For people who don't really know anyone who's poor, it's hard to see that it's not all about iPads or even good cheese and air conditioning and square footage.

Broken teeth you can't afford to get treated. Family members with psychiatric disorders no one can afford to help (or, the available medicines cause side effects that make life completely miserable). Busted plumbing and busted roof you can't fix properly. Aging parent without necessary full time care, but you still have to have a job. Both you and your spouse having to work to support your kids, who you have to put in cheap daycare which they hate just so you can go to work. Living in a trashy, high-crime neighborhood. Having to drive four hours to get to a place which will give you birth control at an affordable price. Getting treated like dirt by a scumbag boss at a job you can't leave, for years. Getting turned down for interview after interview because of the heuristic that you must be bad at what you do if nobody else hired you. Fighting and stressing over money to the point of divorce, when just a little money could have smoothed it over. Actually worrying about how you are going to live when you cannot afford the place you are living. Having the scorn and disregard of most of society until the day you die.

Yes, there are alternate solutions and little consolations and some possible ways out, if you are in a developed country, if you are smart, if you are hard to discourage, if you are lucky.

But when a normal middle class income so easily makes these problems into implausible memories, it can be pretty insulting to hear smug sayings like "money doesn't buy happiness" from people who have decent secure income.

So to be a nice empathic middle-class person, don't say those things in public unless you are prepared to go full Buddhist (and put your money where your mouth is).

How about: "money does not buy happiness, but it can mitigate a whole lot of the misery associated with lack of money".

For an analogy - it's no more fun swimming in a 500 foot deep lake, than a 50 foot deep lake, but a 3 foot deep lake with rocks and waves is painful and dangerous and no fun.

The baseline of money that eliminates misery ( == "buys happiness") is that which takes a person from "really poor" to "modestly middle class".

I like that example. I use a similar analogy to that frequently. If you are in a room with a ceiling that is even a few inches over your head you don't have to stoop at all. It doesn't necessarily benefit you if the ceiling is 3 inches over your head or 10 inches or 10 feet (with respect to walking that is - add some room for up and down etc.) On the other hand things become tremendously difficult if the ceiling is even an 1/8 of an inch lower than it needs to be. In that case you have to stoop and you can't walk normally.

I'm fully aware that you have to cross a minimum threshold of income in order to not be affected by the cash infusion from a company sale. As I said in the post, most entrepreneurs are already richer than a large portion of the world simply because they have a computer and literacy.

"most entrepreneurs are already richer than a large portion of the world simply because they have a computer and literacy"

Ryan - seriously? There are plenty of people in this country that are living in difficult situations that have computers and can read. The fact that there are third world countries that are dirt poor with much greater suffering doesn't make someone in this country feel any better about what they have to endure.

"Having money means importantly being able to avoid things that make you unhappy."

I think this is the key point. Money by itself won't make you happy. But it can remove pain points that make you unhappy. The biggest example in my life is my parents healthcare. Currently they would like to be able to retire and move to where I live so we could spend more time together, but they can't afford to quit their jobs because they have had very bad health and they couldn't afford insurance on their own, and there is no way for a guy over 60 to move 8 hours and get a job paying close to what he makes in job he's been doing for 35 years. Starting over isn't really an option.

If I had a big exit this goes away and significantly and immediately improves my life in that I get to spend much more time with my family.