When money solves everything except what hurts

“I’ve sorted everything out. The house, the children’s education, care for my parents as they got older. What I can’t sort out is waking up in the morning and not knowing why I should get up at all.”

A sentence like that never comes at the start of a conversation. It comes after a long preamble in which the person first explains that they really want for nothing, that they know how it sounds, and that it feels almost indecent to be talking about it at all. When you have more than you ever imagined, the pain that remains is a particularly lonely thing. The people around you find it hard to understand, and you yourself often don’t quite believe it.

In this post I am not going to claim that money doesn’t bring happiness. That would simply be wrong — and disrespectful, too, to everyone whose sleep is cut short by scarcity every single day. I would like to look more closely: what research actually shows about money and well-being, what money solves very well, and what it cannot solve, because it cannot be bought, only lived in a relationship.

What research says about money and happiness

The most cited study on the subject was published in 2010. The psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and the economist Angus Deaton analysed more than 450,000 responses from US residents to a daily Gallup survey. They separated two things: how people evaluate their life when you ask them where they stand on a ladder from the worst to the best possible life, and how they feel from day to day — how much joy, worry, sadness and stress there was yesterday.

The result became almost proverbial. Life evaluation kept rising with income. Day-to-day emotional well-being, however, levelled off at an annual income of around 75,000 dollars — above that line, extra money no longer noticeably reduced sadness or stress.

The story doesn’t end there, and rightly so. In 2021 Matthew Killingsworth published a study in which he used a mobile app to ask people several times a day how they felt in that very moment, collecting more than one and a half million such snapshots. He found no plateau at 75,000 dollars: on average, well-being kept rising at higher incomes too. Two years later Killingsworth and Kahneman, together with Barbara Mellers, re-analysed the data and largely explained the disagreement. For most people, well-being continues to rise with income. For the least happy, however, it stops rising at a certain level — extra money does not carry their pain away.

I am cautious with these figures, and you should be too. They are averages for large groups in the US, measured by income, not by wealth. People who have more than they will ever spend are not well represented in these studies. But one finding seems solid: money is good at reducing the pain caused by scarcity, but it does not remove pain that comes from elsewhere.

Two questions that sound the same

The difference between evaluating your life and experiencing your days is not just a methodological detail. I often hear it in the way people talk about themselves.

“Objectively, I’m doing brilliantly” is an answer to the first question. The person looks at their life from the outside, as someone else might, and sees that everything is in its place. To the second question — what was it like yesterday when you came home, when you sat at the table in the evening, when you lay awake at night — they may give a completely different answer.

Successful people are often masters of the first. They are used to evaluating, measuring, comparing and reaching goals. The second question, though, is not a question of assessment but of experience. You cannot answer it with a balance sheet. And when the answers to the two questions are far apart, a particular kind of confusion arises: “I have everything. So why do I feel like this?”

I describe a similar gap in the post High-functioning depression: when everything works outside and it is empty inside. The outer picture and the inner feeling are not necessarily connected — and it is precisely in people who are doing well on the outside that the inner feeling goes unnoticed the longest. Even by themselves.

What money solves well

Before I come to what money cannot do, it is only fair to say what it can. People with great wealth often hear two opposite messages: that they are the lucky ones who have no right to complain, or that money has spoiled them. Neither helps, and neither is true.

Money removes an enormous number of the worries that shape other people’s days. It buys security against the unexpected, access to good healthcare, space, peace and education for your children. It also buys time — perhaps the most precious thing that can be bought at all. Ashley Whillans and her colleagues showed that people who spend money on buying time — for example by handing over chores they dislike — report greater life satisfaction.

All of this is real and should not be played down. If your wealth means you don’t fear the bills, that is a great deal. If you can give your parents good care in old age, that is a great deal. If you can open doors for your children that were closed to you, that is a great deal. What follows is not a criticism of money. It is simply an attempt to see where its power does not reach.

