You can buy a bigger and bigger house car tv stereo whatever, but it will not make you happy.
Well that seems like an assumption! Plenty of people are happier with nicer things. I don't think we need to tell people what should make them happy.
Happiness is unsustainable. However, contentment is an attainable goal.
So no, not only 6 weeks
You are now unable to get joy from a TV smaller than the largest one you've ever bought. Many people are unable to get joy from a car costing under 10k, let alone 2k.
The things you own end up owning you.
You seem very sure about what does and doesn't make other people happy!
n=1. For the general population:
Are they truly happier, in the sense of being more content? Or are they just deriving more temporary pleasure from the hedonic treadmill they're on?
You can probably tell which one it is, by how long their happiness with their house / car / TV / fill-in-the-blank lasts, before they start thinking about trading up to an even nicer fill-in-the-blank.
Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard wrote a great book on happiness, here's an excerpt I enjoy which talks about the difference between pleasure and happiness, in two parts. [1] [2]
1. https://www.matthieuricard.org/en/pleasure-and-happiness-the...
2. https://www.matthieuricard.org/en/pleasure-and-happiness-the...
It's not a bout moralizing but recognizing how the reward centres of the human brain work:
> The data showed the happiness gap between wealthy and middle-income participants was wider than between middle- and low-income participants.
And the apparent reason:
> He said: “A greater feeling of control over life can explain about 75% of the association between money and happiness. So I think a big part of what’s happening is that, when people have more money, they have more control over their lives. More freedom to live the life they want to live.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/18/mone...
There’s many other research that corroborates this view. After some point increasing income didn’t increase life satisfaction. Usually somewhere in the low upper-middle class region.
That's the common assumption that this research repudiates.
> These findings are counter to a widely covered 2010 study that found happiness rises with income, but plateaus at around $75,000.
He studied much richer people:
> Killingsworth also used data from the ultra-wealthy (people with a median net worth between $3m and $7.9m), which is often lacking and difficult to obtain.
> The data showed the happiness gap between wealthy and middle-income participants was wider than between middle- and low-income participants.
> His study also found wealthy individuals were “substantially and statistically significantly happier than people earning over $500,000 each year”.
The biggest thing anyone can do in their life is figure out exactly what makes them happy, and spend their money there. Don't let society tell you. People on this site likely care about computers and spend a disproportionate amount of their money on them, and that's ok. I don't care about cars or TVs, but I care about experiences and comfort so will spend money on travel and upgraded plane tickets.
I also care about agency, so tend to save money rather than spend. I want the freedom it provides more than what it can buy - typically.
Maybe if the basic needs on the average person were taken care of then random displays of extravagant wealth would be acceptable. But when something as simple as getting a rotten tooth extracted or a filling on a front tooth is too much "luxury" for many working class citizens, it is a complete misallocation of society's resources.
Before you go on about how saying it's "good" or "not good" is a value judgement that I'm not entitled to make -- you're damn right it is, and I'll do what I want.
They are happier… for a limited time and then want 'more':
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
'Upgrading' things can lead down a road where problems arise:
I didn't grow up here—my wife did. Very early on, when I first visited Omaha, she drove me by his place. After three decades or so in California, I retired and we moved back to her hometown. Buffett is still there.
Speak for yourself. There are a lot of aspects to being happy, and having to not want for things certainly helps.
> But you can do that without any money.
Well...
Material things can contribute to happiness, or detract.
Balancing the things we spend our life on, relative to an understanding of what makes us happy, is going to be an idiosyncratic exercise. Assuming that X won't contribute to the happiness of person Y is some deep projection.
There seem to be many kinds of happiness too. Would I remain happy if I lost my house? Yes. I have gone through enough ups and downs to know that. But would I feel as fulfilled? No. I have gone through enough ups and downs to know that.
There are a lot of aspects to being happy, and having to not want for things certainly helps.
I would give you a better answer here but it appears you thought misquoting the conversation was clever so I'll simply leave you corrected.
I even experience this with food. If I am on a strict diet for 2 weeks and then have a "cheat" meal, a previously normal meal feels like a satisfying feast.
