[sershe]

Every time I see a platitude like this it reminds me of those self-compensating put-downs people use like "well she's so pretty, she must be dumb" etc. that have no reason to be true.

I feel like meaning is vastly oversold. People didn't have any meaning beyond "survive and make children" for millennia and they did fine. The whole search for meaning I feel has sprung up only among the people who have too much free time ;) I found that I became much happier when I explicitly rejected it, absurdism-style, and then at least partially internalized the notion... it doesn't quite get you back to the natural lack of concern that you have when you are young and don't think of life as finite, but it's the step in the right direction.

[zd123]

I would respectfully disagree. When you say people survived and just had children, what then would explain the popularity of religions throughout human history (ignoring whether they are true or not)?

It appears to me people have repeatedly searched for a higher purpose that goes beyond their material situation. Hell its even true with those disconnected native tribes in south America drinking ayahuasca and achieving a higher spiritual purpose. It seems to be built into us to want to transcend our material desires once a certain level of sustenance is reached.

Personally, having been a money driven individual earlier in my life (with a high paying job in finance), I quickly realized beyond sustenance for basic needs, money meant little. The reason for this “enlightenment” for me was a serious health problem that made me reevaluate my finite life.

So I would wholeheartedly agree with the original post that money cannot buy your life meaning.

[sershe]

Money cannot buy you meaning, but my points were not that... they were that:

1) Saying "well sure you have money but money won't buy meaning" is usually just a self-defense mechanism. "Well I don't have the money, but at least I have meaning [questionable] and he doesn't [also questionable]." Money and meaning are probably uncorrelated. If anything I'd expect an average(!) person with money to have more meaning than average person without, given that by this only point of evidence, they are better at goal-directed behavior of some sort.

2) The 2nd point is the meaning is unnecessary. I am not sure how elaborate the religious life of subsistence farmers was, but I don't think they were looking for anything like meaning in a modern sense... Ditto for getting high on plants. It strikes me more of a curiosity motive to explain the unknown, the kind the drives modern science. To the extent that it involved meaning, it was more of a meaning of the person as a cog in the now-explained world, not some transcendence. Even the nobles/etc. would see their meaning in advancing the agenda of their city-state or smth like that. Going by modern cosmology, there's no inherent meaning in the universe, so any one you choose is just the one you create (arbitrary), or more likely someone else creates for you with their own questionable motives.

When I started thinking more of the finite-ness of life given the above, I found that it's not the lack of meaning that's the problem, it's the search itself. In this paradigm, money isn't everything, but time and experience is; and you have far more time and better experience in modern society if you have some minimum cashflow. Ideally, you need e.g. $60-80k/year (iirc that was the happiness plateau in the studies for the USA), ideally without sacrificing ~50% of your waking hours for it.

[recursivedoubts]

> People didn't have any meaning beyond "survive and make children" for millennia and they did fine.

That's a deeply impoverished and modern view of both the past and children.

Wealth is a means, and can be a good thing in the right context, or a bad thing in the wrong one. We know that wealth beyond a certain amount is not associated with increased happiness, and is as often as not associated with decreased happiness.

I can attest to that.

[sershe]

As far as I recall, the studies on happiness were all cash flow, not wealth. It takes quite a bit of wealth to get to the cash flow limit that /may/ stop making you happy (60-80k/yr iirc). Unless you think ~50% of your waking hours are worthless and can be given away for free, you need that wealth before these limits become a factor (even if one's job was perfectly aligned with their life meaning, which isn't the case for almost anyone, they could just do it anyway with the wealth, minus the economic insecurity; otherwise (i.e. for almost everyone) they could do something either more fun, or more meaningful, or both, with the time).