Essay Series | Part 1 of 6

The Structure of Happiness and Income

Income and Happiness Do Not Measure the Same Thing
— A Tycoon from a Century Ago and an Ordinary Person Today —

Saturday morning.
I finish cleaning the room, take a shower, and make a cup of coffee.
There is nothing in particular on my schedule.
I drink my coffee and let my mind wander through whatever happens to interest me.
I have always liked this kind of time.

Some time ago, I wrote an essay called “What Is the Secret of Success?”
Once I had thought about success, an obvious question followed.

If we become successful, do we become happy?

To put it in more everyday terms:
If our income rises, do we become happier?

Of course, the situation is different when income is extremely low.
When someone is worried about rent and food and lives in fear of an unexpected illness or expense, money is directly connected to the security of daily life.

That is not the territory I am considering here.
I want to look at what happens after a person can afford an ordinary standard of living.

Beyond that point, does happiness keep increasing as income rises?

Let us try a deliberately extreme thought experiment.

Across roughly the span of a maximum human lifetime, compare a very wealthy person from a century ago with an ordinary person today.

A century ago, there were grand mansions.
There were expensive clothes, fine food, and servants.
Yet even the rich could not routinely use air conditioning and household appliances as comfortable as ours.
Medicine was incomparably less capable than it is today.
They could not search the world's information instantly online.
They could not immediately speak face to face with someone far away.
They could not call up films, music, and books whenever they pleased on a small device held in one hand.
And they certainly could not sit over coffee and casually debate cosmology with an AI (laughs).

Seen this way, an ordinary person today already uses a vast collection of conveniences and comforts that even a tycoon from a century ago did not possess.

That is a rather curious fact.

If civilization has become this prosperous, we might expect people today to feel overwhelmingly happier than the richest people of a century ago.
Yet it does not seem to be that simple.

So let us pause and consider the number we call annual income.

What is income?

Put roughly, it is the amount of money the market pays in return for a person's work, business, assets, and related value.
It reflects not only ability, but also demand, scarcity, position, responsibility, risk, and many other factors.

Then what is happiness?

Sleeping well.
Feeling physically healthy.
Enjoying a conversation with family or friends.
Losing oneself in something one loves.
Having few worries.
Being able to spend the day as one chooses.

These are the kinds of experiences we seem to call happiness.

When we place the two lists side by side, something slightly strange becomes visible.

Income and happiness do not measure the same thing in the first place.

Money is important, of course.
With money, we can choose where to live.
We can choose what to eat.
We can travel.
We can handle unexpected expenses.
Sometimes we can even afford to walk away from work we dislike.

As income increases, things that were impossible become possible.
That is a major change.

But once most of those impossibilities have disappeared, will happiness continue to rise at the same pace if income keeps increasing?

This is where the relationship begins to look less certain.

Income does not necessarily increase by itself.
A high income usually arrives attached to the work and responsibility required to produce it.
As a company grows, the number of decisions grows with it.
As assets increase, so does everything that must be managed.
Social prominence may even take away a freedom that once cost nothing: the ability to live without worrying about other people's attention.

We may expect more money to make us freer, only to find that our calendars and worries have grown alongside it.
That reversal is entirely possible.

Even so, aiming for a high income is not wrong.
Some people genuinely enjoy their work.
For some, the challenge of building a large enterprise is itself a source of happiness.
And being free to buy what one wants is unquestionably one form of prosperity.

This is not an argument that money is unnecessary.
Quite the opposite.
Money is extraordinarily useful.

Perhaps it is precisely because money is so useful that we gradually begin to treat “increasing money” and “increasing happiness” as if they were the same thing.

But they appear to be different.

A higher income can expand the choices through which happiness may become possible.
Yet having more choices is not the same as actually becoming happier.

Let us make the question more concrete.

Suppose a rise in income allows us to buy more expensive things.
We can begin with cars.

Compare, for example, a practical car costing around five million yen with a supercar costing one hundred million yen.
The prices differ by a factor of about twenty.
Does driving the one-hundred-million-yen car make travel twenty times more comfortable and its owner twenty times happier?

It does not seem quite that simple.

In the next installment, I would like to begin with this “Ferrari problem.”