If I splurge on food for 2 weeks, even 3/4th a pizza doesn't satisfy. I just want the other 1/4th.
It is really why we have so much wealth as a society but so much discontent. It is like believing there is some amount of alcohol that would satisfy the alcoholic. It just grows the desire for more while contentment is harder and harder to achieve.
I am pretty sure this is just a property of the dopaminergic system.
If a bigger house makes you happy because you have space for your hobbies and you don't need to fight with your family members for space, buy a bigger house.
The whole "money doesn't bring happiness" thing is bullshit unless you are a Buddha.
A mansion in Malibu isn't going to make me happy, because I wouldn't know what the hell to do in Malibu. An upgrade from a 2-bedroom to a 4-bedroom home with a garage so I don't have to smell laser cutter fumes anymore and hack a ventilation system out a bedroom window? That very well might.
As someone who upgraded from a 2 bedroom flat to a 3 bedroom house with a garage, I concur. Having a place to store my bikes and other “dirty” tools that’s not inside was such an improvement to my quality of life that I tell people to always look for a half decent garage when they buy. Especially if they also like cycling!
Happiness is binary. You're either happy with where you are or where you're heading or you're not.
It sounds to me like you haven’t rode a bike in a long time. I recommend you try it and get back to me.
When I got my first bike as a kid, a cheap "mountain bike" with 24" wheels that probably weighed more than my current road bike, I was at maximum happiness. I was not at only 40% happiness because it didn't have a carbon frame or a Di2 groupset from the future. I was at 100.
Later when I got my first road bike I was at 100% happiness again. But nothing can make me happier than I was with that first, heavy bicycle-shaped object. It might equal it but it's impossible to surpass.
Hard disagree here.
Ask a 4 person family stuffed into a one bedroom condo if buying a larger 3 bedroom home would make them happier, I'd imagine to 99.99999% of them the answer is yes.
I upgraded my road bike 2 years ago from an entry level one to a nice racing bike and each weekend I ride a 100km route, that sure as heck makes me happier than riding the old slower and heavier bike.
We just took our extended family on a vacation for a week. Money sure as heck made us happier in that instance.
It is true that cash can't fix all issues in life but any one who says money can't make you happy is either lying or doesn't have money.
Run a simple thought experiment in your head. If you woke up tomorrow under crushing credit card and medical debt and it was suddenly paid off, would that make you happier?
Its probably worth noting that I mean "enough" in the context of consumption and physical goods. "Enough" wealth doesn't really matter, its only a number in a database or a piece of paper until you spend it.
So what was the point of him living a frugal, simple lifestyle? I would argue that its just something he was used to and found joy in, and thats ok. Some people like that. Others might want to use their money to unlock new experiences that come with it. Thats ok too.
Does this ultimately come down to Taste?
It is hard to judge what is enough. While a Civic is a perfectly good car, it certainly isn't the safest, nor does it have the best riding experience. Once you get into attention to details, what is "enough" often means mediocre.
I want "good enough" from a crazy perfectionist. Like Steve Jobs' Apple.
That said, I do, like Buffet, live in a nice house. I’m not depriving myself. But it’s also very approachable by any successful employee of a company (maybe salary of a director or VP of any large company could afford it). It doesn’t represent what I could afford if I wanted to really get into the elite neighborhoods of my city. I don’t really enjoy people in those areas. They tend to always talk about money in one way or another (vacations, private schools, cars, houses, maids, nanny’s, etc). Nothing wrong with it I suppose, just not my jam and not how I want my children raised and not the people I want as my neighbors and peers. I’ve always been much more envious of those unsuspecting rich people that drive clunker cars or live in modest homes and mow their own lawns but then you find out they paid for 16 grand children to go to college or something random like that. That’s the kind of thing I’d rather be known for than the guy with the Ferrari or yacht (even if they weren’t mutually exclusive).
> I don’t want other people seeing me as flaunting wealth
Lmao.
