Why more money and success stop making you happier

The Short Version

Past the point where your basic needs are covered, more money and more success add surprisingly little to how happy you feel, because people get used to gains quickly and keep moving the goalpost [2][3][4]. Laurie Santos calls this hedonic adaptation and describes income research that levels off around $75,000 a year in the dollars of that study [2][3]. Arthur Brooks calls the chase for money, power, pleasure and honor a trap that costs people love, and names the "hedonic treadmill" of the success addict [1]. Andrew Huberman's solo review agrees that income has a weak effect on happiness once needs are met, though he insists money still matters for buffering stress [4]. All three point the same way: put your effort into time, relationships, giving, presence and meaning, which the sources tie much more closely to lasting well-being than another raise or another trophy [1][2][3][4].

Table of contents

What They Said

Arthur Brooks: the four idols and the success addict

Arthur Brooks, a Vanderbilt professor and senior fellow at Harvard Business School who has studied happiness exclusively since 2019, starts from the claim that happiness is not a feeling at all [1]. Good feelings are only evidence of it, the way the smell of the turkey is evidence of Thanksgiving dinner [1]. Looking at the people with the highest measured life satisfaction, he found three "macronutrients": enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning [1]. In his words: "The happiest people have enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning." [1] He adds a warning that matters for anyone chasing wealth for its own sake: "the pursuit of pleasure is not the secret of happiness, it's the secret to rehab." [1]

His central argument about money and status comes from Thomas Aquinas. Our animal impulses lie to us, he says, that money, power, pleasure or honor will finally make us happy [1]. As he lays it out on air: "There's four worldly rewards, money, power, pleasure, and honor." [1] None of the four is evil, and each can do great good; the problem comes when they are pursued as ends in themselves, because then they cost us love, which Brooks calls the secret of happiness [1]. He offers an elimination game to find your own idol: strike them out one by one until the one most likely to beguile you is left [1]. Huberman, playing along, eliminates honor, then pleasure, then money, and is left with power, which he reframes as a desire for unique self-expression and benevolent influence [1]. Brooks's own idol is honor. He wants people to love him, and he explains that honor addicts often learned as children that love has to be earned [1]. His answer to himself is that love is a free gift [1]. He singles out fame as the worst of the four: it is "the only one of the worldly rewards you can only ever be happy in spite of." [1]

Brooks describes strivers as especially prone to this trap. "What strivers, one of the things they often struggle with, if they're very, very, very competitive, if they're ambitious, if they're successful, is that they want to be special more than they want to be happy. They want to put points on the board." [1] He tells the story of a wealthy, unhappy executive who knew exactly what she needed to change and had not done it, "because I've always chosen to be special rather than happy." [1] Brooks admits the line hit him hard, because it reminded him of the Little League games and birthdays he missed while chasing success [1].

He names the hedonic treadmill directly. Describing the Hindu idea of four 25-year life stages, including a third stage of retreat from the scoreboard, he contrasts the spiritual person's sense of time with that of the achiever: "time for people who are very religious or very spiritual, time is completely different than the success addict. Who's like, time's running out. Ah, gotta do more. Like, hedonic treadmill." [1] In the third stage, he says, you gradually move away "not from doing your job, you know, not from your relationships, but from the scoreboard, from the honors of the world." [1]

His account of satisfaction explains why reaching a goal disappoints. Satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment after struggle, proportional to the effort, and "human beings are made to earn their success." [1] That is why Olympic athletes can fall into depression after winning gold: hitting the goal ends the progress we are wired for [1]. He jokes that Mick Jagger should have sung "I can't keep no satisfaction" [1]. Strivers, he says, also make the opposite mistake: citing Walter Mischel's marshmallow experiments, he says they "don't know what their marshmallow even is" and defer gratification forever [1]. He calls the standard retirement model, years of miserable work followed by total leisure, "neuro physiologically unsound" and philosophically unsound too [1].

