What Does It Mean to Live a Good Life, My Incomplete Answer

In 2023, three researchers ended a public disagreement about happiness with an admission that quietly undid a decade of commencement speeches: the famous $75,000 “happiness plateau”. The number cited in roughly a thousand articles explaining why chasing a raise is pointless, only holds for about one in five people. For the other four out of five, money keeps making life better, in a straight line, for as far as the data goes.

I bring this up because I sat down to write about what it means to live a good life, and I expected to write something about meaning, or presence, or relationships over possessions. That essay has been written ten thousand times, usually by people quoting a statistic they never checked. So I checked it. What I found didn’t hand me a tidy answer. It handed me a diagnostic question instead, and it’s a more useful one than anything I’ve read on a “what is a good life” listicle.

What Does the Actual Data on Money and Happiness Say?

The direct answer: for most people, well-being keeps rising with income and never plateaus, but for a struggling minority, no amount of money moves the needle, because their unhappiness isn’t coming from their bank account.

The $75,000 figure comes from Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton’s 2010 PNAS paper, built on Gallup-Healthways survey data from over 450,000 U.S. respondents (Kahneman & Deaton, 2010). It found that day-to-day emotional well-being rose with income up to about $75,000 a year, then flattened. Life evaluation, how you rate your life as a whole, kept climbing regardless. That second half of the finding almost never made it into the pull-quote.

Eleven years later, Matthew Killingsworth ran a much finer-grained version of the same question using real-time experience-sampling data from roughly 33,000 employed adults tracked through his “Track Your Happiness” app. His result directly contradicted the plateau: happiness rose steadily with the logarithm of income, with no flattening point at all, even well above $75,000 (Killingsworth, 2021).

Two credible studies, two opposite conclusions, both peer-reviewed. So Kahneman, Killingsworth, and Barbara Mellers did something researchers rarely do: they ran an adversarial collaboration, deliberately trying to prove each other wrong with a shared dataset. The 2023 result reconciled both findings. For roughly 80% of people, happiness rises with income continuously, exactly as Killingsworth found. But for an unhappy minority, around the bottom 20% by emotional well-being, happiness rises with income only up to about $100,000, then stalls completely, no matter how much more they earn (Killingsworth, Kahneman & Mellers, 2023).

For roughly eighty percent of people, more income does keep making life better. The famous plateau at $75,000 does not exist for most of the population. It exists only for the fifth of people whose unhappiness has a different cause entirely.

So Why Do Experts Keep Repeating a Debunked Number?

Because the wrong version is more useful as advice than the right one. “Money doesn’t buy happiness past $75K” gives you permission to stop chasing a raise. “Money keeps helping most people but does nothing for a specific unhappy minority whose problem lies elsewhere” gives you homework: figure out which group you’re in.

The oversimplified version survived because it flatters two audiences at once. It comforts people who already earn well below six figures by telling them they’re not missing much. And it comforts people who deliberately chose meaning over income by retroactively justifying the trade. Neither audience had much incentive to go read the 2023 correction. I didn’t, until I started fact-checking this piece.

This matters for a “good life” question specifically because so much of the philosophy built on top of the wrong number treats money as spiritually irrelevant. It isn’t. It’s conditionally irrelevant, and the condition is doing all the work.

What Does the Longest Study on Happiness Actually Find?

The direct answer: relationship quality, not achievement or income, is the single strongest predictor of long-term health and life satisfaction, and most people rank it far below money and fame anyway.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest-running study of adult life ever conducted, tracking 724 men starting in 1938 and later expanding to include their spouses and more than 1,300 of their children. Its current director, Robert Waldinger, summarized the core finding in a 2015 TED talk that’s been viewed more than 40 million times: relationship satisfaction at age 50 predicted physical health at 80 better than cholesterol levels did (Waldinger, TED 2015).

The Harvard Study of Adult Development found that relationship satisfaction at age fifty predicted physical health at eighty better than cholesterol levels did.

In that same talk, Waldinger cites a survey of millennials asking what mattered most in life. Eighty percent said getting rich was a major life goal. Fifty percent said becoming famous was too. The study’s 85 years of data point almost entirely the other direction, toward the depth and reliability of a handful of close relationships, not net worth or recognition.

This is where the two data sets actually agree, and it’s worth sitting with: money helps most people, right up until it doesn’t help the specific 20% whose deeper problem is isolation, grief, or estrangement. The exact variables the Harvard study says matter most.

Is Loneliness the Real Threat to a Good Life?

The direct answer: yes, and it’s now classified as a public health crisis with mortality risk comparable to heavy smoking.

In May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a formal advisory titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation,” stating that a lack of social connection increases the risk of premature death by an amount comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. The advisory also cited associations between loneliness and a 29% higher risk of heart disease and a 32% higher risk of stroke (U.S. Surgeon General Advisory, 2023).

Read that next to the 2023 income-happiness reconciliation and a pattern shows up that no self-help book will hand you directly: the unhappy minority whose well-being doesn’t respond to income increases is very likely overlapping with the population the Surgeon General is describing. Money can’t buy back a estranged sibling or a dead spouse’s company. It was never going to.

But Doesn’t “Relationships Over Money” Just Restate the Cliché?

It looks that way until you notice what it leaves out for the 80%. If someone is in the majority group, money still moving their happiness, and they follow generic advice to deprioritize income in favor of connection, they’re optimizing for the wrong variable. The 2023 study is explicit that for most people, both matter and neither substitutes for the other; income and relationships operate as separate, additive inputs, not competing philosophies.

So the cliché fails in both directions. It underserves the majority by telling them money stopped mattering when it didn’t. And it underserves the unhappy minority by implying more relationships alone will fix what’s often closer to a Surgeon-General-level health and isolation problem, not a simple lack of dinner invitations. The evidence doesn’t support a single ranked list of “what matters more.” It supports a diagnosis: find out which lever is actually stuck for you, and stop turning the one that already works.

Even the World Happiness Report’s own consistency reinforces this. Finland has topped the annual rankings for years running, and its own research points to social trust and connection, not GDP alone, as the differentiator among wealthy nations (World Happiness Report). Rich and connected consistently outperforms rich and isolated. Nobody’s ranking system rewards rich and alone.

What Happens Next

My incomplete answer, then, is not an answer so much as a test anyone can run on themselves: track, for two weeks, whether your worst days trace back to money stress or to isolation. Most people already know which one it is if they’re honest, and almost nobody structures their life around that answer instead of around the version of “the good life” they inherited from a magazine.

Here’s the falsifiable part. Killingsworth’s team has said follow-up work is underway to identify what actually characterizes the unhappy 20% whose well-being doesn’t move with income. Based on the loneliness and relationship data already published, my prediction is that when that research lands, plausibly within the next two to three years, given the pace of this collaboration since 2021. It will find the unhappy minority is disproportionately socially isolated, not simply underpaid or unlucky. If it instead finds that trait-level factors like chronic health conditions or personality dominate over loneliness as the driver, I’m wrong, and the diagnostic I just gave you is incomplete in the other direction. Either way, it’ll be checkable against a public paper, not a vibe. That’s more than the $75,000 number ever offered.