Edit: I rarely do this with HN but I'm getting troll vibes from you and so I clicked on your comment history where you lay out your unfortunate financial situation in a comment ("I have 500€ in my bank account, 3k debt and 30 years of work left ahead of me") and it all makes sense that you are just resentful or jealous. My only constructive advise is you should try not to have this attitude on HN, there are plenty of wealthy or good-to-know people here and any chance conversation could turn into something that shifts your life's trajectory. If the breadcrumbs show that you're just a troll you're basically building a wall between you and those people.
For one, I like to have a connection with the place I live and the physical objects I use like my car and home- the fact that they are old things I fixed up and maintain myself gives me a sense of place, connection, and pride- just buying something expensive that someone else prepared for me would feel infantalizing and unsatisfying. I enjoy deeply understanding and being part of the history of the objects and tools I use, in a way that can’t be purchased.
Also, I think a lot of consumerism and conspicuous consumption comes from a sad and depressing place of anxiety that you aren’t good enough to make friends or find romantic partners without doing this. Many people don’t directly want or enjoy conspicuously expensive things, but are hoping it leads to social status or approval. But this inevitably means resigning yourself to essentially buying the company of people that don’t actually like you. At the extreme end you see some famously wealthy people so anxious about not being perceived as wealthy enough that they glue tacky fake plastic gold on everything they own because they’re afraid of looking poorer than billionaires. That type of narcissism is not a happy way to live, and will turn off the kind of people that would have built a genuine emotional connection with you.
Modern society is too narrow minded about what wealth means. To most people it means fancy watches, cars, homes, etc. To me wealth is about time and freedom. I can pick up the tab at dinner for a group of 12. I can afford to keep my 1972 Schwinn bicycle in tip top shape or my grandfather's jacket mended when it breaks. I can afford to rent forever if I want. I'll never work a job I don't like, I can just quit. I feel more wealthy this way than if I owned 3 lambos and had to work to make ends meet.
My girlfriend years ago thought it was incredible and amusing that I was working a fancy tech job and drove this old car around. We are now happily married.
These days, I could buy a Bentley with cash. But I don't need one.
Warren Buffet's example is an inspiration that should be followed by more people who go into debt buying crap they can't afford with money they don't have in order to look rich.
Besides, I am not wholly convinced that improved safety tech is a replacement for the type of safety first engineering used in every tiny detail of those old cars, that mitigate certain types of accidents and injury that won’t be addressed in crash testing.
Many old cars have excellent rewards visibility without needing any camera- no camera will compare to a first generation Porsche Boxster with the top down for example, where you can directly see behind you by looking back. Volvo wagons are great like that also.
I also, as a rule never back anywhere that I haven’t seen directly just a few seconds before. I always back into parking places so I can see them facing forwards and not back up when starting out, and if I do need to back up when starting out I walk behind the car and look around first and then immediately get in and back up.
Tech really won’t help you here- safe driving requires looking where your vehicle is going with your own eyes. The field of view of a backup camera is insufficient- even if you have one, it’s usually better to be looking directly behind you and not use it. I see cars with backup cameras and sonar hit each other in parking lots all the time, because they thought the camera was a replacement for looking and situational awareness.
By your logic, we should all drive gigantic monster trucks. Lunacy.
Also, I already have a mom who worries about me. She likes the car. I don't need a stranger on the internet worrying about my health, I'm just fine thank you.
Personally, I buy new, and keep putting my car payment into a savings account once it is paid off. If I can't afford to put that money into savings, I can't afford a new car payment. I'm only allowed to do non-routine repairs from those funds. It's amazing how much you don't want to crack into that for a car once it grows to a few thousand. It's the most powerful visual impact of savings I've come across.
Car payments have a way of disappearing into an upgraded lifestyle when you don't have to make them, and then they come out of savings when you take a loan for the car.
Honda Civic may be the ultimate car for that. I bought a pickup 8 years ago that I hope will be a 20 year car. Buy something with a reputation for 200k+ miles.
YouTube has plenty of videos of people calling in with hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year in income and somehow they are still broke and in debt. Live below your means, save the excess income into an investment portfolio, keep doing that until you have enough money to live off the interest. Don't even think about buying a Rolex until you have so much money coming in from interest that you don't even know what else to do with it. Even then, remember that the Rolex, like anything else, requires maintenance, but that if you make someone else happy, they can take care of themselves.