Brooks also connects the chase for numbers with addiction. Huberman shares psychiatrist Anna Lembke's observation that obsessive quantification, such as counting pills, checking portfolios or tracking followers, is often a hallmark of addiction driven by loss aversion [1]. Brooks links this to the left hemisphere's "how-to and what" function, while meaning lives in the right hemisphere, which handles questions like love, faith and purpose [1]. People stuck in the left hemisphere on their phones lose access to meaning, which he calls the biggest happiness crisis today [1]. He points to David Brooks's distinction between resume virtues and eulogy virtues, with a line about what really matters at the end: "it's probably better if you don't imagine people at your funeral saying, he had 5 million miles on Delta." [1]

Where Brooks sends people instead is toward love, relationships and meaning. His rule for turning pleasure into enjoyment is to add people and memory: "If you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong." [1] Drawing on Josef Pieper, he describes proper leisure as time that pursues none of the worldly rewards: deepening relationships on purpose, learning something you don't need to learn, and developing yourself spiritually or philosophically [1]. He says that doing leisure this way is "ultimately what will take you from the world of pleasure into the world of enjoyment and give you greater happiness. That's the theory. And it's actually been verified a lot." [1] He also closes with three "why" questions about coherence, purpose and significance, the last of which asks why your life matters, and to whom [1].

Laurie Santos: our minds lie about money and circumstances

Laurie Santos, the Yale cognitive scientist behind Psychology and the Good Life, made the case twice, once with Huberman [2] and once with Mel Robbins [3]. Her core message is that people put real effort into being happy but aim it at the wrong things. As she told Robbins: "We're putting a lot of work in some of us putting a lot of money in. But we tend to be taking the things that don't get us there." [3] With Huberman she put it more bluntly: "our mind lies to us when it comes to our happiness." [2]

The income curve. Santos describes Daniel Kahneman's research: at the low end of the income scale, more money reliably means more happiness, but the curve levels off around $75,000 a year, beyond which extra income did not reduce reported stress or increase positive emotion [2][3]. She told Huberman those were pre-tax, 2010 dollars [2], and told Robbins the study dates to around 2009 and that the figure would be perhaps $100,000 to $110,000 today [3]. With Robbins she added that beyond that level, doubling or tripling income did not bring more positive emotion or less stress [3]. She mentions that later debates suggest the slope may keep rising, but only by a tiny, negligible amount, far less than extra exercise, 20 more minutes of sleep or writing down things you're grateful for [2]. She is careful about the bottom of the scale: "if you look at the lower end of the income spectrum, you would obviously say that money affects happiness. If you can't put food on the table, if you can't put a roof over your head, definitely getting a little bit more needing is going to affect your happiness in a positive way." [2] For people without food or shelter, or in a refugee camp, circumstances matter a great deal [3].

Why the curve flattens. Santos gives Robbins several reasons. First, more money often means less time: "rich, more higher salary now usually means you're working harder. Or you're putting in more hours at work." [3] Second, more work means less social contact: "The more you're working, the less you're interacting socially." [3] Third, and she calls it the bigger thing, adaptation: "as you get more money, you kind of just get used to that over time." [3] You start seeing the trainer and flying first class, and those upgrades soon stop giving a boost [3].

Moving reference points. The second engine of the treadmill is comparison. We judge relative to reference points, and we compare upward [2]. "And honestly, as you get richer, you're kind of going up this sort of logarithmic scale where their reference points are getting even further away from you." [2] People working toward that ever-receding target are pursuing "a goal that's probably not going to make them that much happier, but they haven't kind of abandoned this intuition that more money will make me happy." [2] Her illustration: "my $50 million seems kind of crappy because I hang out with people who have $100 million." [2] She draws on Clay Cockrell, a therapist who works only with the ultra-wealthy, and notes the irony: "if wealth made you happy, he should be out of a job." [2] His clients keep moving the goalpost from 50 million to 100 million instead of giving up the idea that more money will make them happy [2]. With Robbins she told Cockrell's story of a client in marital strife because he couldn't find a place to park the yacht his wife wanted [3].

