We're halfway through the year. Take an honest look at the last six months.
You've hit some number or missed some number, and either way, you're telling yourself the same story I told myself for years. The next milestone is where the life actually starts. The next zero buys the freedom. The next deal closes the gap between the life you're living and the life you keep promising yourself you'll get to.
That story is a lie. And it might be the most expensive lie you'll ever believe.
I'm not going to tell you money doesn't matter. Money does matter. If you're broke right now, anybody who hands you a check is going to make your life immediately better, and anybody who tells you different has never been broke. Money fixes real problems. It pays the rent, the medical bill, the kid's tuition. The truth I want to give you isn't that money doesn't help. It's that past a certain point, more of it doesn't buy what you think it buys, and the chase for more of it costs you what actually does.
What Money Actually Buys, According to the Data
This isn't opinion. The research on income and happiness has been chewed on for half a century, and the picture is finally pretty clear.
In 2010, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton published a study that ran in every newspaper in the country: happiness plateaus around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. After that, more money didn't make you happier. A decade later, Matthew Killingsworth ran a different study with a much better method and got a different answer. Then, in a 2023 collaboration published in PNAS, the three of them sat down together to figure out what was actually true.
Here's what they landed on. For most people, well-being keeps inching up as income rises, but the gains get smaller and smaller the higher you go. For the unhappiest twenty percent of people, the benefit of more money flatlines around a hundred thousand dollars. After that, more income doesn't relieve their unhappiness at all.
Read that again. The very people we tell ourselves money would rescue, the people who are deeply unhappy, get no help from the extra zero. None. The misery is not about the bank account. It never was.
Now flip to the lottery research, because this is where it gets brutal. Studies going back to 1978 keep finding the same thing. People who win huge sums of money have a happiness spike for a while, and then they slide right back toward where they were before. There's a term for this, "hedonic adaptation," and what it means in plain English is that the brain takes whatever new normal you give it and treats it as the new baseline. The new car becomes the regular car. The new house becomes the regular house. This is also explained in Parkinson's Law: a luxury once enjoyed soon becomes a necessity. The thrill flattens out and you're standing right where you started, except now you have a bigger mortgage and a more expensive lifestyle to maintain.
A 2020 study of actual lottery winners in the Review of Economic Studies makes it clear. The win does produce a real, lasting increase in something called life satisfaction. Their finances are smoother, and they report being more content with their financial situation. But the same study found the win produced no meaningful long-term improvement in happiness or mental health. The money bought a calmer relationship with money. It didn't buy joy.
So is the data saying money can buy happiness? In a limited sense, yes. It can absolutely buy relief, and relief feels like happiness when you're suffering. What it cannot buy is the thing most people are actually chasing when they chase it. It cannot buy love. It cannot buy contentment. It cannot buy joy. It cannot buy the kind of peace you take with you to bed at night. Those are produced by something else entirely, and a bigger income statement does not produce them.
The Lie Behind the Logos
Now look up from the spreadsheet and look at the people you've been comparing yourself to.
The guy with the jet. The Lambo in the driveway. The yacht. The real estate portfolio in fifteen states. Pull the camera back about ten feet and look at what's actually in the frame.
He's on his third wife. The first two left because he was never home. His health is held together by prescriptions, because the body keeps a score nobody on his payroll is allowed to mention. He hasn't had a real conversation with his oldest kid in two years. His phone is a sleep deprivation device. His calendar is owned by people who would not recognize him at a gas station. The wealth he's built has bought him a beautiful set of cages that lock from the outside.
Every Lambo has a payment, an insurance bill, a place it has to live, and a person who cleans it. Every jet has a crew, a hangar, a fuel bill that would make most people pass out, and a maintenance schedule that doesn't care about your weekend. Every yacht is a hole in the water that two people pour money into. Every property in every state has a tax bill, a roof that needs replacing, a tenant or a manager or both, and a phone call you'll get at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday.
The richest people you've heard of are often the least free. They've built a beautiful, expensive, very visible cage, and the world claps for the cage because the world can't see what's missing.
My Wealth Statement
Let me tell you what I'd put on my own balance sheet if I had to write one out honestly. Not the kind a CPA puts together. The kind that actually matters.
I've been married to my best friend for over thirty-one years. Two people who chose each other, kept choosing each other, and still, three decades in, would rather be in the same room than any other room on the planet.
