What caught my eye this week.
I enjoyed Life After The Daily Grind’s article asking whether money and miserableness go together. It was sharply written and thought-provoking.
But I didn’t really agree with the main premise.
Over the last decade or so several of my friends have ‘made it’. From wealthy enough to eschew the commute forever, all the way up to properly rich.
And honestly, besides a bit of a psychic dislocation for the first year or so, they don’t change very much.
Rich pickings
You wouldn’t be able to tell the most understated and modest of my financially very successful friends from how he was 20 years ago, unless you were lucky enough to visit his gorgeous house in the country.
Meanwhile the one who took many of his best friends with him on his entrepreneurial adventure would have done much the same I think if he’d convinced them to eschew the rat race to decamp to Thailand.
As for the banker, yes it was hard to pin him down when he was working 100-plus hours a week in his 20s. But even nowadays when he mostly points underlings to the treadmill or works from home – or on the slopes – a few days a week, he’s still just as hard to get hold of. (It’s not just me…is it, N.?)
True, the friend I’m closest to remains restless and unsatisfied despite his eight figures. He still worries about money, and frets over whether he’s investing it right.
And he just can’t quit the game.
I guess this is the bit where I’m supposed to say I feel sorry for him.
But I don’t.
You see, he was restless and hungry when I met him – and it was part of what attracted me to him. His energy and drive is infectious.
I feel a bit guilty saying this, but if he now spent his days drinking sundowners and spending an hour meditating on the beach before an afternoon nap, I wonder if I’d be disappointed?
In contrast, if my co-blogger The Accumulator was living a materially richer life that was still abundant with quiet moments, I’d be thrilled for him.
That’s his lane, rich or poor.
The bottom line: money doesn’t seem to transform anyone very much – or at least not once you’re off the bottom rung. Mostly just the scenery and props.
Money, money, money
However I am largely with L.A.T.D.G. when they make this observation:
All the high achievers I’ve worked with over the years are disciplined, organised, and highly driven by material gain. While the people I know who strike me as the happiest don’t have these attributes and although not successful in the monetary sense — they are happy and find enjoyment in simple things, like a sunny day, a walk in the park, or the smell of freshly ground coffee first thing in the morning.
Substitute ‘material gain’ in that first sentence for ‘winning’ – or add it as a second or alternative motivation – and I’d agree 100%.
None of my friends stumbled into being rich. They went for it. They didn’t have much of a work-life balance. Or rather they did because work and life was one and the same, so there wasn’t much to topple over anyway.
Many of you will probably find this a bit dispiriting, and are likelier to agree with the bits in the article about how there’s more to life than money.
Of course there is! Much more.
I’m just saying the people I know who got a lot of it first wanted to get a lot of it. Right or wrong, and whatever else they were after in life.
They weren’t necessarily happy or miserable before – nor more so afterwards.
Shiny and/or happy people
All that said, this thought experiment is perceptive:
If the health trackers we wear on our wrists that track our activity and sleep could somehow accurately tell us a happiness score out of 100, and in addition, we could compare that score with friends and celebrities then we would obsess over that number. It would be used to elevate our status as money is today. We’d all want to improve our score and make it into the top 1% of the population’s happy people.
We’re fixated on wealth because it’s measurable whereas happiness is hidden, but if that curtain was unveiled and our happiness became public knowledge then it would have a seismic effect on how we live our lives.
Food for thought.
Go read the rest of the article. And have a great weekend!
From Monevator
Asset allocation quilt: winners and losers of the past ten years – Monevator
Wanted: dead not alive – Monevator [Moguls members]
From the archive-ator: Passive investing and stock market crashes – Monevator
News
Note: Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view click through to read the article. Try privacy/incognito mode to avoid cookies. Consider subscribing to sites you visit a lot.
