[im3w1l]

>But in my life, most of the decisions I've made with my happiness in mind have had the side effect of reducing my income -- going to music school, leaving my day job, choosing to spend time with my girlfriend instead of getting in 8 billable hours every day.

But this is exactly it. If you were dirt poor you couldn't have done these things. Conversely if you were richer you would be able to do less of them. I suppose, anyway.

[rquantz]

This is a long time after, and maybe you won't see my response. But in fact for most of my adult life I have been dirt poor. I scraped by for years as a freelance musician. The decision I made as a high school student was that money wasn't important to me, which is why I chose a field that would make me happy instead of being lucrative.

The day job a I quit was a 34K/year entry level web dev gig that didn't pay me enough to live in NYC and do any saving. I quit without having any runway because I was miserable and decided that I had learned as much as I was going to there.

My point is that I've been poor, and decisions I've made about being happier have not involved making more money. I've been rethinking that decision lately.