A cheeseburger is a cheeseburger.
That was the line. I saw this on a widely circulated Reddit thread, and the argument was that once you have two or three million dollars, a paid-off house, and a car that starts, your life stops getting better. You and Jeff Bezos are eating the same lunch.
People seemed to like it. It was reshared onto every social media platform I use.
However, I sit across from clients at that number most weeks, and almost none of them feel “finished”.
Perhaps we should stop asking for their “number” and start asking something different.
What happens on a Tuesday?
Nobody has an answer ready. That silence is the problem I want to address, and the research explains why.
First, money helps
I should say this plainly before I discuss anything else, because the rest of the piece depends on it.
More money is (almost always) better than less money.
Your mortgage renews at a rate that would have been unthinkable when you signed, and you cover the difference instead of listing the house. Your parents need a retirement residence, and you are choosing between three of them rather than waiting for a subsidised bed. The furnace quits in February, and you replace it rather than finance it at 19 per cent.
Health care is supposed to be the great equaliser here. Mostly it is. But the gaps are real and expensive. Dental work. Prescriptions your plan does not cover. Physiotherapy after a fall, twice a week, for as long as it takes.
And time. Money buys unpaid leave when necessary for family emergencies. It buys the choice to take three weeks off after a diagnosis instead of going back Monday.
None of that is a mindset. It is a resource problem, and resources genuinely help.
The research is blunter than most people expect.
In 2010, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton published the study that gave us the famous $75,000 ceiling. Above that number, they found, day-to-day happiness flattened out.
Then in 2021, Matthew Killingsworth at Wharton ran it again with a different method. Instead of asking people to recall yesterday, he pinged them on their phones and asked how they felt right then. He found no ceiling at all. Happiness kept climbing with income.
Two respected researchers. Flat contradiction.
Here is the part I like. Instead of trading rebuttals in journals for a decade, they pooled their raw data and brought in a neutral third party to referee. Kahneman called it an adversarial collaboration. The result landed in PNAS in 2023.
Both were right, about different people.
For the least happy group, happiness rose with income up to roughly $100,000, then plateaued. For everyone else, it kept rising. For the happiest group, it actually accelerated.
Killingsworth put it about as plainly as a researcher can. If you are rich and miserable, more money will not fix it.
So the ceiling does exist. It is just not where the viral post said it would be, and it does not apply to you by default. It applies to people who were already unhappy. For them, money kept the floor from falling out. It never lifted the roof.
