#635

Money doesn't make you happy, but provides comfort by removing a lot of things that make you sad. If you have enough money, it's a lot harder to figure out why you aren't happy. That whole hierarchy of needs is pretty on point. Once your basic needs are met, its then that you can look for self fulfillment and love. Those are the things that bring happiness and cannot be brought by money. But without money you wont get the chance to even focus on the top of the pyramid. People are also happy relative to their realm of opportunity. You feel you’d be happy if you were a millionaire because you’d be able to do loads of cool stuff outside your current realm of opportunity. And probably for a while, that would be novel. But after a while your realm of opportunity would have shifted and now all that cool stuff would seem mundane. Studies have shown that for this reason, people in developing countries state themselves to be relatively as happy as people in developed countries. Because people’s happiness generally corresponds to relative opportunity, not absolute