We often hear that having money doesn’t make you happy. I don’t think most people really believe that though. Maybe it has something to do with the source. Most people that say that seem to either not be rich, or they seem like very unhappy rich people. What about generally happy people?
Highlights:
Success and money, and the accumulation of material objects, do not really bring you that much happiness. What happens is, you get too much shit, and you end up chasing your life. Before you know it, you’re just kinda fielding calls on shit that you never really enjoy. Its sort of like if you had a bunch of kids that you sent off to boarding school, and you never got to hug ’em or kiss ’em or hang out with ’em, but you kept getting calls from their principal saying “We need money, and one of ’em put a cherry bomb in the toilet, and the other one’s failing out of history class.” You just start juggling all of this shit.
I have a shitload of cars. With each new car I get, I love the rest a little bit less, including the new car. And you know who loves their cars the most? The guy who has the one car. And it doesn’t have to be anything special.
I went from zero, my entire life, to having a bunch of money and not really giving a shit about it, really just chasing the next thing . . . when you get 14 cars, it’s just 14 problems now.
So then, if accumulating things just turns into a pain in the ass, how do get rich and still have fun? Accumulate less? I think that would certainly help. I think restricting yourself would also help. Don’t indulge every desire you can afford to indulge. Leave something to look forward to.
I would say the best and most exciting part of my life was when things started happening, and I bought my first BMW M3, that was used, but it was still more car than I had ever had in my life, and now it would be my 15th favorite.
Now, when I go to nice restaurants, I don’t enjoy myself like I used to enjoy it, because it was a novelty, because it was a rarity.
The lack of novelty seems to be a recurring complaint of the rich. It also seems to perpetuate the cycle of looking forward. Once you fly everywhere on a private jet, it’s your new reality. It’s no longer a luxury or a rarity. Now, you start chasing the bigger jet, and you appreciate what you have even less.
This is a tough cycle to break. Scheduled, deliberate reflection and forced appreciation can probably combat at least part of the new-toy-effect. Meditation or seeking advice from sources like Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, seeing how others have dealt with far bigger concerns, can probably combat at least part of the constant desire for more.
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Many people conflate happiness with excitement. Nowadays you’ll see people talking about the hedonic treadmill. Excitement, grasping, chasing the material tends to come with ups and downs, and just as many downs as ups, because there is always the comedown after the novelty wears off.
Happiness is steady, peaceful. Like most of what you point to throughout the rest of your blog, happiness tends to be found by those with strong internal motivators, chasing the novelty tends to be more in the camp of those motivated by external factors; who may have never taken time to consider the messaging they have received and what happiness means to them. We give too much of our power away by shifting things to outside our control – cultivate your own sense of appreciation for intrinsic factors and you will have much less discontentment.