A Gentleman's Guide to Happiness

Modern research has shown that money can only buy happiness to a certain extent, and it has little to do with the accumulation of riches and more a matter of worry about survival. When you're at zero, getting a buck will certainly increase your happiness, and finding twenty dollars on the sidewalk can cause euphoria. Fifty, a hundred, every increase in denomination from zero has a direct correlation to your feeling of safety, of your ability to take your life into your own hands, of relief from dependence upon society for survival, but there's a cut-off point. According to Dan Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard University and the author of the book Stumbling on Happiness, "Once you get basic human needs met, a lot more money doesn't make a lot more happiness." Past $50 thousand, the buck to happiness quotient declines dramatically. Going from zero to $50 thousand raises your happiness to about 99% of your ability to feel such a thing, providing a healthy cushion of survival, but past that, into the hundreds of thousands and millions, happiness only increases in smaller and smaller increments of the remaining 1%.

So rather than focusing on regaining the riches you once had, the yacht, the heliport, focus on that $50 thousand which is genuinely all anyone in America requires to experience 99% of the happiness they'll ever need.

"Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant."
- Horace -