How happy would you be if you earned £150,000

I met a friend a while back and found out he earns over £150,000 a year.
He's in his early thirties. I think a lot of people would assume he was
pretty happy. I don't know whether he's happy or not but I doubt it.
Research has shown there is an increase it what the study authors
defined as happiness up to a salary equivalent to £40,000 a year but
after that the rate of increase sharply reduced.

I have no expectation that money brings happiness because I feel that is
based on the idea that being able to get what you want is the route to
happiness. I think the Buddhist principle of relating desire to
unhappiness is important because increasing wealth doesn't solve the
problem of new desires. I don't wholly agree with it but its a useful
observation that a person without desire and want will not be unhappy
though they would be severely disadvantaged in the modern world. This is
why Buddhist monks live in monasteries and don't work in offices.

This may be why many people in modern society in developed countries are
unhappy. People have wealth they can't see because they are used to it.
The rat race, the treadmill, keeping up with the Jones or whatever other
term describes what I see in my head as a hamster in a wheel doesn't
seem to lead to high levels of happiness. A goal met is empty in other
words. Once the challenge is met the next challenge is the goal. Without
the goals life can seem to lack purpose but this is is a
misunderstanding of what life actually is.

An Argentinan writer and thinker called Borques (probably not how his
name is spelt) wrote about the maze of life. He describes what life
really is as a corridor. The mind creates the maze because the mind
needs the maze. Without it a person will only see the corridor. So
people create goals to give their life a purpose, to create the maze so
they have a challenge and because seeing life as a corridor can be too
much for the untrained mind or a mind trained to expect the maze.
Borques points out the paths in the mind's construct of the maze of life
all lead to one place: the corridor.

The problem of human happiness is now becoming a government priority in
the developed world. Whether this is genuinely something new or just
another word for mental health is yet to be seen. There's strong
evidence that Western cultures have significantly higher levels of
mental disorder in the population. High quality lifetime prevalence
epidemiological studies have shown sharp contrasts between very poor and
very rich countries levels of mental disorder with mental disorder in
the USA two or three times higher than the rate in Nigeria.

My friend owns a designer flat in Kensington. He parties in the top
nightclubs in London. His annual bonus might be more than I've earned in
a decade. But there are still things he can't have. There are still
things that annoy him. He's used to the things he has and, in his
environment, there are other people who have more. He works very hard
for his money and has to sacrifice a lot to get it.

Admittedly he may not have the problems of someone who earns £15,000 a
year. But there are people on those salaries who are happier than he.
These are people who have found greater truths about life. True wealth
is not money, it's what you have in life and how you make your life what
you want. Money is an enabler but it also adds to the stress.