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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

I mean we know that compensation isn't the primary factor for most people's happiness and satisfaction in their professional life. Put mercenary in and get mercenary out if you want, but for most people that's not the optimal strategy.

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This has been my strategy. I would rather be paid less working for a lower-stress company that treats my colleagues and me well than to get paid a higher salary working in a stressful, less respectful environment.

With that said, I’m paying for this decision with inflation outpacing annual merit increases at work, which means my effective pay is getting reduced as the prices of everything else rise around me. I still rent an apartment; I got repeatedly outbid in 2021 when I attempted to buy a home, and then the interest rate hikes of 2022 and 2023 completely priced me out of the market. I’m still living fine, but this inflationary environment is highly demoralizing.

Ironically, there is evidence that money is still the primary driver of job selection (above meaningful work), based on the assumption that money will make them more happy.

https://giesbusiness.illinois.edu/news/2023/10/23/paper--hig...

Yep, people tend to have different (even contradictory and self-defeating) preferences over different time horizons. Many such cases.

I'm not sure that motivation follows from the preference. Money is an extremely good proxy for all sorts of desirable job attributes like respect, better working environments, and social status.

I would tend to agree, in part because of hedonic adaptation. I suspect the impact on happiness from more money is relatively less enduring.

>I mean we know that compensation isn't the primary factor for most people's happiness and satisfaction in their professional life.

It isn't, but housing is, and housing costs money, a lot of money in the last few years.

Is there data showing that housing is the primary driver? I vaguely remember Sebastian Junger's book Tribe describing how people in low socio-economic community housing generally were happier than more well-off people in individual housing. I think his thesis was modern life, with suburban living, tends to disconnect us from community. From that perspective, it would seem like community is more of a primary driver than housing.

There are also communities of well off people. In Europe. Not every well off person lives alone in a huge ranch 500km away from the nearest town.

I wasn't making a dichotomous claim about wealth. I was pointing out that housing may not be the primary driving of well-being. It's easier to illustrate with an example where lower income people report being happier, despite having less resources for good housing. Similarly, we could point out to poor people who are isolated and unhappy but that also misses the point.

Back to the original ask, I would be curious if there's data that shows housing as a primary driver of well-being, above those other elements.

Well, self reported happiness is all relative. Someone who has two goats in a town of no goats will be very happy while someone owning a small apartment in a town of McMansions will feel very unhappy.

Yes, that's part of the problem with defining happiness in terms of external status and materialistic wealth. Hedonic adaptation tends to erode it rather quickly. With that said, happiness is a subjective measure so of course the measurement will be relative.

But that still diverts from the issue. It wasn't about relative wealth. It was about the claim that the primary driver of happiness is housing. Absent any additional evidence, it doesn't seem to be the case.

My guess is they aren't seeing how much they're going to need for retirement (maybe it's much cheaper in Finland than the US), or have not thought about it, or have accepted/decided that they will work for more of their lives.

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