It also stands in contrast to the other celebrities and business leaders featured on that site. If they had a ranking ordered by size/value ascending, I wonder what number he would be. I still suspect it'd be near the top.
Buffet seems to be on top. Eric Schmidts condo is also worth a look.
But it is quite possible to be a kind of lazy where even 10-20x current wealth, people would live where they currently live. American neighborhoods are reasonable that way. It is just primary home and they would holiday/vacation wherever.
That is so few people.
So, so, few people.
Rough lookup says less than 150,000 people in the US, or 0.044% of the US population.
That’s not far off the current median home sales price in San Francisco and easily the median home price in many, many upper middle class neighborhoods across the country.
How many households in the US can afford a $1.5m home? Assuming they need $400k then we can see that that’s a 95th percentile household income in the US, which translates to about 6 million of the US’s total 135 million households.
Redfin has data showing about 8 million homes are worth $1 million plus, so 5 to 6 million households at the $1.5m mark seems about right as an estimate - or put another way - about 5% of US households could afford Warren Buffets home (but maybe not on a 95th percentile income in Omaha, Nebraska).
https://www.redfin.com/news/million-dollar-homes-increasing/
https://www.statista.com/chart/32925/annual-income-required-...
That's the moral though. He didn't need it so he didn't do it. Whereas so many others with so much less do so much more.
A touch of humbleness creates sympathy with people that cope with reality.
He had 3 kids, and a 3500 sq ft house is, IMO, an extremely average size for any decently paid professional where I live with a family that size. It basically looks like something that had everything he needed, and anything beyond that that you so often see in rich people houses is just for show and bling.
Absolutely, but let's also not do the opposite. Being poor does not make one morally superior either.
Really makes me wonder what drives him. For many people it's the money, but with him it doesn't seem that way. But I haven't read too much about him, so if anyone has insight I'd love to hear about it.
His personal life is much more complicated though - impossible to know if he was happy or not, but for sure it was not usual.
There was a cool fact in there that he sees every price tag as the opportunity cost with compounding interest.
The score keeping aspect makes it interesting, just like playing tennis while keeping score is more interesting than just hitting a ball back and forth across the net without counting.
Warren Buffett wouldn't be where he was if he wasn't obsessed with money. But to your point, that doesn't have to translate to material goods: the bigger house, yachts, etc.
When I was younger I rented furniture from a company called CORT. I happened to notice on the contract or receipt or something, that it was a Berkshire company (I didn't know that before then).
If I were Warren Buffet, I would have been happy to know that someone was a satisfied customer of one of his companies. I got some decent furniture for a few months at a reasonable price.
Just like I'm happy when someone is a satisfied user of my software.
If he believed in them as an investor he helped build the companies.
He took Berkshire Hathaway, a struggling textile company, and transformed it into one of the largest and most successful conglomerates in history.
You can see this behaviour in online multiplayer games that have a currency aspect --- some people will spend almost as quickly as they earn, while others will save some and buy items as they can afford, and then there are those who will just keep saving and saving, rarely buying.
Also, given that he is a billionaire, I do kind of assume that he has paid money to upgrade his home at some point, probably also owns additional homes elsewhere, maybe has done other things with his vast amount of money that normal people don't do, that are still consistent with living at the same address as when he was 28.
Perhaps the best thing Buffet has managed to do is to live long. Most of compounding magic begins at ages 60-65, a time where most investors start to die out.
Second best thing he did was to start/acquire a insurance firm. The 'float' helps them to run a kind of in house index fund on other peoples money, without having to pay TERs/Fees. Thats basically no effort bogle style compounding. Even if you end with a situation where you have to return ALL the premiums collected, you still get to keep the returns.
Other wise everything else is just fairly normal, if you are sitting in front of charts for long, its impossible to miss something that's going up on a weekly timeframe for long periods of time. You just pyramid upwards and wait, patiently.
The real issue is waiting doesn't work too well for most people as you start to die out after 60.
