I agree money doesn’t buy happiness, but money can go a long way to helping with those problems.

For example, money can pay for better medical care.

I don’t agree with you. Most of the things you mention are the same level of pain and unhappiness regardless of if you have, or not have money. The one with the peers is misguided because with enough money maybe you don’t need your peers! Freedom of choice.

And money does certainly buy health in the US.

Money won't cure pain and suffering (although it does make trial lawyers happy) but even there it can buy better care. But pretty much everything else in life is better and more enjoyable with more money. You can live in a nicer house, in a better neighborhood, with better schools, with better goods and services, with more things to do, etc. You can travel more, in a more comfortable style. You can support other projects, artists, charity, etc.

More money absolutely does make it easier to have social life. It absolutely does make it easier to cure curable diseases as well as live the life to the fullest when you have incurable diseases. And increasing your wealth is strongly correlated with gaining respect of people who were born into similar backgrounds and socioeconomic conditions as you were.

More cynically, wealth makes it both easier to attract a romantic partner (fixes loneliness) and harder for them to later leave you (prevents heartache).

So, if you squint a little, money fixes 5 of the 5 listed problems.

> Most of the things that can be remedied with money are not the truly painful things of life either.

Have you done the math of what life consists of for most people?

It's 9-to-5. Your life is DOMINATED - by large order of magnitude - by involuntary wage slavery. Where you literally sell away your time for pennies on a dollar to a highest bidder.

That is the most painful thing in life, bar none, there is nothing worse than this. This is what ruins most of your health, ages you the most, causes most of the stress, which seperates you from spending more time with your family and loved ones and being free and doing what you want.

Unless the wage-slavery happens to be of enjoyable type for you. Which is bit of an outlier, lets be honest.

> From having no respect from your peers?

Most people automatically give respect and admiration to people with money, regardless if it's deserved or not.

> Will money save you from heartache? From being lonely?

Being a 9-to-5 wage-slave is ten times worse than heartache or loneliness. Or most other things.

If you're lonely and aren't able to distract yourself from heartache and you have boatloads money, you have SKILL ISSUES of the most severe kind.

Money has brought nothing, but pure joy in my life.

> Will money save you from heartache?

Probably yes. If you consider dating to be a numbers game, money moves things into your favor greatly and will give you a chance to move past.

> From the pain of losing a loved one?

Money will help greatly, because for many people getting over loss involves therapy which costs money.

> From being lonely?

Money for many people buys companionship.

> From having no respect from your peers?

Given that people associate respect with money excessively, probably yes as well.

> From losing your health to incurable cancer?

Your chances of surviving cancer greatly scale with money.

Sure, there are limits to it, but absolutely access to money is tremendously pushing things towards happiness. I think it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise, at least in a capitalist society we all live in.

I don't think so. The original comment said reducing unhappiness leads to happiness with diminishing returns. This one said they are two different things.

This is a lie that people with money tell themselves to make themselves feel better about not giving away more of their money (ironically, proving themselves correct).

There's certainly a point of diminishing returns, and I'd even agree that it is a cliff. Once you have a decent place to live, and your day-to-day worries about paying the bills are covered, and unexpected emergencies do not threaten your ability to get to work, keep your job, and pay your rent, then for most people more money has a diminishing impact on happiness. But that amount of money is quite a bit more than the poverty line.

That hump is slightly above the average income level, so I wouldn't call it small. And it doesn't flatten at the hump -- people with more money are still generally happier, but the correlation does drop a lot.

No it's not. It might vary by country and culture but in the west that amount has consistently been found to be well over the poverty line and more often over double the median household income.

The whole section about him working for DOGE to "embark on a journey to save our government" tells you everything you need to know about him.

Point and laugh at the man who is honest about what he feels

OTOH, that’s probably how they got rich, and why I’ll never be.

It's surprising how few people do this; mitchellh is the exception that proves the rule.

A lot of the really valuable open source software gets written by people who aren't wealthy and have full time jobs doing something other than writing open source software.

How about let's aim for neither ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So they did improve the lives of the people around them.