As Trump tariffs near, world braces for stock market spillover – Bloomberg via Yahoo
Two hundred UK companies sign up for permanent four-day work week… – Independent
…with staff reportedly rejuvenated by the shorter week, says one firm – BBC
Shoplifting hits all-time high in England and Wales – Independent via Yahoo
New homes fall again in government’s first six months – BBC
Ticking stamp duty timebomb sees house sales rise 12%… – This Is Money
…but price momentum is stalling out – Nationwide
[‘Under fire’] St James’s Place hits record £190bn in assets – FT Adviser
British ‘industrial aristocracy’ Dowlais joins exodus from London market – Standard
Five key impacts of Brexit five years on… – BBC
…but the individual stories like this one all add up, too – BBC
Norway’s wealth fund hits $300K per citizen [Whereas we got a house price boom] – Sherwood
Rachel Reeves going for growth (allegedly) mini-special
Better late than never? Reeves talking a big game on housebuilding… – Guardian
…and boosting economic growth by unshackling pension schemes… – BBC
…and a third runway at Heathrow… – Sky News
…oh, and apparently adding £78bn to economy through Oxbridge links – BBC
…but will this deflect comparisons to 1976? [Podcast] – Long Time In Finance
Products and services
Here’s why Vanguard isn’t getting into Bitcoin ETFs – Vanguard
Five things a mortgage expert would never do – Which
Should you fix your cash savings rate ahead of cuts? – This Is Money
You can get up to £3,000 cashback when you transfer your pension to Interactive Investor. Terms and fees apply. – Interactive Investor
‘Barbell’ effect helps fixed income newbies usurp traditional bond funds – FT
Should you buy breakdown insurance with your car insurance? – Which
Big banks ignoring ISA rules on opening multiple accounts – This Is Money
How to work out the best UK gym membership deals – Guardian
Open an account with low-cost platform InvestEngine via our link and get up to £100 when you invest at least £100 (T&Cs apply. Capital at risk) – InvestEngine
Lloyds in climbdown over Saba-related platform voting – This Is Money
Why an inter-rail trip across Europe should be your next holiday – Standard
Homes for sale with fabulous kitchens, in pictures – Guardian
Comment and opinion
What explains the gulf between the US and the rest? – Verdad and Goldman Sachs
Would you leave your children out of your will? [Search result] – FT
The benefits of tracking safe withdrawal rate changes over time – Morningstar
Bill Gross: lessons from an investing career – FT
What makes a good index fund? [US but relevant] – Morningstar
Master and Commander – 3652 Days
Coffee badging: working or shirking? – Guardian
ETFs increase the efficiency of markets, new study shows – FT
News you can’t use – The Joint Account
How, when, and why to talk to your kids about money – Tim Maurer
Margin of too much safety – A Wealth of Common Sense
Small businesses can transform your wealth – Next Big Idea Club
Higher gilt yields mini-special
Despite volatile borrowing costs, UK pensions see ‘nice opportunity’ – CNBC
Active fund managers also enjoying the higher gilt yields… – Interactive Investor
…though they could add £2,800 a year to new mortgage bills – This Is Money
Naughty corner: Active antics
Tom Slater: manager of Scottish Mortgage trust [Podcast] – B.T.B.S. via Apple
Is Wall Street ready to stay up all night? – FT
Pitting the dividend hero trusts against inflation – Interactive Investor
Wait, past performance predicts future fund returns? – Basis Pointing
Another look at the Microstrategy Bitcoin biz model – Forbes
Should you buy, hold, or fold Fundsmith Equity? – Trustnet
Kindle book bargains
Saving Time by Jenny Odell – £0.99 on Kindle
The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb – £0.99 on Kindle
Good With Money by Emma Edwards – £0.99 on Kindle
Number Go Up: Inside Crypto… by Zeke Faux – £0.99 on Kindle
Environmental factors
China passes 2030 renewables target six years early – Semafor
Can London’s rivers be swimmable within ten years? – BBC
The rise of plant poaching [Search result] – FT
California’s electricity conundrum – Klement on Investing
Mission to save willow tit from extinction – BBC
Thousands of trees planted in Devon to start creation of Celtic rainforest – Guardian
Robot overlord roundup: brought to you by DeepSeek
A DeepSeek FAQ – Stratechery
And everything else you need to know – Exponential View