Arrival and the bronze medal. Santos names the arrival fallacy, the belief that "I'll be happy when" you get the promotion, the money or the elite college; hedonic adaptation means the high fades quickly [2]. Her example from sport: studies coding Olympic athletes' faces found silver medalists often look miserable because they compare themselves to gold, while bronze medalists can be happier even than gold medalists because they compare themselves to not medaling at all [2]. She tells her high-achieving students that always winning is a terrible recipe for happiness [2]. She recalls figure skater Michelle Kwan saying that what she loved most was not the medal stand but lacing up her skates and seeing the Olympic rings in the ice [2].

Circumstances matter less than we think. When Huberman said he knew happy and miserable people at every level of wealth, Santos agreed: "if you look at people with all those different life circumstances, both the good version and the bad version, find some happy folks and some not-so-happy folks." [2] Her conclusion, with its caveat: "unless those circumstances are really dire, circumstances don't matter as much as we think." [2] She told Robbins she finds that empowering: "Going from your current salary to $300 million a year, that's a big change. It's going to take a lot of work," whereas "all the strategies we're going to start talking about soon are ones that you have complete control over." [3]

What to chase instead. Santos's list is specific. Time spent with friends and family, and time physically around other people, are the strongest predictors of happiness in daily-activity studies [2]. Happy people are more social, for introverts and extroverts alike [3]. Time affluence matters so much that feeling time-starved is as big a hit on your well-being as if you self-report being unemployed [2], a finding she credits to Harvard Business School's Ashley Whillans [3]. She suggests that much of the happiness cost of low income may come from lack of time, such as long bus commutes and multiple jobs [2]. The best use of money at any income, she says, is buying time: "one of the best ways we can spend our money to increase our happiness is to actually use money to buy back time." [3] And giving beats spending on yourself: "happy people don't spend a lot of time on themselves," and in experiments by Lara Aknin and colleagues, people handed $20 were happier spending it on someone else [2].

Andrew Huberman's happiness review: a weak effect, with nuance

In a solo episode, Huberman reviews the research and lands close to Santos, with some pushback [4]. He describes the Harvard longitudinal study begun in 1938, whose central finding is that beyond a certain level of income relative to cost of living, more money doesn't make people much happier [4]. He quotes a 2008 Science paper by Elizabeth Dunn and colleagues, titled "spending money on others promotes happiness," which starts from the observation that "income has a reliable but surprisingly weak effect on happiness within nations," particularly once basic needs are met [4]. In that research, prosocial spending was associated with significantly greater happiness, independent of and similar in size to the effect of income, while personal spending was unrelated to happiness [4]. Among employees receiving bonuses, those who gave away more were happier, and "the manner which they spent that bonus was a more important predictor of their happiness than the size of the bonus itself." [4]

Huberman adds his own framing: money cannot buy happiness, "but it certainly can buffer stress," for example by paying for childcare, cleaning or night nurses so parents can sleep [4]. He tells a personal story that shows the treadmill in miniature. As a graduate student in a small town he earned little but lived in the lab doing what he loved and felt low stress; as a postdoc his income rose about 30 to 40%, living costs rose more, and he was very stressed [4]. His peer group changed too: in the small town social life ran on free or cheap activities, but in the city his peers' activities cost more, so money shaped his access to connection [4]. He also notes that people tend to feel less happy on birthdays after about 25, as they compare themselves to peers [4], and that we are decent at knowing how we feel now but poor at predicting how we will feel in the future [4].

His list of what reliably raises well-being is not about wealth: good sleep on at least 80% of nights, quality nutrition, social connection, purposeful work (paid or unpaid), exercise and relationships with pets [4]. He describes a kind of happiness he calls synthetic, a term from Dan Gilbert's field, which we create through deliberate action and mindset rather than by obtaining things such as a degree, a partner, income or gifts; he says it may be as powerful as natural happiness or more so [4]. His tools for it are prosocial spending and giving effort, brief meditation to train focus, quality social connection, eye contact, touch and pets, and committing to your choices [4]. He closes on presence: "our ability to attend and focus really equates to happiness." [4]