Percentage-wise, few wealthy investors are dying out at ages of 60-65. In the US, males that make it to age 60 have a life expectancy of 81-82. But that's across all men - life expectancy is strongly correlated with wealth in the US, so a man in the top 1% could very reasonably expect to live to very late 80s/90s.
Nevermind that Buffet was still fabulously rich when he was 60, so none of your logic makes any sense to me.
Compounding is a function of time. More time you are alive, more you see in that time. This follows from definition of compounding itself.
Buffet does this better. He basically takes the float from insurance business(Geico) and invests in the index his company manages. This basically sets you up for a long compounding cycle. Translation- You are basically investing in the US economy.
Apart from this there are some base businesses in an economy that's under long term multi year climb. Now anybody who is staring at stock charts(weekly) will tell you eventually you do learn to 'Pyramid upwards' on stocks that are clear winners. Lots of literature has been written on this.
All said and done, you can be rest assured there only at best 10 such stocks in any economy. Once you find them, you do periodic audit if the companies are holding up good and just keep putting in money as time passes.
I don't remember where- but I remember reading, Fidelity found out the most profitable accounts belonged to people who were dead. That says two things. 1) You have to hold stocks for long periods of time, like really long periods of time(Index, and some of its constituents that are carrying most of the freight) . Most people won't make it. 2) Live long enough.
Quite literally once you gain the skills to pick stock. Next single biggest skill you can master is to be healthy and live long. These things take lots of time to work.
The "index funds and live long" advice is sensible precisely because even the average savvy investor isn't likely to time value investments as well as Warren Buffet did.
You need to study index carefully, like pick each stock and study it. You will see Buffet isn't exactly investing outside the index, his investments come from inside the index.
You are not looking for needle in a haystack here. More like a thick loaf from a pound of bread. If you squint enough, you find them.
Good for him. Big savings right there. Buying/selling/moving house can cost a fortune.
Amazing for Grandma to pay $500/mo to live alone in a 2b Manhattan where she raised her family.
Terrible for the young families try to find their own 2b bedroom to start their family.
[0] - higher paying, emotionally rewarding, etc.
SF and NYC are the only two places in the US where rent control makes any sense whatsoever. And it's to solve a problem that was largely created... by rent control.
Once you start you can't stop.
You may ask yourself, what would X do and why, and that could help you clarify your own views.
If you believe it, then it helps model other areas of life in a way that undoubtably supports the outcome.
For example, not part of Mr Buffets persona (and I believe it!) is staying up until 2am getting wasted and having 5 baby mommas.
And so anyone trying to have even a shadow of Mr. buffets success should probably also avoid doing so, and perhaps do some of what Mr. buffet does instead. Like reading the financial papers.
To give one example.
You can't get much beyond the median if you copy other people, unless you're really lucky. But if you handicap yourself constantly too, good luck even hitting the median.
Which is extremely important. It's important to call out highly immoral behavior and lifestyles. Being a billionaire by itself is highly immoral. These people sleep like babies while people starve to death.
> He consistently communicated with shareholders of Berkshire in a straight-forward and transparent way in his letters and annual reports.
We praising for the bare minimum now?
The global median income is $2,760 annually. You sleep like a baby making likely 10-100X that, all while people are starving to death.
What are you doing to help the starving poor with your vast wealth? Are you not also morally bankrupt yourself, using your own logic?
While you're joining the current bolshevik revival that the populist left is trying to spin up, I just hope you remember the kulaks (the land-owning peasants) and many of the Serednyaks (the middle class peasants) also got murdered in the revolution. I'd keep any claims of moral superiority to myself if I were you.
Also, you still haven't explained how you're morally superior by being in the top 10% of global earners vs. the top .01%, while people are starving. Using your logic about how you think the world works, you've clearly gamed the system to take more for yourself.
Billionaires are subject to the exact same tax laws as you. What you're likely referring to is the discrepancy in taxation of capital gains vs. income and the use of debt to borrow against assets.
