Morgan Housel on happiness & enough
Housel holds that money prevents misery more than it creates happiness, and it does that mostly indirectly, by buying independence and time with people you love. Happiness is fleeting while contentment lasts, and contentment depends on keeping expectations, which comparison and your social circle keep pushing up, rising more slowly than what you have. He cites people who quit at the top, and giving money away, as better uses than chasing more.
16 points · 6 appearances · 2022–2026
How the view evolved
Money's most universal use is buying independence and autonomy → A good life equals independence plus purpose
In 2022 he called independence and autonomy the most universal thing money can buy; by 2024 to 2026 he had widened this into a formula for a good life, independence plus purpose.
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2022–2026 · changed view
“Oh, I think it's very different. What I meant by no one is crazy is that it is so easy for people to look around at society and how people are spending their money and saving their money and investing their money and say, why the hell would anybody do that? Why would you waste your money on this? Why would you hoard your money like that? And actually, think, if you peel back the onion layer of what's going on in those people's lives, no one is really that crazy with how they spend their money or save their money. It makes sense to them in that moment. My brother-in-law is a social worker. He works with very disadvantaged kids, kids who are abused at home, who don't have homes. And a lot of those kids, not surprisingly, do very poorly at school. They misbehave, they get in fights, they don't go to school. And it is so common for those kids that the teacher will look at those kids and say, why are you acting like this? Why don't you do the right thing? It's so obvious. And he says there's a phrase in social work: all behavior makes sense with enough information. That if you look at what those kids are dealing with in life, it would all make sense to you why they are misbehaving at school. And I think that's a powerful idea for a lot of things in life, that all behavior makes sense with enough information.”
2022–2026
“And the wider the channel is, the more that you can endure. And so much about compound interest, not just with money, but with relationships and careers and friendships, comes down to what can you endure? How many unknowns and the depths of those unknowns can you endure and survive? And so much, I wrote this in Psychology of Money. If you have to like sum up doing well financially in one word, I think it's survival. That's true in your career. That's true for savings. That's true for investing. Absolutely. It's just survive. It's just what can you endure? What can you put up with? And when you view it like that, you realize that like every dollar that you save is a claim check of independence that will serve you not just in the future but today.”
2023–2026
“The definitions are my own, so I'm just making this up, but I think rich is when you have enough money to make your mortgage payment, make your car payment, you can pay off your credit card bill every month. Like, you can afford the things that you're buying, technically. Wealthy, I think, is when you have a degree of independence and autonomy. The weird thing here is that wealth is the money that you don't spend. That's what wealth is. Like, the homes you didn't buy and the car you didn't buy. It's money that you saved and invested that is going to give you independence. And that's a hard thing for people, I think, to wrap their head around, that wealth is what you don't see. Because I can see your house, I can see your car, I can see your clothes, but I have no idea what your net worth is. I can't see your brokerage account. I can't see your bank account. So wealth is always hidden, and it throws a lot of people for a loop. Because if I was looking for a role model of physical fitness, well, I can see your fitness. I can see your weight and your muscle tone, what not. It's all visible. But when you're looking for a financial role model, who do you look up to? And a lot of people, particularly young people, will look up to the guy in the mansion with the Ferrari. But that guy, for all you know, is living paycheck to paycheck. A lot of those people are. And the person who is actually wealthy and independent might be the person in the modest house driving the modest car, that you would actually want to be. If you want to be wealthy instead of just rich, you want to be independent instead of just making your monthly payments, the people that you actually want to look up to are some of the hardest people to identify in society.”
2023–2026
“For a lot of people, not everybody, but for a lot of people, the more you are showing off or you just desire to show off, a lot of it is a wound that was inflicted upon you and you're like, I'm going to get back. And so, and sometimes too, you're not even showing off for other people. You're doing it for, you're doing it to prove to yourself.”