A comedian's view from the other side of the money

A Joe Rogan conversation with writer and comedian Bridget Phetasy adds anecdotes rather than research, but they fit the pattern [5]. Rogan opens by observing that nobody is content being a little successful [5]. He mentions a billionaire friend of Bryan Callen's who feels poor next to people worth $100 billion, and Phetasy recalls dating a man worth about half a billion who concluded with his friends that you could be happy at about $250 million [5]. Phetasy, who describes herself as an addict in recovery, says she avoids obsessing over analytics because she can become hyper-focused on numbers, and meeting fans reminded her that "these are not just numbers, they're people" [5]. Gratitude, she says, was one of the keys to her sobriety, "a powerful mechanism For like shifting your perspective" [5]. Rogan's own formula for happiness is health first, then real friends who make fun of you [5].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

Agreement

Money helps until needs are met, then fades. Santos and Huberman both report that income matters most at the bottom and much less once basic needs and cost of living are covered [2][3][4]. Brooks never argues that money is evil; he argues it is a poor end in itself [1].

People adapt and keep comparing. Santos's hedonic adaptation and upward comparison [2][3], Brooks's success addict on the "hedonic treadmill" [1], Huberman's postdoc raise swallowed by living costs and his note about birthday comparisons [4], and the billionaires in Rogan's stories who feel poor next to richer friends [5] all describe the same loop. Santos's "my $50 million seems kind of crappy" [2] and Phetasy's $250 million threshold [5] are nearly the same story.

Achievement disappoints on arrival. Brooks's gold medalists who sink into depression [1] and Santos's arrival fallacy and silver medalists [2] make the same point from different angles: the prize itself does not deliver the lasting lift people expect.

The better targets are relationships, time, giving and meaning. Brooks says love is the secret of happiness and that enjoyment needs other people [1]. Santos says social connection is the biggest behavioral lever and that time affluence and giving outperform spending on yourself [2][3]. Huberman lists social connection, purposeful work and prosocial spending among the most reliable tools [4].

Numbers can crowd out the thing itself. Brooks and Lembke's point about quantification as a mark of addiction [1], Santos's example of David Sedaris's Fitbit turning the joy of walking into a chase for step counts [2], and Phetasy's reason for avoiding analytics [5] all warn that extrinsic scorekeeping can steal intrinsic enjoyment.

Disagreement

Does money buffer stress? Huberman says money "certainly can buffer stress" and argues it would be inaccurate and even disrespectful to say money doesn't matter; his closing model includes income that covers the cost of living plus savings for two to 12 months of expenses [4]. Santos, when Huberman offered the same line on her episode, said the data may not support even that, though wealth can make risk feel safer [2]. Both are describing the flattening curve, but Huberman's view comes partly from his own experience of being stressed on a higher salary in an expensive city and from what money can pay for (childcare, cleaning, night nurses) [4], while Santos leans on Kahneman's finding that extra income beyond the plateau did not reduce reported stress [2]. The two positions meet in Santos's own advice to Robbins: money does help when you spend it to buy back time [3].

Do we fully adapt to big life changes? Santos describes the classic study of lottery winners and people who became paraplegic in which, a year later, both groups were statistically back near baseline, and uses it to argue we should fear risky attempts less [2]. Huberman revisits the same study and says Dan Gilbert later corrected himself in a 2019 podcast: the difference was not as large as people expect, but people who became paraplegic did report being less happy [4]. Huberman concludes that sudden wealth brings a modest increase in happiness while major trauma tends to lower well-being, even though people are remarkably resilient [4]. On the money side, both readings support this article's point: winning a fortune does not transform a life as much as people imagine [2][4]. They differ on the bad side, where Huberman is more cautious.

Small differences in detail. Santos dates the Kahneman study to 2010 in one conversation [2] and around 2009 in the other [3]. She describes Nick Epley's train experiment with a $10 Starbucks gift card on Huberman's show [2] and $5 gift cards on Robbins's [3]. She puts loneliness among young people at around 70 to 75 percent [2] and overall loneliness rates at around 60% [3]. None of these changes the conclusion.

Where suffering fits. Brooks stresses that unhappiness lives inside all three macronutrients, and that people who try to eliminate suffering "will paradoxically miss their own happiness" [1]. Santos is not preaching toxic positivity either; she treats negative emotions as dashboard warning lights [2]. The difference is emphasis: Brooks puts meaning, struggle and faith at the center [1], while Santos and Huberman focus on everyday behaviors that can be tested in studies [2][3][4].

