Now, here’s the contrast, I know an independent future’s trader, who works 8 hours per week (yes, at most one business day in week’s time), for a $100K/yr income. Sorry folks, but I’d never seen a happier person. He teaches martial arts, writes, travels, and does whatever he wants with his time. Does money bring happiness? It certainly can.

To be honest, I’m a person who wants to be financial free and wealthy. But I’m not just set my goal to be wealthy in finance. But also in relationship, health and spiritual. In fact the true “wealthy” should cover all the aspect in life.

There’s several reasons why your ‘make a rich man poor and/or make a poor man rich’ experiment wouldn’t work:

-First, if you experience less happiness when you go from making $100k per year down to $20k per year, that doesn’t necessarily mean that making a lower salary leads to less happiness. Rather, it could just mean that a drastic drop in income causes people to be less happy. The same logic applies for someone getting much more money and becoming happier; is it the amount of money, or just the difference compared to what they were previously receiving.

-Second, without controlling for the job environments of each group, you can end up drawing false comparisons. Many high paying jobs are accompanied by high stress (doctors, lawyers, CEOs of failing banks, etc.), which might cause enough unhappiness to offset the happiness of increased pay. The only thing we can determine by simply changing the subject’s income is that, say, doctors are happier making $100k a year for their services than making $20k a year for the same work, or that McDonald’s workers would be much happier if they took home $100k each year.

-Third, and most troublesome, is that to be a true measure of the effects of shifting incomes on happiness, the participants would need to be chosen randomly. Otherwise, the volunteers who do participate might be substantially different from the overall demographic (they might be more adventurous or take pleasure in advancing scientific knowledge), which could skew the results. Of course, choosing a bunch of people at random and changing their income (and possibly their jobs, as per my second point) for an experiment would be morally questionable and highly illegal. And thank goodness for that; I for one don’t want some sociology professor to determine my income next year in order to see how I react.

At the same time, it seems intuitive that money doesn’t buy happiness. Can money buy love or help with loneliness? What about health? Yes, you can eat healthier or have better medical care or join the health club, but these choices make very limited impact. At the same time highly compensated jobs often come with higher level of stress. They are also more often sedentary jobs.

I also agree with Master Po. I earn over 100K, and nope, they don’t pay it for nothing. I cannot just leave work at 5PM and forget about it. My employer is actually better than most in terms of schedules – it gives me unlimited number of sick days, doesn’t bother tracking vacation days and couldn’t care less when I come and go or if I work from home on some days – as long as I am there for critical meetings (many of which are teleconferences so you can easily dial from home) and get results. Results are all-important, and these are near impossible to achieve by stopping work at 5pm. Even if you do, you still think about it. Talking about teleconferences – sometimes they are with India or China, in which case I may end up having a meeting at 9pm. Plus, the environment is very competitive, and everyone is ranked against each other. So you always worry if you’ve done enough and often take on more than you can handle. There are a lot of people in my company who don’t even take all of their vacation days. I make a point of taking my all vacation days, and always feel guilty about it, even if I have completed everything.