That is the secret to happiness as far as I am concerned; measure your days by how much you've learned not by how much you have earned.
Yet the vast majority of the time, this sentiment comes from people who are well-off, e.g. someone with an MIT PhD and an almost impossible-to-screw-up future.
There are at least two possibilities. Either people who aren't well-off are just sour grapes, or they deal with a lot more than a lack of proper mindset.
The secret to happiness is no secret: if you have more money than you know what to do with, you can cover the vast majority of cases that will make you unhappy. If you, your children, or your pets get ill, you can get them proper medical care. For someone who lives on $25k/yr, that will almost always end in disaster.
I think it's not productive to pretend like money doesn't equate to happiness. The lust for money can do a lot of damage, but simply realizing that money is incredibly important to happiness is a realization that most people don't make. They spend extravagantly when Christmas comes around; they eat out because they want to "feel like a normal person," i.e. someone who can afford to eat out; they get expensive birthday gifts for family members. And why? Then when a financial disaster comes around, like someone getting ill with no insurance in the US, there are no resources left to deal with it.
I don't know. It's just far too easy to feel like there's a key to happiness waiting to be discovered. It's a multi-faceted and complex issue.
I live in a post-Soviet country - maybe one of the best in terms of GDP. Compared to the US it's basically the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of how much money you need to live - healthcare is free, you can rent an ok apartment on not much more than minimum wage, unemployment is below the EU average, transport is cheap (and public transport is good), food and entertainment isn't expensive.
Yet people still like to complain about how everything is too expensive and how they have no money. People here are miserable and we have one of the highest alcohol consumption and suicide rates in Europe.
I'm not really sure what point I'm trying to make, but as you say happiness is complicated. Giving everyone $X/year more isn't suddenly going to make them happier.
I really like this response, it gives tremendous insights into the person. I'd like to unpack it a bit though and perhaps provide some food for thought.
Starting in the middle:
> I think it's not productive to pretend like
> money doesn't equate to happiness.
That quote and this one:
> Yet the vast majority of the time, this sentiment
> comes from people who are well-off
Ties the notion of money to happiness.
It would be great if it were that simple, but it isn't. All of the studies show that once your basic needs are met The correlation between money and happiness essentially goes away. And part of the problem is being imprecise in our language, because their is 'money' which is to say "gee you're pulling in $10,000 a month!" and there is 'wealth' "gee it only takes 10% of your take home pay to cover your rent!"
Many people who work in the STEM sector of the market, will have their basic needs met. They will all have individually varying levels of happiness that are not well correlated with their individually varying levels of wealth. You'll meet them, people who are "rich" and miserable, people who consider themselves "middle class" and are totally happy.
And I assert there is a key to happiness in this uncorrelated range of wealth.[1] That key is to define your happiness in something you have complete control over, rather than something that is externally influenced. Everyone I've ever met who does that is happier, more consistently, than people who don't do that. It doesn't have to be learning like it is for me, I know people who are very happy and measure their days by how many people they have helped.
It is my thesis that everyone has some internal notion of their "score" in life, and once their survival needs are well met (food & shelter) their happiness is entirely a function of how much they are 'scoring' versus an arbitrary benchmark of what a good 'score' should be.
[1] For the literally minded we'll define this uncorrelated region as that level of wealth that starts just above 'I have enough incoming capital to keep from struggling to meet financial obligations' and below 'I have so much capital I don't have to work to meet my financial obligations.'
It's security. Money (currently a proxy for power) can provide you with the ease of mind that if you fall ill, if someone you care about is injured, then you can get them the best care, that you can take time off to help them. Similarly, it helps to feel as if you have people who are also secure so that they can be there for you too.
I think of it as, money can't buy happiness, but poverty can create unhappiness. I do think it's important for most people's happiness to get to a point where they can earn enough (at a job they don't hate) to never have to worry about how they're going to pay next month's bills or whether or not they can afford everything they need from the grocery store. Having to worry about stuff like that is a constant source of stress that wears away at whatever happiness someone does have in their life.
Beyond that level of income, whatever it is, people don't necessarily get happier, but they at least have more resources to work with. Depending on the person, and depending on whatever tradeoffs are made to get that higher income, they might figure out how to turn more money into more happiness, or they might not. That's more dependent on what makes an individual happy.
On the other hand, there are ways you can risk your health for money, where the reverse trade isn't possible for any amount of money. So, getting back to the article, retiring early seems like a good trade.
That's possible in some special cases, but it's also quite possible to ruin your health in ways that can't be fixed. And this is what football players are facing.
Always? No. Many health issues are actually incurable with current technology. For a simple example, many forms of hearing loss are incurable as far as we know. You can spend a lot of money on fancy hearing aids but it won't get you normal hearing again.
Old rich people can't spend money to cure all their ailments and be young again. Maybe someday, but not today. And it's not a gamble if there's no chance of success.
The vast majority of time you /hear/ it from people who are well off, as they are the ones who have their lives written about. There are plenty of happy, non famous/rich people. I should know ;)
Interesting to know about the retirement 'vest' of 3 years. If he lives another 60 years that is a bit more than $1.25M.