In the end it's all relative to your expectations. For example let's take 2 different people; "A" and "B".

"A" has rich parents (few hundred million). "A" has rich friends. "A" enjoys expensive past-times. "A" currently lives off around $1,000,000 per year (mortgage, food, entertainment, etc.). Most of "A"'s associates have a similar lifestyle. If "A" loses all of his money and is forced to take a job at $150,000 a year then he'll be absolutely miserable. He'll feel poor because all his friends and associates have so much more, and because he's become accustomed to a way of life he can no longer afford.

Now person "B" has a blue collar job, no savings, and makes $50,000 per year. "B"'s parents are not rich, but were always able to put food on the table. "B"'s friends and associates all live fairly similar lifestyles. If "B" is suddenly handed a magical supervisor role that pays $150,000 a year he'll feel absolutely rich. He'll have more money than any of his current associates. He has more money than he even knows what to do with.

Both "A" and "B" now make the same amount of money, but "B" is happier than "A" and it has everything to do with expectations, and since they have the same amount of money, then money must not be a direct factor.

You can keep taking this further until you hit a point where there's not enough money to cover bare necessities. This means that every single $ you make above the bare minimum to live a healthy life is unnecessary if you manage your expectations. For many of us it's easier to make more money than manage our expectations though. If you're barely scraping by on a $100,000 salary, maybe it's time to step back and examine your expectations and priorities.

+1, I think all of this is true and wise, but I will offer a contrasting perspective. I think it is good to have high expectations, not so much financially but in general.

I was working a stable, dull job, had a quiet social life, and was reasonably happy and content. But I decided that I could be living much more. I quit my job, moved cross country, started and finished a Ph.D. program, got an academic job, and also got much more adventurous in my social life. Across the board, my life was characterized by a lot more hardship, failure, and painful exposure to things which I wanted but were out of reach.

My life has been much, much better as a result. I am actually making much less money than I would be if I had kept on at my old job, but I raised my expectations relative to the life I was living, and this made all the difference.

It's in our nature that achievement makes us happy. I think it has something to do with Dopamine being released into our brains.

What I've found to be the secret for myself is that I only appreciate something as much as the effort it took to get it. It doesn't really matter what it is I'm trying to get, how much I enjoy the result seems to depend entirely on how much effort it took to achieve. If I work my ass off for $100, then it might feel like the best $100 I ever made. If someone hands me $1,000,000, I won't turn it down, but I won't care about it nearly as much as that hard-earned $100.

So setting realistic but challenging goals keeps us happy. If the bar's too low we don't appreciate the gains. Too high and we can lose our motivation.

Money can be part of those goals but it doesn't have to be.

It really starts to blow your mind when you start applying this principle to everything in life (I'm not running a cult or anything, ymmv).

Just out of interest ...

My life has been much, much better as a result.

How do you know this? You didn't live the other life, so you seem just to be speculating about how the other life may have turned out. You know know that the life you chose really is better.

Or do you?

"How do you know this?"

This question is, in my experience, the crux of many people's depression.

I realize that may seem to be hyperbole but consider that it is a question that cannot be reasonably answered. Even when it seems like it can, for example a friend of mine was stressing over the fact that they did not take a job offered to them by a startup, the startup was acquired and the person who did take the job did quite well. They felt like they had been 'stupid' to not taking the job, but everyone knows a company is the sum of its people. With the different mix the outcome could have been different.

I sometimes joke about knowing that I never invent time travel, because if I had I would have gone back to the summer of 2000 and told myself to cash out of equities. My wife said, but what if doing that prevents you from having the set of experiences that lead to you inventing time travel? Or maybe future-you sees the value of the path you took vs 'other' road you did not take.

Fundamentally you have to decide, move on, and accept. As a parent it is especially hard to do since you not only don't have any sort of manual on what the right thing to do is, everyone's child is different and so the 'right' thing is really impossible to know apriori.

So perhaps its not so much knowing that your life has been better because of your previous decisions, its more about understanding that the quality of your life, its 'betterness' if you will, is a combination of variables and that you've always decided to be true to your principals. So having solid principals for making those decisions you can be satisfied with your part in how your life has turned out.

I am comparing my life now to my life eight years ago, and also to some extent the life of my friends who are still living in the same town and working at the same company.

As far as how my other life may have "turned out"... I guess I'm not really sure what that means. I think the one comparison I can really make is if I had not made a lot of changes. Of course it is possible that I could have changed my life in some totally different direction, maybe without leaving town, and life would have been even better than my life now. That, of course, I can't guess.

But I feel conviction in my bones that I did right.

If you hadn't made any changes your life would have been exactly the same. And if you had made changes at a later point hen it would have been similar to ones your making now.

I think people underestimate how much work/effort/time it takes to change ones perspective.