Deep Impact… – Where’s Your Ed At
…versus the most important moment in history is now – Uncharted Territories
DeepSeek punctures US big tech’s bubble: analysts respond – Tech Crunch
The real DeepSeek revelation: the market doesn’t understand AI – Semafor
OpenAI cries foul – Gary Marcus
The Vatican has something to say about AI too – Vatican
We will have to learn to live with machines that can think [Search result] – FT
AI haters build tarpits to trap AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt – Ars Technica
Former OpenAI safety researcher brands rate of change ‘terrifying’ – Guardian
Off our beat
How to feel bad and be wrong – Experimental History
Why the architecture world hates The Brutalist – Guardian
Microsoft should call time on the Xbox – Sherwood
How come the future hasn’t arrived yet? [Podcast] – Faster, Please
Food companies plan to make a fortune from weight-loss drugs – Sherwood
How to fall asleep fast and stay that way – GQ
“I don’t want to buy a £4 coffee just so I can use the loo” – BBC
Fix three broken things – Raptitude
And finally…
“To make money, you must first survive.”
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game
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I thought there might be some weekend reading on what is happening with gold. i.e. lots of it being shipped from London to the USA.
It’s all a bit bonkers really:
https://www.ft.com/content/d09ea7ff-7652-4c7b-b52f-575e52fe5fca
I had thought about slightly tweaking my asset allocation to buy some, but I won’t be doing that at the current high price.
Happiness is doing the things you enjoy most…making wonga, making friends, making gadgets (me), or/and *insert Motown music* making luurrrve.
making enough to live on is a misery vs not misery point….
so perhaps happiness is for the birds?
What’s money got to do with it ?
‘You are only ever as happy as your least happy child..’
About gold (the FT article in comment #1), am I to understand that gold is now being physically being shipped from London to New York? In planes? That’s a bit mad.
As per your recent ‘tweet’ about US Gen Z kids seeing ‘living standards’ going up by 2.5% per year since the 1990s (versus bog all in Europe), measuring people’s quality of life by GDP is bonkers. Yes, it’s one factor, but only one of many.
I’m sure we could increase GDP by kidnapping everyone’s children and telling them to work harder or else. But I’m not sure that would raise living standards.
What was that saying again? Not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured matters.
A quick public service announcement: If your immense wealth is proving an unbearable strain on your happiness, I’d be more than willing to shoulder the burden for you. No need to thank me — just doing my bit for collective well-being. 😉
Evolution optimises for reproductive fitness/genomic survival (selfish gene). Happiness (consciousness) byproducts in some complex organisms. So don’t sweat whether you’re happy or not.
On consciousness, thanks @TI for links on AI. This summary of Substacks loosing their collective mind over DeepSeek is, perhaps, a useful addition:
https://open.substack.com/pub/read/p/deepseek-unstacked
The FT AI piece in the links ends quoting Frank Herbert’s character Leto II Atreides in the fourth book in the Dune series, God Emperor of Dune. Unfortunately Martin Wolf of the FT misunderstands the context of the quote. The God Emperor Leto II is mad. One third Jesus Christ. One third Joseph Stalin. One third Prince Hamlet. A near immortal (human-sandworm symbiant) philosopher tyrant. Nothing he says can be taken at face value. Dune is a dystopia of religious superstition and disastrous messianic convulsions. A 25,000 year imagined dark ages without the benefits of thinking machines. The very name of the crusade against those machines (the Butlerian Jihad), which Leto II recalls in the distant past, is based on Samuel Butler’s 1863 “Darwin amongst the machines”, which conflates biological and machine evolution with a near religious Luddite urge to stop ‘progress’:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines
The problem isn’t whether these high achievers are miserable or not, that is their own cross to bear 😉 The problem is that they increasingly define what success looks like in our culture, which has rejected transcendent aspirations for the materialism they epitomise.