What money can’t buy: closeness, meaning and security in relationships

Among all the research into what brings people health and contentment over a long life, the Harvard Study of Adult Development holds a special place. It began in 1938 and is still running. Its current director, Robert Waldinger, summarised it with Marc Schulz in the book The Good Life. The message is simple, almost disappointing: of everything they followed over the decades, good, warm relationships proved the most important for a long and contented life. Not income, not fame, not achievement.

This finding does not stand alone. In a large meta-analysis in 2010, Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues showed that people with stronger social ties had a noticeably greater likelihood of survival over the period observed — an effect comparable to well-known risk factors such as smoking.

Three things follow from this that money cannot replace:

• Closeness. The feeling that someone knows you — not your position, but you — and that with them you can also show what isn’t working. Money can buy company; it cannot buy being seen.
• Meaning. The feeling that your life serves someone or something. I have explained what meaning is, and why we cannot get it from outside, in the knowledge base. Its absence often shows precisely when goals disappear — as with retirement, the loss of a role and the question of meaning, or after selling a company, which is the subject of the post Meaning after the exit.
• Security in relationships. Not security against the outside world, but the inner certainty that a relationship will hold even when you are tired, angry or unsuccessful. That kind of security cannot be insured by contract.

As early as the 1990s, the psychologists Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan noticed something else: people for whom financial success sat at the very top of their life goals — above relationships, personal growth and contributing to the community — reported, on average, poorer psychological well-being. Not because money is bad. But because a goal that takes up all the room crowds out the ones that nourish a person.

Why pain amid plenty is so confusing

When someone is struggling because they have lost their job or cannot pay the rent, their pain has an explanation. The people around them understand it, and they understand it themselves. But when someone who has everything is struggling, there is no explanation — and that is exactly what makes the pain heavier.

It is often accompanied by shame. “I have no right to feel bad.” “Other people have real problems.” “If I told anyone, they’d think I was ungrateful.” This inner voice does not remove the pain; it only pushes it into silence. Shame: the emotion that whispers “There is something wrong with me” appears here in a particular form — not as shame about failure, but as shame that success was not enough.

Loneliness comes along too. People with great wealth often have no one they can talk to about this. Friends from their youth may be living completely different lives. People in their present circle are often connected to them through business as well. The family has its own expectations. Loneliness doesn’t depend on how many people are around you, but on whether there is anyone among them you can tell how you really are.

Added to this is something we all know, but which shows especially clearly amid plenty: getting used to things. What was exceptional yesterday is ordinary today. A new level of comfort quickly becomes the baseline from which everything is measured. And the comparing doesn’t stop — only the circle of people you compare yourself with changes. I have described what constant measuring against others does in the post Comparing yourself on social media: what constant measuring does to the brain.

This is what a conversation might look like in which this confusion is first put into words (composite, not a real person):

“I don’t know why I’m even here. I don’t have real problems.”
“What are real problems?”
“I don’t know… Being ill. Not having money.”
“And how are you when you come home in the evening?”
“(long pause) It’s quiet. The house is always quiet.”
“Would you tell me a bit more about that quiet?”

A conversation like this doesn’t start with money. It starts with a silence the person can’t name, because they feel they have no right to feel it.

When money becomes the family’s language of love

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we often look beyond the individual — to the family they come from and the one they have created. In wealthy families a pattern often emerges that nobody planned: money became the way care was expressed.

A father who worked a great deal gave his children everything — except himself. A mother showed love through gifts because she could not put tenderness into words. Or the opposite: the parents came from scarcity, and money in the house was a source of anxiety, arguments and shame. When such a child grows up and builds wealth, they often try, without realising it, to use it to repair something money cannot repair.

Christian Gostečnik, the founder of relational family therapy, writes about how we carry the emotional atmospheres of our family of origin into all our later relationships. If love in childhood was something you had to earn, an adult can achieve as much as they like and the inner sense of being enough still doesn’t arrive. Not because there were too few achievements, but because the wound was made in a relationship — and it is in a relationship that it heals.