You make a good point and it comes down to the parallel between the people who have money and the people who don't. For those who already have money, they view it as a standard, something they're used to and believe that their happiness comes from something else. For those who don't, not being able to pay a bill, having a good car to get back and forth to work, or being able to treat your kids to a movie and ice cream can significantly impact your happiness. Everyone says that money has nothing to do with it, but you're right, it does. Perhaps from a cosmic "we are floating in space" point of view, but in a human, "we run on money" view, there's significant happiness found in having money.

That being said, I think the concept of money and having or not having it is a great topic for debate. It's one of those things that most would love to detest, but in reality, they realize they only way they're going to be able to detest it (short of being homeless) is to make money. It sucks, it's dehumanizing, and it shouldn't be that way, but it is.

Maybe so, but it really is demonstrably true that there's a huge law of diminishing returns there. Once you earn a reasonable amount of money (the figure I saw for the US was around 50k, probably depreciated by now and obviously location-dependent) there is absolutely no correlation between making more money and happiness. The main take-away is that it probably requires a lot less than you think.

For this and many other interesting musings on the nature of happiness I strongly recommend "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert. It's fascinating.

There's a big difference between "once you have a home and food" and "once you have 50k/yr", though.

Absolutely. A lot of people don't plan to stop at 50k/yr either, though - the OP's main point is that from a happiness optimisation POV after that point (or maybe earlier) their energy would be better spent elsewhere. And your expensive shoes example person is probably making more than 50k.

I believe what he means by this is part "more money will not solve ALL your problems" (ie: it's not a panacaea) and part "if you have food and shelter, everything else is a form of luxury". If you require a car to provide food and shelter, then I don't think that what he's said is invalid.

Sure a lot of things in life are luxuries, but that doesn't mean they are bad, and often can still solve problems.

"My feet hurt all day" might get solved by buying a fairly expensive pair of shoes, for example.

Will winning the lottery give you the perfect life? Doubtful. Can money solve many problems and improve your life in other ways? Very often.

As an interesting corollary, it's actually a longitudinally studied and extensively documented fact that winning the lottery does not provide long-term happiness.

More often than not, it actually causes more problems than it solves. I forget the statistic off the top of my head, but some astounding percentage of lottery winners -- let's say 75% -- end up worse off within 5 years of winning than they were before they won. (Granted, a lot of that has to do with the fact that the type of person most likely to be playing the lottery is also the type of person who has no real concept of the value of how to manage a $XXX million fortune, let alone a $XXX million fortune acquired literally overnight).

    Granted, a lot of that has to do with the fact that 
    the type of person most likely to be playing the 
    lottery is also the type of person who has no real
    concept of the value of how to manage a $XXX million
    fortune, let alone a $XXX million fortune acquired 
    literally overnight

That's it - I (anecdotaly) know several people who won the "internet start up lottery" (gotten very, very wealthy due to their start-ups doing well) and all of them are doing alright years after "winning the lottery".

I'm the author and I agree with Vacri's interpretation.

In other words, money is a necessary but not sufficient condition to be happy.

You can't spend 8 years traveling the world without quite a bit of money. The author should look at his own life before telling others that they don't need money; it sounds like luxury to me.

Simply not true.

When I first started traveling for long durations, I quickly realized that my biggest expense was keeping my life in the USA alive. Once I ditched the apartment/car payment, I found that I could live substantially cheaper on the road than I could back home.

As an example, living and climbing on the beach in Thailand, I could pay for my monthly rent/food/beer expenses with a single day of billable work. I had a laptop along for exactly that purpose, and as a result I ended up padding out the savings quite a bit by living in a tin shack on the beach.

You think travel is expensive because vacations are expensive and that's your only experience with travelling. A week in Hawaii costs about $10k for your family all in, so naturally it must cost me ~$500k a year on the road, right? I'll leave it to you to do the math on what you actually end up spending when you're paying local rates for accommodation and travel in 3rd world countries, but the answer you're working toward is $500-$1000/month.

I do see your point, and agree to a certain extent. Having spent some time in south-east asia, I have experienced first hand how cheap life can be compared to what I'm used to (a factor of 10, for a comparable lifestyle). In fact at one point I would consider that I pretty much ran out of money but still managed to get by.

However, I still see this type of travelling as a luxury. I would not fly off to another country for 6 months or longer, without a significant amount of savings.

Not everyone can necessarily do a bit of freelance work when they are abroad. As a former freelancer who who's spent several years now working full-time in an office, I have lost a lot of my freelance network of clients and contacts. Furthermore, if we're looking outside of the Hacker News community, not everyone has a skill that can be as easily marketable from a distance.

Trying to establish a freelance network back in your native country, once you're abroad could be an option for me, although not one I would rely on for my survival. I would also not rely on acquiring work visas, either. Especially if I couldn't prove to the relevant authorities that I had enough existing savings to not be a burden.

So unless you're a person in a particular situation in life, with a specific skill set, you will still be spending a reasonable amount of money during your months or years abroad. Add to that flights, insurance (maybe you're not too keen on cheap surgery in a third world country), vaccinations, the loss of maybe a few years contributions to your retirement savings, the cost of reintegrating yourself into your country when you return. Things get expensive. Although I previously did not think so, I would now definitely consider long-term travelling (with the intent of returning) a luxury.