This means you have to be increasingly self-referenced to ignore all that reflected hollering about work to listen to the sound of Thoreau’s distant drummer and live your best life. As the article said, a good start is
@ermine – yes I think you’ve nailed it there. The overton window on the successful life is pretty narrow right now I would say. Makes it very difficult for those who sit outside of it. You have to have a large portion of self belief to swim against all that tide.
Another thing is that miserable people who get rich then remain miserable, could be down to them being confronted with the epiphany that not being miserable is far more complex than their bank balance originally suggested.
Nice one for linking up LATDG. It’s a really well written niche blog that deserves some kudos!
The link to the Jenny Odell book shows 5.99 for me not 0.99.
@ermine, @rhino – I agree.
(1) Progress is driven by the discontent. To be a high achiever, one must start with a baseline level of dissatisfaction — otherwise, why bother? Which is all well and good, except no one sends out a memo on when to stop. One minute you’re striving, the next you’re on your third stress-induced ulcer wondering why this was meant to be fulfilling. Some realise it’s time to call it a day once they can afford a decent bottle of wine and an stress-free afternoon to drink it. Others, unfortunately, just keep running.
(2) I think this guy makes a good point about why pushing happiness over the cognitive horizon — always downstream of success — is a bad idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLJsdqxnZb0
@Big Ern — Yes you’re right. Looks like they all flipped over with the first of the month today.
Annoying — they used to change them on the first Tuesday of every month, which was more convenient for us!
@Ermine: “a life where you feel good, sleep well, and are stress-free with minimal negative emotions”
I would say the ‘right’ level of stress and negative emotions, rather than free or minimal. In my case, I like doing difficult things with delayed pay-offs, and a life without at least some stress and the resulting negative emotions sounds jaw-achingly dull to me. Each to his/her own, etc.
I’m quite well off with a hefty seven figures of investments and zero debt. Most of my friends are similarly well off and a handful are in the eight, nine and ten digit net worth clubs. I’d say the lower income people are much less happy, on balance, than the wealthy ones. While we face common problems, aging, health, family issues, etc. we don’t face money trouble. Generally we are immune to divorce because, again, its mostly money issues that lead to divorce. We have the time and energy to have healthy social hobbies, because we are past having to earn more money. Also, the traits that lead to wealth generally include the ability to plan, honesty, trustworthiness, loyalty, intelligence, self discipline and kindness. Those same traits lead to building strong social bonds, which contributes to happiness.
I call bullshit that someone was working 100-plus hours a week. They were at work from 7am to 10pm every day in life? Assuming this super-human did still need to sleep, that leaves no time for anything else in life. No family & friends, fitness, holidays, diy, housework, hobbies & interests, meals/drinks out – literally nothing but work and sleep. Hmm…
“enjoyment in simple things, like a sunny day, a walk in the park, or the smell of freshly ground coffee first thing in the morning.”
I nominate that lovely electrical smell you get from the first rain after a dry spell.
@Steveark #14, you’ve got a lovely website and I share many of the sentiments of your comment. It may be here that Americans are typically a rather more optimistic bunch than us Brits, but I do wonder if the “generally include” caveat in your observation before “honesty, trustworthiness loyalty, intelligence, self discipline and kindness” is having to do a lot of work. For example, I’m not seeing much demonstration of those characteristics from Elon etc just at the moment. Isn’t it really a case that some people have, or develop, those attributes and others don’t regardless of their past, present or future wealth? There are nice billionaires like Buffet, and not so nice ones. And there are nice people who are dirt poor, and not so nice ones.
