I think there's a good medium between the two that most people fail to notice--it's good not to be too obsessed with money, but when I hear people say that "money doesn't matter!" I instantly suspect that they have always been rich enough to never have actually experienced living without it. It matters quite a bit when you are struggling to pay rent on your crap retail job, and routinely having to choose between gas in your car or food in your stomach.
This all was somewhat stressful. However, it's important to be mindful that things can always get worse, and that your happiness is not actually dependent on having a job, place to live, or food. Although the last one does tend to occupy your mind, most people would not actually be harmed by skipping a meal or six.
You can let money, or the lack of it, determine your happiness. You can let your health, or lack of it, determine your happiness. You can let whether your favorite sports or political team determine your happiness. Or, you can have a sense of perspective, trust in yourself, and let happiness be a goal to reach no matter what fate has in store for you.
I can't help but recall the lines of "Invictus" here, but I'll refrain from quotation.
Mine is.
This was the most powerful phrase of the article for me as well. These days I wonder if something like a "Freedom maximization framework" or a "Personal satisfaction maximization framework" might work well for many people including myself, rather than a "Income maximization framework" or a "Career maximization framework" that we tend to default to.
That's been on my mind a lot for the last few years. While I'd like to put my (future) kids in a good starting point, there's more to life than rolling around in cash.
These weren't poor people, by the way. They were students at an Ivy-league school who were in the transition period between graduation and six-figure jobs.
There's a long way between "barely not broke" and "upper middle class". I am not particularly interested in struggling my whole life on the way up to wealth, but I am also not interested in living broke and trying to keep myself and my family fed.
My favorite line was this one: "...life isn't a competition to see how upper middle class you can get." This is so true. It blows my mind how much people internalize these milestones of success and how little questioning goes into them. It seems that basically the whole culture's on autopilot, and I guess the point of a culture is basically to build a structure for most people to sail through on auto-pilot but I am really starting to see a life of questioned assumptions as the only life not lived in slavery.