Yes. Financial independence would give ample time for me to escape abuse but alas, I’m trapped under family’s false insights and paranoia.

This image post could have been a text post.

Past a certain point, money can’t buy any more happiness. Sure, you have a house, but what is it worth if there’s no one to share it with?

Getting 99 salary increases does feel unrealistic though

Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can give you the foundation and support to look for it.

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The money can’t buy you happiness people are rich.

I’ve always said if money can’t buy happiness then what’s the point in having it.

A few years ago I was stealing water from a construction site so my partner and I could flush the toilet. Parked in a development lot in the middle of the night, watching for security guards while I filled a bunch of plastic organizer bins in the back of a van.

We were several years into a total financial crashout from a combination of major health problems, deaths in the family, and a floundering job market. Things are better now, but I can say at least that I know now what it feels like to lose everything and claw your way back out of the hole. I don’t recommend it, it sucks.

Our nation doesn’t want you to succeed. Remember that. In order for the wealthy to stay wealthy, there has to be a class of people who have less or nothing so that money retains value. We’re the richest fucking nation that’s ever existed, many times over, so if we really wanted we could end poverty, we could end hunger and disease and make a glorious world where everyone is comfortable and able to aim for their own dreams without risk of losing everything and having to steal water to flush the fucking the toilet.

We’re not in that world for the simple reason that a tiny fraction of people want to have things and they want other people to envy them.

Money alone can’t buy happiness, but it sure helps with the down payment.

Ya the only people who say this bullshit are those that have never experienced hard ship before.

I do have terrible crushing problems money can’t solve.

but I would be a hell of a lot happier with lowish 6 figures a year.

As the saying goes, money can’t buy you happiness but a lack of money can buy you a lot of misery. Enough money for a comfortable lifestyle, anything over that and we enter ego validation territory.

Money absolutely does buy happiness until you’re in middle class and in a fulfilling job. (If you’re rich but in a shit job, it means you might have the option to work less or look for a better position.)

Money does not buy you happiness applies to people who are already rich and are looking for money to fulfill needs way high on the Maslow hierarchy. In fact, much of the tyranny and cruelty within stratified social systems comes from miserable rich people believing they should be happy due to their vast wealth and power yet are not. And our capitalist society has messages everywhere that promise that a new car, (yacht, vacation, lover, religion, etc.) will totally fulfill them and they don’t.

I mean we’ve had three billionaires shoot themselves into space. If that’s not an obvious plead to the gods or the cosmos for a taste of nirvana I don’t know what is.

Curiously, this is a thing that Jesus (and every other divine-ish wise guy) knew about: If we give away our vast fortune and live simply with that experience and wisdom, fulfillment comes. But it means overcoming greed for wealth and power, which is quicker, easier, more seductive.

ETA: For those of us outside the ownership class, though, money improves our base Maslow hierarchy (better housing, HVAC, better water, better food) and gets us out of precarity (or worse, scarcity) which make us desperate and miserable (which accounts completely for elevated crime in poor neighborhoods). Money buys us out of that hell hole. The only thing better than not being there is to also have the perspective of not being there, which can lead to maybe helping others behind you out… Unless you’re Clarence Thomas. (He’s a very special case.)

Money does buy you happiness. It just has diminishing returns.

So the best way to maximize happiness is to take the money from those that have maximized its effect and give it all to the poor.