Edit: That's not to say it's not a good idea. Or that it's impossible. As far as luxuries go, it's a very good one to go for.

You're arguing against an Existence Disproof here. Right this minute, there are tens of thousands of people travelling the world slowly from a backpack, picking up casual work as needed to get them to the next place. No special skills needed. Most of them you'd consider unskilled, which is just fine for waiting tables or running the front desk at a hostel.

It's less common to see Americans doing this, but you'll be hard pressed to find a Brit or Aussie who didn't take a Gap Year at some point.

As a brit who has had a gap year, and worked for it. I don't deny the existence of gap years, or people working on the road, by all means. But taking my past travels, for example, I now realise that I was fortunate to be at a particular point in my life (still living at home) and had parents which were not rich, but well enough off to be a viable backup should a problem arise. I also worked hard for it.

Gap years aside, I'm referring to sustainability when trying to do the work you want to, travelling and living frugally. Perhaps the author of the blog post was waiting tables for 8 years, in which case I apologise. But I'm assuming that, like me, they're a person who might have a bit of savings, and has a skill set in an industry that is location-independent. As such, doing work we are qualified in, on the road, is an option that is available to us. However, I acknowledge that doing so is a luxury. I do not believe I would be able to do so if I was penniless and didn't have a fair amount of work experience.

I didn't mean to be a killjoy. Doing what the author of the blog post did is something that I aspire to do. And as someone working hard towards that goal (work fulfillment + location and financial independence + guaranteed retirement income), I feel that presenting the bigger picture is important.

"...you'll be hard pressed to find a Brit... who didn't take a Gap Year at some point."

Not true. Sure, it's common enough for young people to take a gap year before or after university, but not everyone does - I certainly didn't. Among those who don't go to university, taking a gap year would be the exception rather than the rule.

As a Brit... might I suggest that the more accurate answer is that you'd be hard pressed to find an ex-pat in your current country of residence who didn't do that at some point?

You don't need to limit yourself to freelancing work either. I've done odd jobs that got me enough money for another week of travel with a few days works. One was laying concrete in a 3rd world country after drinking with a local farmer. It is very easy to get by if you have a varied skillset. Learn how to weld and you will never go hungry anywhere (until they invent cheap, intelligent welding robots).

I've been working abroad for over a year now. Make it happen and go where you want. Kids are easy to travel with in most countries too.

Sure you can. Travel needs not be expensive. If you don't stay in expensive hotels and eat out all the time, don't go drinking/partying every night its not difficult to travel on very little money. Move to a new country with a work permit, get a short term job, maybe working in your hostel, or at a bar, or even as general labour and save up enough to make your next hop.

I think you'll find it's not that easy to move to a new country with a work permit, unless you have a lot of money in your bank account (which is one of the first checks the embassies do), or you're of the wrong nationality (try entering europe being african). Yeah, try telling a starving child labourer in Honduras or South Africa that money will not solve any of their problems. Maybe you can travel hitch-hiking and getting to stay in people's places… I've done that in some parts of europe, but there's nothing like a pillow of cash to help you through the day.

If you're young and from the right countries it's very simple. It's called a working holiday visa. Usually gives you around a year to work and live in the destination country.

I am being downvoted above but isn't travel expensive? It has to be simply because of the fuel costs involved.

In my eyes, 8 years of constant travel would be expensive. Compare that to 8 years of working on the same spot.

Travel can be very expensive. It can also be very cheap. It might be nicer to fly from point A to B but odds are there is a cheaper bus ticket available. A 4 star hotel is very nice to stay at but a 0 star hostel will often cost you less than $15 a day. Working in a bar will easily cover that, your food(buying cheap from local sources and cooking for yourself), and allow you to save for your next bus/boat ticket or where absolutely needed a short haul flight.

You see, that's my point, as soon as you have to cut the costs of other parts of your life you've clearly started doing something which requires large amount of money...

What costs are you cutting? No, vacationing in 5-star hotels for 8 years would not be cheap but that's not a necessity for travelling. You probably don't rent a 5-star apartment at home.

People are talking about buying less stuff, and going out for drinks and nice food less often.

These are costs that would be decreased.

My thought was that: you have to make concessions beyond what you would normally have in your life and that, to me, is proof that you are undertaking in a luxury which you can not easily afford.

Which brings me to my original point: when it's clear that the ability to travel requires money can somebody then genuinely advise others that more money doesn't solve a problem?

You're also often lowering your level of income by getting rid of steady employment which is where the cutting down on things comes from.

From what I've heard, travel costs are shockingly cheaper once you get out of the US.

The author addresses that exact point in his article. Take a look -- apparently he has no money.

Agree - as long as money buys you time, it's valuable, because time is the only truly limited resource we have. From a certain income level and up, though, there is very little gain in happiness, so i find the western world's fascination with very rich people absurd.