We just demolished every institution that used to answer the call and replaced them with therapy, porn, and corporate pride slogans.
That’s the real insanity. Not climate change or late-stage capitalism. The soul shows up for duty and the building’s condemned.
Averages are just that - averages. They say nothing about any given individual’s experience. And probabilities aren’t assurances of a particular outcome. Just because the average person is more likely to face obesity than starvation doesn’t mean that there aren’t millions of people facing starvation in the world. Your argument is based on an incorrect use of statistics.
The bottom decile in all western countries has a objectively better material conditions yet I don’t dispute they may feel less “Happiness” which the formula explains and if you drill into the components of Reality which are causing the unhappiness and it’s absolutely non-material as I explained.
Folks say just get on food stamps or medicaid, but it's not that simple. At that level of destitution you may not have a phone, an address, basic ID/documentation, or even a means of getting to the office to apply. Means-testing makes the process so drawn-out and convoluted, that many folks (including myself) don't even bother, because there are more immediate things to worry about (once again speaking from experience).
After years of destitution, I finally managed to make a bit more than twice the FPL and I was still struggling (but significantly better off). Just recently I lost that job for reasons outside my control and after my unemployment runs out I'm back where I started. Everyone I know has a similar story. Any data that says that poverty is decreasing in the US is detached from reality.
It's easier (read: cheaper) for the broken NHS and cash strapped government to shovel pills than it is to get someone to revamp their life.
Imagine the alternative cost of talking therapies for the NHS. There are three year waiting lists for them already.
Depression usually occurs for a causal reason, it just may not have been found for the individual yet. It could be poor diet, lack of exercise, excessive escapism as a response to unprocessed trauma etc. Ultimately though these causes require the patient to exert effort toward improving their life, and so they have to have willpower and motivation.
Thankfully exercise can now be prescribed by doctors in the UK!
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/aug/22/gps-to-presc...
Part of the problem is the medical system doesn’t have great language around this, I think in America in order for insurance to pay for therapy there has to be diagnosis. My therapists solution to that was to provide a diagnosis but we didn’t really lean into it, he just explained that’s the process.
But the language around diagnosis unfortunately has implicitly power. We probably should talk about mental illness much less that way.
I’m plenty capable of policing my own moral failings thank you very much.
We ban accounts that post like this, and we've asked you more than once before, so that's not good. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd be grateful.
The parent says that they themselves had reservations about having a diagnosis associated with whatever problem they had. I merely pointed out the negative side of the coin ("wasted money") if over diagnosis is the case here (which considering the recent threads on the topic and author's own previous doubt seemed probable to me). I mentioned the author ("you") as the responsible party, because that's what needs to be considered. Otherwise it is easy to defer blame to "the system" and absolve oneselfs from personal responsibility.
More importantly, though, is a spirit-of-the-law place, not a letter-of-the-law place, so if you're asking for specific rule citations about a comment which obviously was not in the intended spirit of the site, we're already off track a bit.