Comments by "Magic Beans" (@Magic_beans_) on "The Hidden Brilliance of Stealth Wealth - How Money Works" video.
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@jo2305 Exactly, people are confusing pain relief with happiness. The first is important for sure and can free up resources toward pursuing the second, but they’re not the same.
Research on what brings happiness typically finds the same few things: meaningful relationships, helping others, and having a sense of purpose to your life. A certain amount of money can help with that; if you’re working 60+ hours a week just to get by, you won’t have much time for relationships or helping others, and those jobs may not align with your purpose, they just pay the bills. So yeah, get that person a basic income or a living wage and they probably would be happier.
Beyond that though, it tapers off. Going from a salary of $50K to $100K a year helps somewhat, but $100K to $1M a year doesn’t. Once you’ve removed the obstacles to pursuing happiness, money doesn’t help much. In fact some people horseshoe around to where they’re working such long hours that they have no time for relationships.
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@GhostlyNomad130 Semi-retirement is pretty much what it sounds like: you get some level of income, maybe not enough to live off of entirely but enough that you don’t have to work a “normal” job. Instead you can dial back to part-time or seasonal work. Sometimes it works the other way around, people go back to working out of economic necessity, but for others it’s a way to “downshift” to a less stressful life.
Not everybody hates working in and of itself. UBI experiments and workplace survey suggest many people like work; it’s a good outlet for their talents or a way to contribute to society. What sours the deal is the obligation of it all, the idea that they have to put in 40-plus hours a week 50 weeks a year for 40 years, basically nonstop, or else risk a swift descent into homelessness. Semi-retirement is essentially being able to work on your own terms.
I knew some Silicon Valley guys who did that. Not the folks who got IPO windfalls, but regular programmers and designers. They’d grind for ten years and live as cheaply as possible, saving up half a million dollars or whatever. Then they’d move somewhere cheaper like Oregon (cheaper relative to Silicon Valley, of course). They could partly live off their nest egg, supplementing it with a couple days a week working at a coffee shop. Or maybe they’d keep programming but as a contractor, only taking as many gigs as they felt like. That leaves plenty of time to put toward parenting or hobbies.
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