My observations are based on recently eclipsing $100k in my primary job after mostly making under $50k.
Everything was suddenly easier. Not just because I was easily paying the bills and had cash building up, but everything.
Things are easier, you’ve got options you never had, a major life stressor is just gone.
For me, when I achieved my goal of having more than I would ever spend, work became so much better. I was working for enjoyment..the challenge…the game, not for the money. It’s funny how people on the job treat you when the see you’re giving 200%, running on adrenaline, and treat money more as a scorecard. You’re unstoppable.
Does all that make you “happy”? IDK, and who cares? It’s a blast.
The opposite happened to me. Once I hit my goal, work got tedious. Parts of the job I didn't like (and I couldn't change them no matter what) I started to hate. I tried to focus on what made my job a dream job when I first started but it was of no help. I was done. Someone else can have the dream job. I had better use of my time.
It's only been a seven months in retirement, but I am right so far. I had better use of my time than working. Not really seeking happiness but contentment.
Yeah. It really depends on the job.
It's a lot easier to lean into that "I have a lot of freedom and I'm going to enjoy this work" when you have a job with a lot of autonomy and authority to work the way you want to.
This is key My career goal was always to have significant business authority. I had little interest in acting as “a professional” or consultant or in a staff-level career tracks.
You certainly don’t need to be the sole decision maker, but it pays to be close. Doing what you’re told can suck…
1000%
Unfortunately, by design, most people don't have a ton of autonomy in their work.
Not so much here on the forums though, we have a ton of very senior professionals here compared to the general population. But still, we have a ton of folks, even very high earning folks, who are under the thumb of toxic management, so it's totally understandable that reaching FI could make them totally intolerant of their work, not enjoy it more.
I could never, ever go back to having a toxic person directly supervising me.
I'm personally happy to keep working until I die, but only if it's on my own terms. Throw a toxic boss in there and/or tedious work I don't want to do, and I would rather cut my spending in half and employ austerity measures.
That's why the reporting on studies like this is so misleading. People who make more money, like the population here, tend to statistically have more autonomy, more respect, and more interesting work.
You also have to account for the fact that the kind of folks who are getting to much higher incomes are the kind of folks who are *able* to get to those higher incomes. They tend to be more intelligent, more confident, more extroverted and assertive, feel entitled to success, and because they achieve the successes they pursued, tend to have an enormously inflated belief in their own agency in that success instead of attributing a reasonable portion of their success to luck and privilege.
They tend to believe that effort equals outcome, that the world is reasonably fair to people who work really hard, like them. People tend to like and respect them. They tend to have a ton of privilege, like not being from a marginalized population, and frequently come from comfortable, stable families. They are also very frequently attractive and/or taller than average.
So OF COURSE higher earning, more successful people are generally happier, because they tend to have the traits that correlate with being happier people who are treated better in society.
The research is pretty solid on this that making more money, especially in the US, tends to be solidly correlated with being dealt a better hand of cards in the first place. That people who make a lot of money tend to come from families who can pass down traits that result in making a lot of money.
Money is a huge part of happiness, nothing will make a person more miserable than serious financial insecurity. But money and power and autonomy are inextricable, and the kind of people who rise to positions of obtaining a lot of money are often coming in with a lot of power to begin with.
I've spent a ton of time with folks who have made enormous amounts of money (high 8 figure, low 9 figure folks), and I can tell you that from my perspective, what they had in common was less about talent or skill, and more about personality traits that command respect. People want to trust them, which makes it so much easier for them to attract capital and opportunities.
These are the folks who their whole lives have always triggered a vague sense in the people around them that they should be in charge. This is the kind of advantage that cannot be understated, and yet what's hilarious is that folks who have it, tend to believe that they've earned it due to merit.
Someone I know well, who has somewhere in the mid 8 figures NW, is one of these people. People just listen to her, and have done so since she was a child. She comes from wealth and just commands authority with every fiber of her being, but as someone who knows her well, I can tell you, she's not exceptionally intelligent or skilled. The world is just nicer to her, and it's pretty easy to be wildly successful when other exceptionally intelligent and skilled people want you to have authority over them.
The best leaders aren't geniuses, they're people who attract geniuses to work hard for them. So being one of these people who just vaguely inspires confidence in people is actually more valuable than being intelligent, skilled, or talented. But they often walk through life believing that this advantage is earned and that it's available to everyone if they just worked hard enough.
So is the money making people happier, or the respect, autonomy, and general comfort and ease in the world, the thing that's making them more happy?
It's obviously both, synergistically, but let's not ignore the complex interconnection of factors that contribute to someone having more success, what that success looks like in terms of their existence in the world, and what that all means for their general sense of safety, fairness, and comfort.
For some people work is a joy and for others it's torture. And it's sociologically fascinating to tease apart why that is.