I don’t think rich people are any more or less miserable or happy than anyone else. I’m 10x more wealthy than I was a decade ago, 50x over two decades, top 0.1% by wealth etc. Yet, I’m still the grumpy git I always was and always will be.
I find that happiness can only be measured relative to sadness. To feel happy, you need to feel miserable. Once I’ve achieved objective A, I get a fleeting dose of happiness and then I get the sadness as I start to think about how to achieve Objective B. I just don’t see happiness as a useful metric to aim for.
@SteveArk. “the traits that lead to wealth generally include the ability to plan, honesty, trustworthiness, loyalty, intelligence, self discipline and kindness. Those same traits lead to building strong social bonds, which contributes to happiness.”
You say this while living in the US? The country that just elected Trump and his Project2025 cronies. That increasingly shows all the signs of being more like an oligarchy than a democracy? Societal bonds are fraying. Median US household income is $80k (£65k). It’s an incredibly rich country. Yet, a large percentage of the population think they are hard done by. If anything supports the hypothesis that rich people are miserable gits, it’s the USA!
I’ve been pondering this topic a lot recently. There was a well cited study from 2010 by Daniel Kahneman suggesting that beyond $75k there was no increase in happiness and it platuead beyond that point. Then more recently there was another study showing that it actually kept on going, not linearly but logarithmically so you needed to double your income to increase happiness again as much as the previous jump. What they found to resolve the conflict between the findings was that the plateau effect only exists for unhappy people, basically once financial stress is relieved they don’t get happier. But for happier people the effect keeps on going, albeit needing a doubling of the increase each time to keep going.
I quite liked the original study because it meant with my income I was already at optimal happiness. Now my obsession with optimising my life leads me to try and work out how I can either debunk it or I need to continue to infinitely increase my income.
The second study author speculates that it comes down to agency and security rather than the ability to purchase specific material items that makes the difference. Which makes sense to me, being able to afford the train fare across the country to see a good friend makes a big difference. A good quality winter coat is worthwhile and a big increase in being miserable in the cold. There’s plenty of stuff that you could consider luxuries like a holiday where you can sit in the sun for 2 weeks, or dining in a multiple michelin star restaurant (a few times perhaps before the novelty wears off). But beyond that you’re generally being mugged off and paying for a fancy version of something that provides no additional value except to remind yourself and others that you had enough money to exchange for it. See – property, wine, cars, private jets, clothing. Earning over 100k in the UK I can’t think of a single thing I can’t buy 10 of that would genuinely enhance my happiness. Perhaps only property.
@Steveark – your comment leaves me scratching my head. First of all the idea that rich people possess these qualities that poor people don’t. I know very successful people (CEOs of huge companies, corporate executives and successful startup founders) and people who are cutting back on groceries to make rent. I’m not saying that rich people are evil, just that the goodness, the bastards and the neuroticism are randomly distributed amongst all of them. The only thing I can pick out about the rich ones is that they had a mix of wanting to be successful, working to get it and enough luck and social status to be overcome the obstacles.
If money issues are the sole cause of divorce, what happened to Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk (x2) and Rupert Murdoch (x4)? Unless you’re working a high stress job, I think it’s fairly easy to have healthy hobbies and social life.
What would interest me is to see that same study done with cohorts of different nations. In Finland when I visited everyone I met spoke of the warm glow of knowing there was a safety net – no worries about housing, health or general wellbeing. Given how far you can fall in America when disaster strikes perhaps that’s why you percieve 7 figures as being a minimum threshold for feeling safe. If that sense of social safety can be provided as a collective good perhaps it makes the increase in personal wealth redundant. Similarly for a sense of agency. The more your country gives you a democratic voice that makes you feel represented and is acting in your interest, the less necessary it would be to have that through setting up your own philanthropic foundation might be.
You are either happy or not wealth does not really change the person you are. Worrying about obtaining money results in equal worry over keeping it.
Just sold some of my gold last week. Keeping the etc I hold but went to bullion dealers and sold coins.