Why It Works

Adaptation. Santos explains that every good thing becomes ordinary if it sticks around, from the tenth bite of a great salad to a partner saying "I love you" [2]. Huberman connects this to the nervous system: happiness, like every neural system from vision to temperature, depends on contrast [2]. A raise or a first-class seat creates contrast at first, then becomes the new baseline [3]. Santos's line: "If you've ever lost something you're hedonically adapted to, you know how quickly you recognize the value of it." [2] The flip side is hopeful: we also adapt to bad events, at least in part [2][4].

Relative judgment. Santos says our minds rarely judge anything objectively: we measure salary or looks against a reference point, usually someone who seems better off, and it never stops, even at the top [3]. As income rises, the reference group gets richer, so the gap never closes [2].

Reward and effort. Brooks says satisfaction is proportional to the struggle behind an accomplishment, so reaching a goal ends the progress we are wired for [1]. Huberman adds that dopamine not preceded by effort tends to leave you in a trough, and describes addiction as "a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure," while happiness looks like a broadening [2]. In his review he notes that anticipating a reward often raises feel-good chemistry more than receiving it [4]. The effort of calling or visiting someone, he says, is part of what makes it rewarding [2].

Time pressure. Higher pay often brings longer hours, less free time and less social contact [3]. Time famine is as big a hit to well-being as unemployment [2][3], and feeling rushed changes behavior: in a 1970s study, Princeton seminary students hurrying to give a talk on the Good Samaritan rarely stopped to help a person in need staged along their route [3]. People primed to feel time-wealthy were more likely to chat with others in a coffee shop and felt happier [3].

Misprediction. Our brains evolved to lock onto threats rather than blessings [2][3], and because social connection was abundant in our evolutionary past, we never evolved a strong craving for it the way we did for rare sweet and fatty foods [2]. So we overvalue things like money and undervalue a conversation: in Epley's work, people predict an interaction will rate about three out of ten and experience something closer to a six [2]. Huberman notes that we are poor at predicting how we will feel in the future [4].

Giving and presence. The Dunn research found prosocial spending linked to happiness while personal spending was unrelated [4], and Aknin's experiment found people happier spending $20 on someone else [2]. Santos adds that doing something nice for someone makes you feel you have more time, because helping signals to your brain that you have room on your plate [3]. On attention, Killingsworth and Gilbert's 2010 Science paper found that minds wandered to pleasant topics about 43% of the time, yet "people were no happier when thinking about pleasant topics than about their current activity," and mind wandering appeared to be a cause, not just a consequence, of unhappiness [4].

Meaning versus metrics. Brooks's explanation is philosophical and neurological at once: the worldly idols pull us away from love [1], and life spent in the left hemisphere's "how-to and what" mode, counting and checking, cuts us off from the right hemisphere's questions of love, faith and purpose where meaning lives [1].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

It applies once basic needs are covered. Every source that addresses it draws the line there. For people who cannot put food on the table or a roof over their heads, more money clearly raises happiness [2][3]. Mel Robbins describes her own card bouncing at a gas station, and Santos agrees that relentless stress over basic needs crowds out happiness [3]. The plateau Santos cites was around $75,000 a year in the dollars of its time, perhaps $100,000 to $110,000 today by her estimate [3]. Huberman frames the threshold as income relative to cost of living [4], which his postdoc story shows can move depending on where you live [4].

Money still has good uses. The finding is not that money is useless. Huberman calls it inaccurate to say money doesn't matter and wants a savings buffer [4]. Santos recommends spending to buy back time [3]. Both Huberman and Santos point to giving as money well spent [2][4]. Huberman stresses that giving isn't a call to give away all your money; whatever fraction you can afford helps, and giving time and effort counts too [4].

