Getting 99 salary increases does feel unrealistic though

Sure, but poverty is a lack of money. The inability to sustain oneself healthily. Once you have "sufficient" money, having even more won't make you happier.

The problems of poverty might be easier to deal with. Not discounting that. But a salary increase under capitalism does not solve the fundamental depression you feel from alienation.

Not to say I don't have it better. I do. But the emptiness is not solved by a higher wage. It only has allowed me to have the time to become more reflective and depressed by the alienation of my labor.

To have more time and freedom to reflect on the suffering of these systems that I benefit from more than others do.

Well duh. Just apply for a leadership position. Double the stress for a dollar raise!

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

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

Happiness is connected to contentment, feeling you have enough.
There are people living in their cars who are happy, and elon musk, with all the money in the world, very much doesn't look like a happy person.

Money can't solve all your problems but it can solve most of them.

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?

but it surely helps a lot, i mean i dont ask to be a billionaire, just enough for place to living, and i dont have to worry about food. and maybe with a pc gaming :) and i hope i dont need to go to hospital because sickness. just die while im asleep.. just burn my body or give it to some lion. i dont care

pardon my english

I'm very close to paying off all my student debt. You'd think I'd be happier with the extra 250 a month now going to me, but.... it's really not a life changing amount. I can afford better groceries, and can save a bit for a rainy day. Other than that, nothing much really.

Financial independence would be life changing. Not seeing a large portion of my income going to rent, but to a property that I own and can happily invest time and effort into. That would be amazing

Nobel Laureates Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton at Princeton University published a study in 2010 showing that money buys happiness only up to about $75k per year (in 2010 dollars, for Americans), at which point happiness plateaus and more money doesn't meaningfully buy more happiness.

Years later, Matthew Killingsworth at the University of Pennsylvania published a study showing that happiness didn't really plateau with money, but kept increasing at $75k and beyond.

They got together to see if they could reconcile their different findings from pretty similar methodologies.

As it turns out, Killingsworth's data did show the same plateau, at pretty much the same place, if you focus only on the least happy 20%. In a sense, the Kahneman data was focused on only measuring unhappiness, and didn't properly distinguish between people who were kinda happy, people who were moderately happy, and people who were really happy.

So now the most widely accepted analysis is that there are people who are deeply unhappy, for whom giving them more money might not make them emotionally better off, at least past $75k in 2010 dollars. But for the rest of us, the majority of people will continue getting happier with more money, well up to the $500k income.

Here's a write up of the collaboration

I just want to talk.

I made it big. Huge. Motherfucking huge. I bought and paid off my house in 2 years, was taking 5 major trips a year, had all the bullshit.

Wasn't ever a materialist and was frugal, not cheap. Tried to take the lessons of my grandfather who grew up in the depression with literally nothing, and where he taught me over many years that everything is priceless and worthless at the same time. He was 1000x the father to me than my booze-bag sperm-donator male called my "dad".

That piece of wire on the ground might save your life. It might just be another piece of shit. One day you go and buy some wire for $11 because you need it, other times you walk past $11 of free wire laying there because you have no immediate need or want for it. I was too spoiled and precious to get it. I want my meat packaged on a Styrofoam tray and there needs to be cartoons on things. No you shouldn't make me a home made metal detector out of a broken FM radio, lacquered wire and a 9V battery because then I won't be cool.

Through my life and path, I discovered no matter how much material stuff, no matter how lovely the accouterments of my life, no matter how many "freedoms" and experiences I had stemming from my financial wherewithal, there was an underlying thing at the core, the kernel of my being, that had been neglected my whole life. For I was never taught to see it and know it. I hated myself and hated my life and refused to look through the telescope to see that.

I didn't really find any of this out until I had a humiliation that provoked the beginning of my thoughts of personal transformation. I later heard Miles' Kind of Blue for the first time, by myself, in a separate bed from my pill-popping wine-guzzling wife, wearing Bluetooth headphones. I had smoked a grain of cannabis, my first return to it in about 20 years. Something touched me and I cried. One photon of light hit me somewhere and I couldn't unsee it.

I later arrested my rage-drinking, or demon-drinking as I sometimes say. When the magical fairy wand didn't dispense the fairy dust on my life and render everything into utopia, I intuited my power-drinking was a mere behavior and really had effectively nothing to do with the underlying issue. Or perhaps it did in the same sense that water in a boat isn't the issue, it's the rotted holes and splits in the hull.

I aimed myself at discovery and self-transformation and opened myself to anything from which I could take something useful and apply it to my own perspective. After getting into 5 years of heavy therapy which I pursued with vigor, something happened. I connected to that thing that I didn't know existed.

My life exploded, I effectively went insane, but not insane enough to lose sight of that photon. I lost everything because I was not able to care for myself. I ballooned to 135kg.

I had $280,000 in my chequing account at one point, 100K of random investments, and I was living in my car and eating at shelter. I was fucked.

Anyhow.

Now my shit is together. I have 1BR apartment and I will never ask or take more. I refuse. I pull things out of dumpsters, clean them, use what I can and give away the rest. I repair electronics and sell them to survive in part. My community is Harkness Station, a bus shelter in the freezing cold snowbank called Winnipeg, where people live - many suffering addiction and abandoned by humanity. These are my friends and I bring them home-cooked food, water, tea, sugar-laden 3am coffee, hygiene, relief of all sorts. My friend Alex who did 4 years hard time for an armed-robbery he set-up, spoke to me about getting sober 2 days ago. He's heard my story but I've never heard those words on his lips before.

Hear what I'm saying please.

I got an inheritance from my sperm-donors estate and gave it away. There were more than 5 ~~zeroes~~ digits on it.

I am moving to Zen. All of the problems in my life are my own creation.

My grandfather gave me something priceless. My new community at Harkness showed me you can live with nothing.

We put all of this together and I can say with confidence I'll live in a car (which I don't have anymore because I gave it away), eat at the "missions" and be happy as a motherfucker. Whatever bro. I'm happy inside, I can care for me, and I need nothing but basic elements of mechanical survival. edit: How silly of me. I forgot the most important thing of all, perhaps so intuitive to me it needed not be said, but I think it should be said. I also need the love of humanity and connection to community for we are all one. And where I have no community I will make one because I also need that.