Now I am sitting in Oaxaca wishing the wedding parade outside would stop, 1 hour was great but 3 … guess I am just a grumpy guy wealthy or not !
@Delta Hedge #17 > Elon
Thank you, I drafted a misanthropic screed re Elon, Peter Thiel et all and axed it for lacking the milk of human kindness. But yes. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. QED
Bless these disaffected rich gits. Have they ever been poor? I use to get bronchitis every bloody winter until I earned enough to heat a place properly, it’s been 40 years since I experienced that, though obviously I am four decades older and therefore more susceptible. Money buys you helth, up to a point, we all gotta go of something. I’ve eaten reheated beans because it’s cheap. And I wasn’t poor in the grand scheme of things (subsisting on < $2 a day).
Seriously guys, the evidence is in. At the bottom end money buys you happiness. Above a certain limit Erich Fromm had it taped. Do not conflate to have with to be. You can get away with that till midlife. After that Carl Jung has a word for your shell-like-
@ermine #20. It’s complicated.
Buffet, Gates, Thiel and Elon had privileged (although not all necessarily happy) upbringings.
Soros, in contrast, barely survived the Holocaust in Hungary as a 14/15 year old as his own government helped to try and kill him and his family.
Each of Gates, Soros and Buffet went on to do great philanthropic work and all seem genuinely nice in their different ways. Who they are (and not merely their works) each adds to the sum of human happiness*.
Meanwhile, Elon (TSLA and SpaceX) and Thiel (PLTR) respectively run and found perhaps the most dynamic, innovative and transformative businesses in history, but both have made conscious political choices and shown personalities which arguably leave much to be desired 🙁
*Granted here that Microsoft bloatware is not exactly a gift to the world:
https://open.substack.com/pub/read/p/you-are-simpler-than-microsoft-word
but Gates’ own charity more than makes up for that in my book.
[P.S. here’s the whole of the Malmesbury link on MicroSoft Word compared to DNA:
https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/mechanisms-too-simple-for-humans
as thought that it plays both into the nature v nurture debate on happiness (in its own way) and also, obviously, into the implicit themes of evolution v design by machine as per the weekly links’ “Robot overlord” roundup].
Adams had a view on the money/happiness relationship – “This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” One of the best openers to a book of all time?
The Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has some interesting takes on “happiness “
“It’s all very well to think the meaning of life is happiness but what happens if you are unhappy? Happiness is a great side effect.When it comes accept it gratefully.But it is fleeting and unpredictable.Its not something to aim at-because it’s not an aim.And if happiness is the purpose of life ,what happens when you’re unhappy?Then you’re a failure.And perhaps a suicidal failure.Happiness is like cotton candy.Its not going to do the job.”
I think further on in his writings he recommends emphasising Responsibility and Competence as main life aims with Happiness as a nice side effect when it comes
I have therefore tried to be a responsible and competent investor and it certainly brought me some financial happiness over the years
Perhaps all we can ask for?
xxd09
Great links this week @TI, thank you. Appreciate the nudges on defensive balancing.
Money and happiness. An interesting philosophical point, (love the HHGTTG quote @Rhino – so agree!) especially as a part of a collective pursuing financial independence. I like to think this is distinct from wealthy though. Early FI with R as E as possible is kinda the opposite.
I suspect a very different mindset with the pursuit of wealth per se, as distinct from comfort without employment. There appear to be traits hardwired into this subset which can at turns be both admirable and destructive (as several very eloquent posts identify), but little direct correlation to happiness. Certainly less than to, for example, a drive for power. Dangerous combo; thank goodness for the democratic disconnect between the two or we could be in real trouble!!
@rhino – Yes. Second best (in fact, the guide to the galaxy is one of my favourite books). The best opener? “People are afraid to merge on freeways in LA”. Third best: “The sky above the port was the colour of television tuned to a dead channel”.