Patterns like these can be traced on a family tree across several generations. That is what the longer, 90-minute genogram session A Look into the Past is for: together we look at how your family talked — or stayed silent — about money, work and love.

Exercise: what I’ve sorted out and what still hurts

This exercise takes about twenty minutes. You need a sheet of paper, a pen and a little quiet — ideally in the evening, when the day is behind you.

It isn’t about finding the right answer. It is about separating two kinds of problems that easily get mixed up in your head: the ones that resources solve and the ones that people solve.

1. Draw two columns. Title the left one “What I’ve sorted out” and the right one “What still hurts”. In the left one, write everything you have managed to sort out — without modesty and without skipping anything.
2. Fill in the right column. Write down what has been weighing on you in recent weeks, even if it seems small or “unjustified”. Don’t judge, just write.
3. For each item in the right column, ask yourself: would money solve this if I had twice as much? Mark it “yes” or “no”. For most people, the right column is almost all “no”.
4. Next to each “no”, write a name. Who in your life is connected to this pain — because you miss them, because they are close to you, or because you wish they were? If there is no name, write that down too.
5. Choose one name and one small step. A call for no reason, a dinner without phones, a sentence you haven’t said in a long time. Don’t fix anything — just move a little closer.

If at the end you find there is no name in the right column, that is not a failure of the exercise. It is one of the most important things it can show you.

Where this idea doesn’t hold

I want to be honest about the limits of what I’m writing, too.

Money helps enormously when there isn’t any. Everything I have written applies to people who have enough or more than enough. For those living in scarcity, money is directly tied to health, peace and well-being, and the saying “money doesn’t buy happiness” sounds to them like mockery.

Not every pain is a story about relationships. If for weeks you have been sleeping badly, have no drive, nothing gives you joy and you can’t see a way out, depression may be behind it, and it needs a medical assessment too — however much you have. Depression doesn’t ask about your assets. The post You have everything, yet you’re unhappy covers this in more detail. See your GP or a psychiatrist. If thoughts appear that it would be better if you weren’t here, call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (7 pm to 7 am), the Samaritans line Zaupni telefon Samarijan on 116 123 in Slovenia (24 hours a day), or 112 in an emergency.

You don’t have to give anything up. This post is not saying you should live more modestly in order to be happier. Moral lessons about wealth are not my job and they help no one. The question isn’t how much you have, but what is missing from your life alongside everything you have.

Research gives averages. None of the studies mentioned says anything about you personally. You may be an exception in either direction — and your experience counts for more than a curve.

What therapy can offer

People who are used to solving problems often expect a strategy from therapy — a plan that will get rid of the unpleasant feeling. Sometimes therapy offers that too. But with the kind of pain I am writing about, something else usually matters more: a space where you can talk about it without having to apologise for having it at all.

In the therapeutic relationship your wealth is neither an advantage nor a problem. You don’t have to prove yourself and you don’t have to hide. And something may happen that perhaps hasn’t happened in your other relationships for a long time: someone listens to you for your own sake. From that experience, the way you open up to people outside therapy often begins to change as well.

Sometimes a feeling that research describes as gratitude also returns along the way — not as a duty you are supposed to feel because you have a lot, but as a quiet noticing that something good was there all along, only you couldn’t feel it. That difference can’t be forced. But you can make room for it.

Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, in Slovenian or English.

What to remember

• Research shows that money is good at reducing the pain of scarcity, but for the least happy it stops improving well-being above a certain level.
• Evaluating your life and experiencing your days are two different things — “objectively I’m doing well” and “the house is quiet” can both be true at once.
• What money cannot buy is closeness, meaning and security in relationships — and these are the things most strongly linked to a long and contented life.
• Shame at struggling even though you have everything does not remove the pain; it pushes it into silence.
• If the heaviness lasts for weeks, seek medical help too; depression doesn’t ask about your assets.