But you then have to contend with the fact pretty much every successful country in the world taxes capital less than income at a certain point. And nobody taxes debt. Why? Because it incentivizes risk taking and investment in businesses (a value multiplier) vs. the non-scalable activity of selling your hours as an employee past a certain point.
What you perceive as "immoral" activity (investment and entrepreneurship) is the risk-taking that makes the economy function and grow, which benefits everyone.
Even your perceived socialist utopia, the Nordics (where I live) taxes capital gains less than income. I think you may want to investigate whether this is a Chestertons fence before loudly shouting about remaking the world on an emotional impulse and calling me a bootlicker.
> "I am not retarded enough to compare my income to a billionaire gaming the system"
> I am not retarded enough to compare my income to a billionaire gaming the system
Means:
> Billionaires make their money by gaming the system
Serious reading comprehension issue.
That being said, I find it odd to moralize on moralism. We have way too many people in power that are awful humans and do a bad job and never get punished.
Meanwhile, stealing a car because you are hungry can be the begin of a ruined life.
There is no balance.
(This isn't about buffet, idc, just about your interwoven opinion.)
Instead of seeing the nuance, you’d see everything that comes out of Elon Musk or Israel whoever you’ve managed to convince yourself is that current villain, as bad - without attention to details. More than that - you’d waste your time arguing whether they are “good” or “bad”, instead of focusing on specific actions, which is what society as a whole seems to enjoy seem to gravitate towards, and what increases polarization and reduce proper discourse.
We made a machine that is driven by emotions and rewards short and exaggerated interactions. On the surface it's black and white, but in each such situations there is also nuanced discussions and people that reflect things. I often also carry such moral debates to friends, I assume others do as well. There is at least a portion of nuance. Saying it's always black and white, is black and white thinking itself.
What I would agree with is that groupthink is a problem. People choose sides depending on who or which group said it. Also virtue signalling, as it's often just (unconscious) reputation management and hinders progress.
Moralism can make people see things without nuance (i.e. saying "stealing is bad" with no regard for the context). This must be tempered. But this is not a good reason to throw out the pursuit of shared moral values within society.
When was this ever not the case? And what makes you think that you (or any other human) are somehow morally superior and would do a better job if subject to the same environment and pressures?
The point is that power corrupts, so we try to design decentralized systems wherever possible that don't require absolute power to function (ie. free markets, the internet, etc). Trusting specific human animals to wield authority over us in a non-awful way is not a reliable solution.
> Meanwhile, stealing a car because you are hungry can be the begin of a ruined life.
Sure, but the overwhelming majority of people who steal cars are not starving. And thinking that being poor makes someone morally superior is simply an argumentum ad lazarum, one of the oldest logical fallacies going back to biblical times.
Morals are necessary for humans to live together. We all shape them, we are all entitled to do so, they are inevitable. We encode morals into laws if we deem it necessary. But that doesn't originate from an individual in a functioning democracy. It's a process, not a individual decision. Each individual can decide to stand for it's own morals. A large public backlash is a sign that you acted against public morals, you don't have to agree, but you have to deal with it. That's how a society works if everyone is free to speak and has a tiny bit of power.
> Sure, but the overwhelming majority of people who steal cars are not starving. And thinking that being poor makes someone morally superior is simply an argumentum ad lazarum, one of the oldest logical fallacies going back to biblical times.
I didn't mean any of that, I don't even know how you come up with that conclusion. My example simply expresses that a simple act of theft can ruin a persons life, while powerful people cause much more damage and get away with it.
Holding powerful people and institutions to account for the morality of their actions can and has been a powerful force for good.
How often did he ever deliver "bad news"?
What does “living” mean in this case? That can mean absolutely nothing. I travel a lot (and probably Buffet too), and tax authorities would have a headache with what should I pay and to whom if I reported it completely to them when and where I am. In the country where I officially live I’m maybe 20-30%. There is no other countries with more. The simple case of 50%+1 days is nowhere near. In Buffet case, it can be even less. 10 years ago I had a different pattern. I wasn’t at home but in the same country (in the case of the US, like a state) at random places like 80-90%. So does Buffet really live there, like properly?
That said, it makes me a little sad that we've read the last of his annual letters.