Voluntary giving only. The benefits of being other-oriented depend on choice. Santos says obligations you feel you can't refuse, like unchosen caretaking, don't produce the same lift: "If you feel like you have no choice, then that doesn't count." [3]

Work is not the enemy. Huberman pushes back on the idea that no one on their deathbed wishes they'd worked more: work is how most people earn income and can bring deep meaning [4]. Brooks keeps his struggle-and-satisfaction model [1]; his target is making money or honor the goal, not effort itself. His ashrama stage moves away from the scoreboard, "not from doing your job" [1].

Adaptation is not total for bad events. Huberman's correction of the paraplegia story means you shouldn't assume people bounce back from every trauma [4]. The treadmill argument is strongest for gains.

Size of the effect. Santos is candid that her practices produce modest change: roughly five to 15% happier, which she calls small but real and lasting [3]. She has personally become "maybe even about 20 to 30% happier" through practice [3]. This is a shift of emphasis, not a cure. If you are dealing with depression, anxiety or trauma, the sources point to real resources and treatment [4]; talk to a qualified professional rather than relying on lifestyle changes alone.

What To Do With It

1. Find your idol. Run Brooks's elimination game on money, power, pleasure and honor, striking them one by one until the one most likely to beguile you remains [1]. Then ask his significance question: why does your life matter, and to whom? [1]

2. Pick a lower reference point. When you catch yourself comparing upward, look for what Santos calls the bronze lining: compare yourself to a point below you, as she did on a run when she compared herself not to the runners passing her but to her own recent days on crutches [2][3].

3. Practice negative visualization. Briefly imagine losing something you have adapted to, such as your job, your car, your health or your partner, then notice you still have it [2][3]. Santos says just two seconds of imagining can make the next hug with your kid feel different [2].

4. Spend money to buy time, and name the time you bought. Pay a neighbor's kid to mow the lawn or use a wash-and-fold service, then say what you'll do with the saved time, as Santos did with the 45 minutes from buying an egg sandwich [3]. Schedule a blank hour on your calendar a few months out and protect it [2].

5. Use your time confetti. The scattered five- and ten-minute gaps in a day add up to more free time than past generations had; instead of scrolling, use them to text a friend a delight, walk in sunlight or do a short workout [2][3].

6. Add one real-time interaction a week. If you're not feeling happy, Santos suggests one more call, visit or conversation a week and see how it feels over time [2]. Real time counts, including video or a phone call, while texting is closer to an artificial sweetener [2]. Talk to a stranger: introverts and extroverts get the same boost [3].

7. Give, by choice. Spend some money on someone else, in whatever amount you can afford [2][4], or give time and effort by helping a neighbor, serving at a food kitchen or picking up trash [4]. Santos's homework: give at least three compliments in the next seven days that really matter to the person [3]. If you have no spare money or time, ask for help, because "asking for help can be a gift to someone else." [2]

8. Stop counting what you love. Watch for metrics that turn an intrinsic pleasure into a scoreboard, like Sedaris's step counter [2], obsessive portfolio or follower checking [1], or analytics [5]. Brooks suggests going device-free for the first and last hour of the day and at meals [1].

9. Enjoy the journey, and don't wait for retirement. Treat goals as a path, as Michelle Kwan loved lacing up her skates more than the medal stand [2], and build leisure into your life now rather than deferring it to a retirement Brooks calls "neuro physiologically unsound" [1]. Use that leisure for Pieper's proper leisure: deepen relationships on purpose, learn something you don't need to, and develop yourself spiritually or philosophically [1].

10. Train presence. Put your phone in another room during meals and focused work [2], and try a short daily meditation; Huberman cites findings that about 13 minutes a day, or even five, improves focus and mood [4]. Being absorbed in what you are doing predicts more happiness than drifting toward a daydream of the next win [4].

Sources

1. Arthur Brooks on the Three Macronutrients of Happiness, the Four Idols, and Finding Meaning · Huberman Lab
2. Dr. Laurie Santos: How to Achieve True Happiness Using Science-Based Protocols · Huberman Lab
3. The Science of Well-Being: Powerful Happiness Hacks That 5 Million People Are Using · The Mel Robbins Podcast
4. Science-Based Tools for Increasing Happiness · Huberman Lab
5. Bridget Phetasy · The Joe Rogan Experience