I have two adult kids who actually kind of like me. If you have grown kids, you know how rare that is. I didn't get that by accident. I got it because we kept showing up.
My parents are still around, I love them, and they live close enough that "close enough" means something. Most people lose that math and don't know they had it until it's gone.
I have my health, which means I can get on a motorcycle and ride for a thousand miles, or jump in an RV and disappear with Kristie for weeks. I have friends who'd take a call from me at 3 a.m. and would call me at 3 a.m. without thinking twice.
And yes, I have some of the nicer things. The RV. The motorcycles. The income to take real time off. I'm not pretending I'm a minimalist monk. The point is that those things sit at the bottom of the list, not the top, and they exist to serve the rest of it, not the other way around.
Now compare that against a guy with a tenth-of-a-billion-dollar net worth, the third wife, the kids who've quit answering the phone, the doctor who pulls him aside after the physical, the calendar he doesn't actually own.
Which one of us is wealthier? It depends entirely on what wealth means. And the world has been lying to you about what it means.
The Mid-Year Money Audit
It's June 24. You're about to flip into Q3 and run the same play you've been running since January.
Don't.
Stop.
Do this instead.
Pull out a piece of paper. Not a spreadsheet. Answer the following questions honestly, because the only person who's going to see the answers is the person in the mirror, and you've already been lying to that person for too long.
- How many days in the last six months did I spend the way I would have spent them if money were not a factor? Count them. Not the days you wished you'd spent that way. The actual days. If you can't get to thirty out of one hundred and eighty, the chase isn't working.
- Who's on my calendar that wouldn't be there if I were free? Make a list. Be specific. Then ask whether those people are paying you, or whether you're paying them with the only currency you can't earn back.
- What am I spending money on that's buying me status, not freedom? The car, the watch, the house, the membership. Status is a tax you pay to look like the person you're trying to be. Freedom is what's left when you stop paying it.
- What number am I chasing that I have never honestly examined? Most of us are running toward a finish line we picked when we were twenty-five and never updated. The number isn't bad. The number being unexamined is bad.
- If I died next Friday, what would my family say about what I traded for what I have? That is a hard question, but it's worth sitting with for ten minutes before you charge into the second half of the year.
That's the audit. It takes thirty minutes if you do it right, and it's the most valuable thirty minutes of administrative work you'll do all year.
The Real Equation
Wealth is what you can spend without trading what matters.
Read that one more time. Wealth is what you can spend without trading what matters. By that definition, a guy making six figures with a strong marriage, healthy kids, and the freedom to take a Tuesday afternoon off is wealthier than a guy making eight figures who hasn't been to one of his kid's games since middle school. The bank disagrees. The bank is wrong about the only thing that matters.
There's a framework I teach called the Five Freedoms: Energy, Money, Time, Choice, and Purpose. Money is one of the five. Just one. Most people have spent two decades optimizing one of the five at the cost of the other four, and then they wonder why the win didn't feel like a win. You don't win one of the five. You win all five, or you haven't won.
I'd rather be wealthy by the only definition that counts than rich by the one the world is selling.
Words of Wisdom
"Do not toil to acquire wealth; be discerning enough to desist. When your eyes light on it, it is gone, for suddenly it sprouts wings, flying like an eagle toward heaven." – Proverbs 23:4-5
The writer isn't telling you money is evil. He's telling you not to wear yourself out chasing it, because the second you fix your eyes on it, it grows wings and flies. The thing you're killing yourself to catch is the thing least worth catching at the speed you're running. Wisdom is knowing when to stop pedaling. Most of us don't have that wisdom yet. Now would be a good time to get some.
Change One Thing Before Q3
Here's the challenge as we cross into the second half of the year.
Change one thing your money is buying so that it buys you a day instead of a thing. Not a posture. A specific change. One subscription, one obligation, one expense, one expectation. Trade it for a real day with the people you'd actually choose if nobody was paying you to choose differently.
Do that this week. Then do it again next month. Then again the month after. By the end of the year you'll have given yourself something the next zero was never going to buy you.
The gold is the lie. The number was never the prize. The life was the prize. The number was just the cover charge people kept telling you to pay, and most of them are still standing in line.
If this one cut close, you'll want to read why busy is not the same as productive, because the money chase and the busyness chase are blood relatives. And if you've ever told yourself you'll fix it next year, read Later Never Comes. Same lie, different costume.
– The Real Jason Duncan