That's not how this works.
You don't need much effort to "get the people show up": they'll do it because they need the money, and you have those.
Second, if you're rich, you have people managing the hiring and coordination of projects and maintenance, you don't even need to know how many people are in your overall staff.
In any case, far far far less than worrying about next month's rent, or even a leaking roof and you scrapping for money to fix it.
They have people for that too. It's called personal assistant or secretary.
Very few don't do it this way, basically all 'old money' work like that for generations, employing non-trivial amount of folks.
I agree with you, just one more thought:
Imagine that you received ungodly amounts (20x your current salary) of money for something you like to do. And if you did i some more of that in a day, you would get even more money. And then there would be people sending you letter that they want to take care of your mundane things for about 0.8x of your current salary, which means you can do more of the thing you like every day. Wouldn't you take it? I probably would :(.
Or maybe it's the money itself all the way through. Just a lot of possibilities.
Imo, humans are hard wired to care about relative social standing. Income is a measure/indicator of social standing, among other things. Ideologically, we're resistant to the idea that we care about our ranking. We should care about absolutes... so I think this one is hard to study.
Generally speaking, human satisfaction tends to be relative. Relative to where we were. Relative to expectations... Relative to parents. Relative to last year. Etc.
This bias can also exist for lower-paying jobs, however I would guess proportionally there might be more 80-hour/week type high responsibility jobs in the higher paying brackets.
Yes:
> One could draw a snap judgment from this analysis and conclude that money, in fact, simply buys happiness. I think that would be the wrong conclusion. Clever sociologists will always find new ways of “calculating” that marriage matters most, or social fitness explains all, or income is paramount. But the subtler truth seems to be that finances, family, and social fitness are three prongs in a happiness trinity. They rise together and fall together. Low-income Americans have seen the largest declines in marriage and experience the most loneliness. High-income Americans marry more and have not only richer investment accounts but also richer social lives. In this light, the philosophical question of what contributes most to happiness is just the beginning. The deeper question is why the trinity of happiness is so stratified by income—and whether well-being in America is in danger of becoming a luxury good.
* https://archive.ph/4ofJ6 / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/happiness-...
There is a correlation between age and happiness. People of retirement age are generally happier than people in their forties. It's probably safe to conclude that retired people are happier than they themselves were when they were working. Even though they will have less income. So yes, what brings in the money matters: Not having to work makes you happier. Presumably the wealthy group correlates with not having to work. Or maybe only working a CEO-level job that consists of golfing with business partners and leaving the rest to others.
Numerous surveys show the people happiest in their jobs are hairdressers.
It's not highly paid, but it's a simple job in the warm and dry, chatting and making people happy.
Name me one job that is stressful for every single human being who ever lived on this planet. Or name a job that is never stressful for anyone.
You can spend whole life trying to find non-stressful job and never get it, because the problem is with you, not with your job.
I'm sure there are servicemembers who are super-chill under fire, and there's also anxious dog-walkers, but to say there's no meaningful distinction between jobs is ridiculous.
I do not say there is no distinction, I am saying how much someone gets stressed depends on their mental state, physical and emotional parameters that are not being taken care of. Its like if you try to make a city car perform on a level with racing cars it will break quickly - this is the same thing as stress.
> You can spend whole life trying to find non-stressful job and never get it, because the problem is with you, not with your job.
Sociopaths exist and can definitely make your job a misery.
This sounds obvious maybe but it's a bit different from money per se bringing happiness. It would be more about the perception of the work.
I also am not sure what to make of life satisfaction as a happiness indicator. It's a single item reflecting one aspect of happiness; there's other components of well-being. The author acknowledges this but it feels like a critical issue.