Sure, my point is that you can (to an extent) reverse this - feeling rich and miserable is worse than being not-so-wealthy and happy.
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Your friend sounds like a great guy. I wonder if the seminars and the meditation have anything to do with it, maybe that’s just him 
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It’s based on donations.
I don’t think those courses are the best to start: you follow prerecorded tapes from a teacher (Goenka) in a large group of people and the tape will move on to the next step even if you have not yet mastered the earlier, required skills. I would try to find a place where a teacher can talk to you daily and adjust his/her guidance to your current needs.
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If you are rich, you are dependent to a lifestyle that cost a lost. The fall could be from very high. If you find happiness in living frugally. It will be easier to be happy whatever happens. There is so much nice things to enjoy that doesn’t require a Ferrari or don’t need sacrifice your life at works.
Try going on holiday by bike. For the price of a night in a fancy hotel, you can travel for several weeks on a cheap bike. On a plus side you are going to be fit.
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It’s the boost from 2M to 5M that would make you happy, but it would only be temporary. Once you are at 5M you will not be happier than with 2M. There is a threshold above which happiness no longer increases with wealth and income in the long term.
The main source of happiness of the FIRE level (I think it is below 2M) is not the wealth itself, it’s the financial independence and no employer who can control your life any more. You can stay if you’d like, quit whenever you want if you don’t.
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Finally, we agree. I think FIRE is happiness-producing, not wealth or Ferraris per se. Of course, being poor is no fun, but being rich is not a guarantee of a happy life. That was my point.
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You don’t need to test it - we have scientific data on this:
Source: Can Money Buy Happiness? A Review of New Data · Giving What We Can
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It seems scientific consensus is not so clear regarding this relation.
https://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/
See " Income & Happiness" section
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My wife recently insists on claiming that since the markets are down I’m more balanced and less distracted by my portfolio… I personally think it’s rather the DnD games I’ve started joining in February and the more or less frequent bouldering sessions.
@Bojack try picking up some new hobby or sport
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If you plot this curve with Y scale from 0 to 100%, it is flat. No error bars are shown. Reminds me how pharma companies present efficiency of their new medicine.
I have not read the paper, but judging by this plot, if I would review it, I would probably recommend to reject it. But these are social sciences, oh well.
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These are reproduced charts from a study, not the original charts… In social science they also have a certain standard (at least of what I could see as an exterior observer through friends).
EDIT : not sure we are referring to the same link though…
The “other study” could be the one of Kahneman & Deaton of 2010 “High income improve evaluation of Life but not emotiona well-being”:
“ We infer that beyond about $75,000/y, there is no improvement whatever in any of the three measures of emotional well-being. In contrast, the figure shows a fairly steady rise in life evaluation with log income over the entire range; the effects of income on individuals’ life evaluations show no satiation, at least to an amount well over $120,000.”
75k is USD of 2010, in USA. Full study here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1011492107
Check Fig.1
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I read somewhere, that it’s easier to fill the time with something more meaningful, rather than to force yourself not to watch your phone anymore.
It certainly works for me. 
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I think the problem is that a lot of people don’t know anything more meaningful to do.
It’s especially hard when you are waiting for the bus or something, there’a often not a lot of meaningful things to do at that moment.
I sucessfully reduced my screen time to max 1 hour a day with android’s built in app timers. The only things that I allow unlimited time is babbel for learning a language and my app for reading ebooks.
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Oh in those situations, I love to watch other people how they are fixed to their screens, not looking where they walk into. Same thing in the bus/tram/train.
The other day I was waiting at a bus-stop with two other people. Both of them didn’t lift their head up for one second. One of them walked past us back and forth like 20 times. So after 5 minutes, when the bus arrived, the two people realized that they knew each other, hugged and laughed it off.
And I am there, thinking about where this addiction will take us…
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I would really recommend all the ultra-frugal folks here this video of Ramit Sethi 
I could relate back to my past, where I was really penny-pinching everything for a (thank god only very short) period of my life. After I just noticed this is not making me (and my closest environment, especially my partner) any fun, changed my mind completely.
Yes, it can be SO FRUSTRATING if you are just simply SO CHEAP.
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Well, it won’t take us to any happy place, but according to recent research it takes teenagers to suicide:
On average kids spend almost 7-8 hours on screens daily, half of it on social media. Their overloaded brains are basically boiling in dopamine. I’d recommend any parent to also read this outline of scientific research on social media effect on children development (and follow some good advice on how to handle this madness).
I’ve recently struggled with my mental health issues, and I started reading more on this*, and decided to radically detox myself from screens. I started commuting to work without a phone, this changed to going phone-free 99% of the time - I now only use my phone only when I absolutely have no other option. I still use my computer at work, and from time to time (like tonight) at home, but most of the time after work I’m leaving my computer in the closet in another room and I ask my wife to police me to not pick it out. This really helped me relax my brain and get back into book reading - on the other hand, I have much more time to think about what I should do with my life and this sparks some anxiety too. In any case, I’d recommend everybody for a test going phone-free (yet better, screens- and Internet-free) for a month - it’s a fascinating experience to go through withdrawal symptoms, like some kind of alcoholic or drug addict.
Screens are literally driving our brains bananas and our children to kill themselves. We should be as serious about them as we are about hard drugs. Most people seem to be not aware of what is going on - many of my friends in Poland bought their children smartphones when they were 6-7 years old. It’s lunatic.
*) Recommend books: “Dopamine Nation” by Anna Lembke, “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt, “iGen” by Jean Twenge, “Digital Minimalism” by Cal Newport, “The Shallows” by Nicholas G. Carr, and classic “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman
PS. All of this reminds me of the introduction to “Brave New World” written by Huxley in 1946 (!), where he wrote about an alternative to the dystopian future:
Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them.
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I wonder if books are like “Screens” but from another era. Forget social media, that are like drugs, but “normal” internet seems to be a modern version of books and magazines.
I wonder if you should switch to “making” : painting, sculpting, woodworking etc. That would be probably nicer. Living in CH make it all more difficult unfortunately.
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Before printing press, people were memorizing everything (that’s why early epic stories, like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, for example, were songs/poems). So humans definietely lost valuable skill and they were able to distract themselves far easier from the life and it’s issues. That is not to say that books didn’t bring any benefits - obviously they expanded, beyond thinkable before, our knowledge-retention capabilities and thus enabled scientific-technical civilization. (As one of my favourite economists says: “there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs”).
I think, however, at least to some extent, that “medium is the message” - reading books on paper (or e-book reader) is completely different experience than reading online. Books are longer reads than Internet articles and they don’t come in a package with a whole world of distractions, so you don’t have to mobilize your willpower - which is very costly in terms of energy - to not open a tab with YouTube, 9gag, social media and what not. Additionally, book publishers filter away bad candidates to print, whereas in Internet every idiot, jerk, and psychopat can publish whatever they want - the result is that although Internet has seas of valuable knowledge and bays of wisdom, they are hidden in the oceans of distracting nonsense or deliberate misinformation and propaganda.
Yes, I think it makes a lot of sense. Cal Newport calls it “high quality leisure” (or “deep leisure”) in his “Digital Minimalism”. Making music, sports, making or fixing stuff, reading ambitious books, in general, exploring technically difficult hobbies pays off in many ways (especially mentally). Particularly when they are done offline and require getting into “flow” state, when they develop particular skill, when they both require and create energy, when they strengthen social connections (doing stuff with family or friends) or they force us to reflect (in this case solitude helps).
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